China has some of the most polluted cities on the planet, and for years the usual fixes, stricter emission rules, factory shutdowns, better public transport, have only chipped away at the problem. So Italian architect Stefano Boeri decided to try something far more radical, wrapping entire buildings and eventually entire cities in trees. His firm's biggest project so far is Liuzhou Forest City, a planned neighbourhood in southern China where offices, homes, hotels, schools and even a hospital are meant to be covered almost completely in greenery. It sounds more like science fiction than city planning, but the idea comes straight from an earlier experiment that already worked in Italy, and China has been trying to scale it up ever since. Whether Liuzhou fully delivers on its promises or not, it reframes a stubborn question, asking not how cities might survive pollution, but how they might quietly begin undoing it.
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