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Research

02 June 2025

Vertical Urbanism Index Case Study: Amsterdam & Rotterdam

CTBUH Research

Amsterdam is a global leader in sustainable urbanism, known for its human-scale planning, cycling infrastructure, and adaptive reuse of historic structures. While traditionally low-rise, the...

04 April 2022

State of Tall Timber 2022

Daniel Safarik, Jacob Elbrecht & William Miranda, CTBUH

The past few years have seen tremendous interest in the development of mass timber buildings of increasing height, in urban settings, many of which are...

15 December 2021

Megacities vs. Urban Sprawl; Densifying vs. Social Distancing

Astrid Piber, UNStudio

Decentralization and the “15-minute city” are ideas that are currently being put forward to tackle urban challenges, but how will these issues be tackled in...

30 October 2017

Rethinking CTBUH Height Criteria In the Context of Tall Timber

Robert M. Foster, University of Queensland; Michael H. Ramage, University of Cambridge; Thomas Reynolds, The University of Edinburgh

Recent developments in the design and construction of progressively taller buildings using engineered timber as a structural material raise important questions about the language that...

01 February 2017

Reaching for the Sky: The Determinants of Tall Office Development in Global Gateway Cities

Richard Barkham & Dennis Schoenmaker, CBRE Global Research; Michiel Daams, University of Groningen

There are numerous hypotheses about the social and economic processes that lead to the development of skyscrapers, but empirical evidence is scarce. In this article,...

17 October 2016

Tall Buildings and Polycentricity

Greg Yager, Carolien Gehrels & Maren Striker, Arcadis / CallisonRTKL

Dwindling land reserves, water and food shortages, climate change, diminishing air quality, environmental degradation – these are all among the intractable challenges we face in...

17 October 2016

What’s Next?: How Do We Make Vertical Urban Design?

Winy Mass, MVRDV

It seems sometimes as if the further away from the ground we rise, the more architectonic and less urban our buildings become. Skyscrapers have always...

24 February 2015

Taming Tall Buildings’ “Autistic” Tendencies

Kees Christiaanse, KCAP Rotterdam

The CTBUH is actively expanding the “Urban Habitat” portion of its mission, which calls for tall buildings to be optimally integrated into human-scaled urban environments....

18 February 2015

Frankfurt and Rotterdam: Skylines as Embodiment of a Global City

Nebojša Čamprag, Technical University of Darmstadt

In contrast to US cities, which allowed construction of skyscrapers in central urban areas, the post-World War II development of western Europe generally involved new...

16 September 2014

Ultra Light Weight Solutions for Sustainable Urban Densification

Maurice Hermens, Michiel Visscher & John Kraus, Royal HaskoningDHV

This paper shows, through the realized case project “De Karel Doorman” in Rotterdam, how ultra lightweight solutions for apartments and other building types can be...