Dream cities: why trees and nature are needed to bring joy to the urban jungle

Cities are often designed to be practical. Rarely do urban planners today have space for romanticism or poetry. But it was these qualities Ronan Bouroullec and his brother Erwan considered crucial when they considered planning solutions for metropolises.

It wasn’t an area of design familiar to the French design duo, best known for their homewares, but that was part of the attraction of the project.

“We are industrial designers and it’s quite interesting to be naive in front of a subject,” says Ronan Bouroullec, in Hong Kong to open Urban Daydreaming at the Hong Kong Design Institute, an exhibition of the scale models the pair produced to express their ideas for addressing contemporary issues in urban environments.

“The nature, the poetry, the romanticism, the sensuality in the city, the fact that you walk and the walk is not just surrounded by shops but by trees, shadows, water,” says Bouroullec, citing the beginnings of their thinking. “It is a reverie in the sense that there is no precise subject, yet it’s a very pragmatic reverie.”

Examining different scenarios, the brothers came up with 14 delicate scale models and a number of additional early-stage mock-ups of urban scenes, incorporating nature, shadows and water features that might encourage city dwellers to pause, to reconnect, and to step outside the everyday. The models were first exhibited in October 2016 at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany and then toured Europe, before making their debut in Asia.