Cities today are bustling developments evolving as centres for social engagement, capital generation and cultural amalgamation. They consist of a dense urban fabric that reflects the very core idea of the city and its ever-changing landscape. For long, high-rise buildings have been seen as a solution to the rapid development of cities and their rushed means of capital generation. High density neighbourhoods are a result of more people wanting to be present in the same neighbourhood yet limited land giving rise to the need for high-rise buildings. The larger the scale is, the more intangible and unmanageable the entire idea seems. Yet the higher we go, the more we lose touch with the ground and the more inhumane this whole concept seems. Or so we think.

This study aims to look at the idea of humanising the high-rise through the ideas of social and contextual interactions at varied scales of personal, neighbourhood and city levels changing the notion of the high-rise as more than just a tall glass box.


The Need

With the advent of global capital markets, high-rise buildings have been dotting cities the world over. By August 2018, there were over 3251 ‘tall’ buildings (with a height of more than 150m) located at over 258 cities worldwide1. ‘Tall’ is the new normal. However, our way of addressing the new ‘tall’ in these dense environments hasn’t changed much. This research is an attempt at bringing back the human scale to high-rise built environments.