The UltraCities program brings together all knowledge and experience for the development of brand new, highly sustainable, healthy, and resilient urban areas. It realizes urban areas that work across all social, economic, ecological and physical aspects of a city.
UltraCities are ideal places to live, work, play, and relax. With lush nature, new mobility systems, smart city technologies, and ideal habitats for life, in any climate. They utilize our 20 years of experience in sustainable and resilient development, bring together pioneering partners from across the globe, and realize new exciting futures for their inhabitants.
UltraCities are cities that embrace a new reality of living on this planet. They provide high quality living and working environments, while being self sufficient in their energy, water, food and waste management needs. They are resilient towards unexpected changes in environment, have biodiverse natural areas, adapt to climate change, and water challenges. They have self sufficient economies that are built on abundant resources, knowledge development and a rich cultural life. Their inhabitants enjoy vibrant, healthy lives, strong communities, and diverse living experiences for the full scope of life, from the very young to our senior citizens.
Developing a new city is an immensely complex task. To maximize value from efforts and investment, project management that steers towards an optimal outcome in planning, design, and construction is essential. This requires tight cooperation between disciplines, developing parties, government bodies, and those on the ground. To do this, we apply systemic integrated project management, design thinking, and performance based contracting.
Within the development of UltraCities, we perform the following tasks:
This masterplan transforms downtown Shanghai into a fully sustainable community, in energy, food, water, and jobs, designed for Expo 2013. The plan strategically interweaves sustainable innovation with exciting urban design, and making it run with urban agriculture, sustainable technologies and vertical farms. The result is a valuable and beautiful urban community, an emergent circular economy, and a future-proof investment.
The Shanghai urban master plan demonstrates the Urban Renaissance approach on a specific site adjacent to Nanjing road, incorportating a historic Lilong housing district.
This urban redevelopment project of the Fort Point district in Boston, MA proposes a unique strategy to reduce city-wide traffic congestion, increase livability and property values and contributes significantly to the resilience of the city as a whole.
BKCity is a magnificent listed monument of more than 30.000m2 functioning as the faculty of Architecture of the TU Delft. Except created a phased plan to make this historic educational building energy and carbon neutral within ten years.
The plan converts the building into a didactic tool that puts sustainability at the heart of education for generations of architects, introducing a unique in-building ecosystem that provides an inspiring environment, functional qualities and cost savings.
The San Francisco Transbay Center redevelopment project realizes the world’s largest rooftop park in the center of one of the world’s most exciting cities: Salesforce Park. The concept, developed by Except together with Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, restructures an existing transport hub into a beacon of beauty, biodiversity, and health. The project started in 2007 and the park opened in 2019.
Tom Bosschaert
Director