La Forest City malese. L’utopia incompiuta della città intelligente

Forest City is in Malaysia. Forest City, however, does not exist. It is one of the ghost cities that were abandoned before they were even finished. A new land archipelago, a futuristic smart city, a large forest in continuity with the surrounding landscape. Forest City was to be a territorial hinge on which to divert and catalyse the economic flows of one of Asia's special economic macro zones, just 2 km from Singapore. A Smart City model based on the triad of safety, comfort and sustainability. All that remains of all this is a fragment, an artificial sod with no forest and commercials trying to attract new investments. What remains are abandoned skyscrapers that have never become forests. No citizens but only sporadic visitors. The theme of cities as “intelligent forests” opens up the architectural debate to the Utopia of the contemporary founding city - in a world, ours, where everything seems possible - and Rem Koolhaas in his book Texts on the (no longer) city states that «in front of Utopia, the architect is placed in an impossible situation more than anyone else. Without reference to Utopia, his work has no real value, but by associating himself with it he almost inevitably makes himself complicit in crimes of greater or lesser gravity». Crimes are against the stratified environmental palimpsests that are inhabited by architectures without an organic relationship with the landscape and that do not give the city a face.