ABSTRACT
In the 1988 paper entitled “The Intelligent Tropical City,” a paper that comes closest in describing what the tropical city ought to be, Tay lists a number of agendas, each with its own set of recommendations.7 The idea is that when urban schemes or buildings incorporate these recommendations – including rainwater collection and recycling, vertical landscaping, aesthetics of shadow rather than platonic volume and plane, connectivity, synergistic mix of uses and social choreography and more – the designs will produce tropicality.8 But do they? A Northern Hemisphere city can embody all these features and more and is certainly no more tropical than the ones incorporating them in the tropics. Germany, a case in point, has legislated laws concerning water conservation for homes and other habitations, and these conservation measures do not necessarily give their cities and urban schemes signs of tropicality, which is not to say that the Germans had tropicality in mind. The question then is: what constitutes Tay’s tropical city that provides a mark of a rethink in architecture and urban design?
