A 42nd-floor ‘skybridge’ in the dazzling Raffles City project could help solve overcrowding–will it simply let the super-rich escape to the sky?

Raffles City Chongqing, a project headed by the architect Moshe Safdie, will boast 134,000 sq m of homes, shops, offices, entertainment, transportation links and a public park. It also features a more unusual claim to fame: a “horizontal skyscraper” 300m in length, stretching across four of the main towers at the 42nd floor. With the building situated in an earthquake zone, it “floats” on top of the towers to accommodate the necessary sway.

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An artist’s render of Raffles City Chongqing, which will have the world’s highest skybridge linking the most towers.
An artist’s render of Raffles City Chongqing, which will have the world’s highest skybridge linking the most towers. © Safdie Architects

If sky-high connections between buildings are the future, then technology will hasten its arrival. Last year, the German engineering firm ThyssenKrupp unveiled its new horizontal-vertical elevator system. The Multi allows multiple lifts in one shaft, removes height limitations and allows for horizontal lifts to shuttle from one building to another. Buildings could reach higher, and reach across, creating an interconnected network that stretches across the city.

“It gives us choices of how to understand the building in a different way,” says Michael Cesarz, CEO of Multi at ThyssenKrupp. “For me, being an architect and an engineer, I don’t have to think of lifts as the centre of the building anymore – I can put them anywhere I like. Moving horizontally creates some new sorts of freedoms. You can move people from one end to the other end of the same or connected buildings. You don’t even have to step out of the lift.”

But what are the social implications of a life lived in the air? Could this trend for linked skyscrapers accelerate segregation, creating a two-tier city socially as well as physically: sky-high cities for the elite with everyone else stuck at ground level?

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