Chongqing is a city in southwest China, it’s the largest city in that region, with a population of 18 million in its metropolitan area. The city is built on hills beside the Yangtze River, even so, the city is still densely packed with a large amount of skyscrapers, which is still continuously being developed. With the limited available land, the city planners and architects in Chongqing have designed and invented many novel ways to solve the issue of scarcity of the land, in this city many futuristic concepts have come true.

If you have a walk in Chongqing, you will find many spectacular scenes that will surprise you, many of these scenes can usually only be seen in films or art works that depict future world. Below are a few most futuristic views in Chongqing.

Train Road Pass through a Building

The apartment building below seems not very special on its overall appearance, but as you can see, it has a train running through it, this is a very futuristic feature that usually can only be found in science fiction films or art works. It is a effective method to make space for the train route in such a housing-intensive city.

This unusual train track is built directly through the 6th-8th floors of the 19-story residential building, the track is a part of Chongqing Rail Transit No.2, and the building even has a transit stop there, known as Liziba Station, the apartment residents can conveniently hop on the train from there.

Sky Pedestian Bridges connect to Residential Buildings

This is a pedestrian bridge that 40 meters high, much higher than the normal pedestian bridge, and it’s not linking two sides of the road, the overpass can takes pedestrians from one side of the road directly to the 13th floor of a residential building.

And below is another example of pedestrian bridges in Chongqing, these bridges connect the surrounding apartment buildings at 10th floor, giving residents convenient access to other buildings.

Cable Stayed Sky Bridges Connecting Two Buildings

Cable stayed bridges are not always hovering across rivers, here in Chongqing they are used to connect two high-rise buildings at a high altitude.

These two cable stayed bridges are hovering at a height of 68.5 meters, the bridges themselves are each 23 meters long and 4 meters wide.

Connecting a building’s 22nd floor and the roof of the other building, they were built for the convenience of the residents and office tenants. By contrast, most sky bridges in New York City are abandoned or not in use.

Cable Car for Public Transport

Cable cars are usually seen in some sort of tourist attractions like mountains, here in Chongqing it’s being used in public transport.

Nicknamed Sky Bus, the cable cars in Chongqing travels from Yuzhong district to Nanan district, passing through the Yangtze River, the full distance is 2110 meters, every day, more than 10 thousand people are transferred with this special transport in Chongqing.

Road on Building Roof

In Nanan District of Chongqing, a 5-story building’s roof is being used as road, you can see cars running on it, how incredible it is.

The concept of roads on building roof was first notably featured in one of Hugh Ferriss’ visionary art work that depict cities in the future.

Playground on Building Roof

In Nanan District’s Marble Rock Area, a large playground is built on the roof of a shopping mall. The playground has an area of 17,000 square meters, it’s open to public for free!

Skyscrapers

Skyscrapers is one of the indispensable part of future world, and Chongqing is a city of skyscrapers, as 2018 the city has 55 skyscrapers rise over 200 meters, 6 of them are supertalls(buildings over 300 m in height).

The most unique one of these skyscrapers is a building complex named Raffles City on the Chaotianmen riverfront, it comprised of 8 towers, tallest two of them are 355 meters high, the four adjacent towers are each 265 meters high, the most significant feature is that super-long sky bridge right above those four towers.

The sky bridge is 300 meters long, linking the towers together, it’s considered the highest sky bridge linking the most number of towers. The sky bridge is designed to be curved and accordion-shaped, once complete, it will include an observation deck, sky gardens, swimming pools and restaurants.

The buildings of Raffles City project are still under construction and will be open to the public in 2019.

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