Vertical Cities Asia  (VCA) is an international urban design competition organized by the University of Singapore. Each year contestants from Asian, European and North American universities work to solve a hypothetical urban design challenge in a selected Asian mega-city. 

          The 2012 competition was set on a one square-kilometer site in Yongsan District, Seoul, South Korea. The objective was to develop the site so that it can house 100,000 people. The total residential floor area, however, is not to exceed fifty percent of the total proposed building mass. The urban planning studio was charged with the task of designing building regulations that could accommodate such high building density without compromising public health, livability and real estate value.  

          ‘A Watershed Moment’ was one of four finalists selected to represent the University of Michigan in the VCA finals in Singapore. The judges were particularly impressed by the depth of research demonstrated and the project’s core concept —the distributed density model— and the strategic integration of natural features with the built environment. Unlike cities with strict building regulations and therefore relatively uniform urban fabrics (the typical European city) or the more laissez-faire, land market- driven cities of North America, ‘A Watershed Moment’s’ vision for the site proposed the distribution of population density and economic activity among five districts. Each district would contain a relatively small but highly dense Central Business District surrounded by lower density and more human scale mixed-use areas. The resultant urban fabric resembled a “landscape of peaks and valleys.”