🏙 Cities don’t just need taller buildings: they need vertical neighborhoods

For years, high-rises were built as symbols: glass, steel, views. Today, the most exciting towers are something else entirely: #urbaninfrastructure.The Global Real Estate and Infrastructure Institute captured this shift in their “Vertical Virtues” feature with Cro&Co and CroMe Studio: towers as tools against sprawl, climate risk, and social isolation.When vertical buildings sit on top of strong public transport, mix uses, and open ground floors for greenery, they can:

🏞️ Free up land for parks, cooling islands, and public life

🚞 Cut transport emissions by clustering living, working, and services around transit

🧬 Build dense, human-scale communities inside one buildingWe already see this in Europe. For example, The Shard in London as a “vertical village” directly above London Bridge Station.That’s why the “virtues of verticality” resonate with us: where construction innovation, smart building design, and clean energy meet, towers become infrastructure, not icons.Happy to be part of the GRI Institute community! 🔗