Part of the inspiration for this project is the excellent development and changes of Shanghai, where the author lives. At present, urbanization is more and more serious, and the urban population density continues to increase. To deal with this kind of phenomenon, the infrastructure and transportation of the city should be developed continuously. Think about 40 years from now. The city will be in an unpredictable state.Unquestionably, at that moment, single ground traffic is far from handling the traffic load of the entire city. This thought is evident when the author stands on the Oriental Pearl Tower. She saw skyscrapers are landing everywhere. How will people walk through skyscrapers in the future? What should be the embodiment of their traffic freedom? Concept-wise, the author hopes to encourage people to think more boldly about thepossibility of flying. The author speculates the development direction of the future city based on the early research. Then use it as the background to explore the user demands. It is a process of repeatedly investigating the development, including collecting information, identifying target users, brainstorming, sketching, modeling and rendering, etc. These steps are often alternated due to some feedback or new inspiration. The result of the project is a city air taxi, Geely Sooyun. This concept is mainly aimed at business tourists in Shanghai. In current years, the population of business travelers is increasing. However, the time wasted in traffic jams is a real pain for these groups. Geely Sooyun provides a more pleasant and meaningful trip by uninterrupted and efficient transportation between buildings.

The project originated with the question "What is the future of urban mobility?" and the counterquestion "What is the future of urbanity?". To understand the future of mobility, we first need to try to understand more of the future context where it'll reside. Mobility and the context it exists within are two symbiotic yet constantly evolving elements. This project seeks to speculate about their respective state in the year of 2050. Our global population keeps on growing, and more people are moving into urbanized regions. Already today more 90% of the worlds population is concentrated on roughly 10% of our planets land surface, and the density keeps increasing. To cope with the expanding population, cities need to keep growing and create sustainable infrastructure. The trend in densely populated regions has been to grow in the vertical axis. Besides just residential spaces, modern cities are starting to distribute shops, utilities and other typical city content vertically as well. City blocks and their content that used to be spread out in the horizontal plane are now increasingly being housed within compact hubs over multiple levels vertically. This project proposes the idea of a prototype sub-city within a mega city in the South East Asian region, around the year of 2050. Created as a way to prototype solutions to challenges found in hyper densely populated regions ranging from urban planning and congestion to general liveability. The fictional district has a highly vertically oriented cityscape, consisting of many interconnected highrises and megastructures. Traversing the walls of the buildings, vertically and horizontally, are vehicles propelled through magnetic levitation technology on an inductive infrastructure retrofitted onto or built into the buildings in the region. The far future, visionary setting of the project intends to provoke thoughts and reflection about an urban lifestyle within a far more vertically oriented environment. The thesis also aims to paint a picture of a car free city hub where vehicles are bound to the vertical plane, and the horizontal plane is devoted to the community of the city. Whether it's on the ground level or multiple stories up in a luscious "sky garden", the horizontal planes belong to the people and are roamed by foot. The process behind the development of the project involved research into the future setting and emerging technologies. Creative development and ideation were done using analogue as well as digital sketching, brainstorm sessions and physical and digital mockuping. The final vizualisations and compositions were designed from storyboards describing typical use cases of the vehicle. After researching topics of future cityscapes, creating the future premise of the project and ideating and refining various ideas, the end result of the thesis is Vertal Hex. A maglev propelled shuttle targetting future businesses. Travelling along the walls of the interconnected megastructures making up the future cityscape and company campuses, it allows it's passengers to reach their destinations anywhere within the hub entering right at the floor of their destination.

The project is highly inspired by the rise of vertical cityscape and how it can shape a new context for mobility to exist within. When the destinations travelled will be spread out in the vertical landscape instead of only the horizontal one. A rearrangement of housing, schools, restaurants and parks will create new needs for mobility to fill. In which the vehicles restricted to the two dimensional format of today can not. This will create a new era of vertical transportation to combat the densification of the future. The project investigates how new technologies such as magnetic levitation could be applied to architecture and open up space for vertical transportation. To give a flexible mobility system in high rise, high density urban areas. And with this create walkways thriving with nature on the horizontal planes. That promotes walkability, social connections and gives more space to people. For this to work, the project was set in the year of 2050 inside of a protoype district. By the reason to let the technology mature, this will also be a pivotal time of how to accommodate for the densification. Exploring how mobility would work and the everdaylives of the innhabitants in the district. The Project aims to provoke the perception of what a future urban area could be and how it would affect the need for transportation. When the premise was set, the mission was to create this new type of mobility, its functionality, its experience and of course a vehicle to convey these different elements. This was made through a number of ideation sessions, physical prototypes, hand sketches, digital sketches and digital modeling. Realizing it into an viable solution. The result of this project is Vertal Mono, A compact vehicle suited for the era of vertical transportation. It is designed to be a daily commuting vehicle within Vertico district, a prototype district testing vertically connected cityscapes. Mono is designed to be the smaller human footprint pod of the Vertal line up. It is nimble and flexible, being able to reach anywhere at any time. It is an essential part of mobility to the inner circles of the district and part of the communities living there. Vertal offers an on demand shared experience whether the occupant is riding for a single minute or for 15. The interior space offers great flexibility as a response to the vast range of usecases it needs to fulfill.

The project is inspired by the idea of trying to simplify and create understanding on a broader level regarding the issues of climate change within the author’s field of design. How can design help us understand the relevance of acting now by visualizing how a potential future might look if action is not taken. Out of many issues that might arise due to climate change the project specifically targets that of desertification. The consequences global desertification already has on life and nature could potentially reach devastating levels in a not-so-distant future making it a highly important topic. Desertification if left uncontrolled is expected to force billions of people from the densest areas of the world onthe move by 2090. Driving densification of the last liveable land to reach unprecedented levels. This is a scenario that we want to stay clear of at all costs as it gambles our survival as a species on this planet. It would lead to the creation of vast unhabitable areas, potentially major conflicts, and large-scale segregation. Leaving little to no room for our ally nature to regenerate would mean the mass extinction of species and potentially life on our planet. To enforce the urgency of action taking the project steps into the distant future of 2086 to portray how a growing desert would have affected the way we live, the struggles it has brought, and how we are putting all efforts towards assisted regeneration of the planet. As much as the project is speculative the scenario builds from data and analytics mapped by scientists and research within the fields of eco- science. As the issue of desertification is an already existing problem today. Scientists and inventors are working on ways to counter its growth. Taking inspiration and learnings from biodiverse reforestation work done today and applying it to the potential scenario allowed the author to highlight issues in the current process. As the scenario was pushed to the extreme so were the problems within the current system. Scalability, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility came up as some of the most prevalent issues. Mobility already plays a great role in distributing the efforts of today’s work and will come to play an even greater role in future reforestation efforts. With technological development and systematic changes come new possibilities for innovation. The process behind the development consisted of exploring solutions that hinder desertification whilst simultaneously promoting and assisting in the regeneration of nature. This involved research into large-scale reforestation development and up-and-coming technologies. Through creative development and ideation grew potential scenarios that resulted in story-driven final visuals. The result is Terra Nova. A lighter than air propelled cocnept that allows long term cargo- mobility in barren areas with minimal impact to the environment. The vehicle is multifunctional in the sense that it carries the capabilities of both personal and cargo transport making it a great all-around vehicle.