China is building a city in which 40,000 trees will grow across buildings to combat the pollution choking its urban skies

China has some of the most polluted cities on the planet, and for many years, the usual reforms, stricter emissions rules, factory closures, and improved public transportation have solved the problem.

So Italian architect Stefano Boeri decided to try something even more extreme, wrapping entire buildings and eventually entire cities in trees. His company’s largest project to date is Liuzhou Forest City, a planned neighborhood in southern China where offices, homes, hotels, schools and even a hospital are supposed to be almost entirely covered in green space. It sounds more like science fiction than city planning, but the idea comes directly from a previous experiment that actually worked in Italy, and China has been trying to scale it up ever since.

How Milan’s vertical forest inspired China’s plan to create a forest city

The entire concept goes back to the Bosco Verticale, or Vertical Forest, a pair of residential towers built by Boeri in Milan and completed in 2014. According to Stefano Boeri Architetti’s project page, these two towers alone are said to filter about 15 to 17.5 tons of soot from the air each year, which convinced Boeri that the same principle could be scaled up into something much larger, with an entire city being built in the same way. Liuzhou Forest City takes this logic and applies it to dozens of buildings instead of just two, turning the architectural experience into a complete urban planning model.

Where is Liuzhou Forest City built in China?

Liuzhou Forest City is planned for the northern tip of Liuzhou, a city with a population of about one and a half million people located in the mountainous Guangxi region of southern China. The site itself covers about 175 hectares running along the Liujiang River, and was chosen in part because Liuzhou already suffers from heavy smog thanks to rapid industrial growth in the surrounding area. Implemented by the Liuzhou Municipal Urban Planning Bureau, the masterplan connects the new neighborhood to the existing city through a dedicated electric vehicle railway.

How many trees and plants will cover the buildings?

The amount of green space planned here is truly enormous. Once completed, Liuzhou Forest City is expected to have about 40,000 trees and nearly a million plants distributed among more than 100 different species, covering rooftops, balconies and building facades throughout the neighborhood. Rather than treating greenery as a decorative addition, the design treats it as a fundamental structural feature of each building, meaning that plants are integrated into the architecture from the ground up rather than planted afterwards.

Can trees on buildings really clean the air?

According to figures shared by Stefano Boeri Architetti, this plant life is expected to absorb approximately 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide and about 57 tons of fine particulate pollutants every year, while producing about 900 tons of oxygen annually. Far from simply cleaning the air, this dense layer of vegetation is also designed to help cool the neighborhood by reducing the urban heat island effect, reducing traffic noise, and creating a true habitat space for the birds, insects and small animals that already live in the surrounding countryside.

How does the city plan to run on renewable energy?

Liuzhou Forest City is not only about green spaces, but energy self-sufficiency is built into the design from the beginning. The plan calls for using geothermal energy to handle interior heating and cooling, coupled with solar panels on the roof to generate electricity, with the goal of making the entire neighborhood operate independently of traditional energy sources. Combined with an electric-only transport network connecting it to the wider city, the aim is to create a fully self-sufficient green area rather than just a collection of plant-covered buildings nestled in a regular urban grid.

Is China building more forest cities outside Liuzhou?

Liuzhou is supposed to be just the starting point. Stefano Boeri Architetti has floated similar forest city concepts for other highly polluted Chinese cities, including Shijiazhuang, a city that has sometimes recorded some of the worst air quality readings in the country. The company has also completed stand-alone vertical forest towers in cities such as Nanjing, applying the same tree-covered construction concept on a smaller scale even where a full forest city master plan does not yet exist.

Why forest cities are important to China’s pollution problem

China is adding tens of millions of new city dwellers every year as people migrate from rural areas in search of work, increasing pressure on air quality in already struggling cities. Boeri has described projects like Liuzhou Forest City as an attempt to prove that dense urban life and true biodiversity do not have to work against each other, showing that even rapidly growing, densely populated cities can build ecological recovery directly into their skyline rather than treating it as an afterthought.

Whether or not Liuzhou Forest City ends up achieving its ambitious goals once completed, it represents one of the most visible attempts yet to respond to China’s pollution crisis through architecture rather than regulation alone.