title: "Fourth-Generation Housing: You've Got to Be Kidding Me?—Also on Responsible Innovation" slug: "fanchunping-fourth-generation-housing.en" date: "2017-03-01" category: "engineering" author: "Fan Chunping" excerpt: "The so-called 'Fourth-Generation Housing' has been touted as 'China's Fifth Great Invention'—bringing suburban villas into the sky, with 'communal courtyards on every floor and private gardens for every household.' But where does the soil come from? How do you manage plant diseases? Is this really innovation?"

Fourth-Generation Housing: You've Got to Be Kidding Me?—Also on Responsible Innovation

Author: Fan Chunping (Senior Editor, Academic Journal Office, Beijing Institute of Technology)

The grandiose vision of "Fourth-Generation Housing" has been circulating for some time. Recently, I saw it several times on social media touted as "China's Fifth Great Invention," and I felt compelled to take a closer look. Upon examination, problems abound.

The naming scheme classifies humanity's historical housing as: thatched cottages (first generation), brick-and-tile houses (second generation), and elevator apartments (third generation). The fourth generation—the "Aerial Urban Forest Garden"—purportedly "combines suburban villas, hutong alleyways, and courtyard houses, places them in city centers, and lifts them into the sky"; "every floor has communal courtyards, every unit has a private garden and several dozen square meters of land for growing flowers and vegetables, walking dogs and keeping birds, with cars driven directly to the doorstep on every floor, and building exteriors covered in plants."

I. Questioning the Nine Alleged Advantages

The article analyzes these "advantages" one by one and raises sharp questions:

Aerial parking—Transporting cars via elevator to the 30th floor? With 600–900 cars per building, how many car elevators would be needed? If an operational error occurs, a simple parapet wall will not be enough to prevent disaster.

Saving underground construction—If the building must be reinforced to support forests and parking garages on every floor, how much thicker and stronger must the walls become? How much cement would be required—enough to quarry a small mountain?

Property value appreciation—Will the added "aerial alleyway" space not be factored into shared area calculations? Will the energy cost of vertically transporting heavy steel vehicles up and down not be distributed among residents?

II. Other Intractable Problems

The soil problem: Tree root systems are enormously extensive. If the soil layer is insufficient, either the plants will wither, or the roots will burst through the building structure.

The plant disease problem: A dense plant community—without pesticides, it becomes a breeding ground for infestations; with pesticides, it becomes a toxic zone.

The water consumption problem: Plants evaporate vast quantities of water daily. Against the backdrop of urban water source depletion, have the costs of desalination and long-distance water diversion been factored in?

The wastewater problem: Runoff from garden fertilization and pesticide application—treating it on-site increases costs, while discharging it untreated into municipal sewers is irresponsible.

III. Reflections

On the concept of development: If we are to excavate soil from mountains, transport it into cities, and carry it up to high-rises to plant trees and grow flowers—why not simply build our homes among the green hills and clear streams in the first place? When the artificial "forest" withers, will we still be able to recover those mountains we destroyed?

Reverence for nature: Nature's miracles are the product of eons of evolution and cannot be so easily replicated by human artifice. Only by working with nature can we live in harmony with it.

Responsible innovation: Any so-called "innovation" that carries potential negative impacts on the natural environment and future generations, or that steers economic development in an unhealthy direction, ought to be resisted.

The author observed that the post claimed "38,624,780 shares" yet showed only 6,799 views—a clear case of fabricated metrics. Even if the concept were sound, such deceptive commercial promotion would only erode credibility.

Originally published on Fan Chunping's blog