The predominant aesthetic of Zanzibarland new construction in this formative period was the idea of the “jungle town," a high-rise arcology that was meant to house several dozen thousand people. The name was a double meaning: firstly, that the arcology would integrate vertical farming schemes and a bountiful quantity of flora in its design, such that; secondly, that the arcology would be subdivided into discrete layers with distinct purposes, much like the vertical stratification of a tropical rainforest's ecology.
Staring from the bottom, the floor of the arcology was. Supposing that the average arcology rose 30 storeys, the floor might encompass the ground through the 5th floor. The floor would be designed to serve a transit network, not the other way around; thus, an arcology's train station (or, in some cases, ferry terminal) would be quite literally the centre of activity. Arrayed around this transit hub would be high-density commercial space and spaces for open markets. Some local entertainment would be located there as well, but it was expected that most would instead choose to go to the urban core for serious nightlife. In addition, the floor would contain an arcology's control centre, doubly serving as a local government authority and as the heart of emergency services.
Moving up, the understorey would form the bulk of the city’s living and working space. It might take up the 6th through 25th floors of a 30-level structure. Residential spaces would be interspersed with branching three-dimensional "street grid" of skylobbies and skywalks. Skylobbies would serve as reception points for the arcolohy's lifts; they would also contain small-scale commercial hubs and the same purpose that one's local high street might have served in a pre-Trouble city; they might also contain primary schools, churches, or mosques. Skywalks would serve as "streets in the sky" and encourage residents to interact.
Some workspaces would be interspersed in the understorey, too; telecommunication had broken down the barrier between home and workplace even before the Troubles, and Zanzibarland arcology designers kept this fact in mind. The understorey might contain artisanal enterprises or "cottage factories," filled with 3D printers and intended for local manufacturing. This would help give an arcology some economic base, rather than render it purely as a dormitory town. However, an arcology would not contain the offices of the Authority's many bureaucratic agencies, large corporations, universities, research facilities, or generally other white-collar occupations; those would be located elsewhere, either in the city centre.
The canopy, topping off the bulk of the cell’s buildings, would be largely devoted to solar panel banks, urban agriculture, and rainwater collection. The upper five floors of a thirty-storey building might be dedicated to the canopy; they would contain the facilities needed for the upkeep, support, and mainenance of those life-giving facilities. Thanks to the thick layer of urban agriculture, the canopy quite literally took the appearence of tropical treetops. This would certainly not be enough to feed all residents of an arcology, so urban agricultural spaces were usually dedicated to growing specialty crops such as fruits and vegetables, rather than staples. Solar panel banks, however, were usually enough to power an arcology; while arcologies were still connected to the greater city electrical grid, during a sunny day they could be self-sustaining and indeed a net producer of electricity.
Finally, there was the emergent layer, consisting of high-rises that would be utilised for various, usually civic and community-oriented purposes such as high schools, trade colleges, libraries, and healthcare facilities. These were sparsely located buildings that rose like antennae, several storeys higher than the rest of the canopy. Recreational space would be located here too, offering the jungle city’s residents the amenities of meadows in the sky, and literal hanging gardens of Babylon.
In a break from the typical fashion of a tropical rainforest, the jungle city would be constructed in a way that there were shafts for light to reach all the way down to the floor. Despite this, the floor's density often meant that its interior resembled the neon passageways of Chungking Mansions more than the spacious grounds of an actual mansion. Still, from above, an arcology would look closer to a convoluted green honeycomb of glass sinkholes - imagine a bank of pods in a Japanese capsule hotel, tilted vertically. From below, looking up from an open space in the floor, it would look much like a paradisiacal vision of an overgrown Hong Kong estate.
All residential spaces were constructed with at least one floor-to-ceiling window, in theory allowing plenty of light through. Furthermore, for many newcomers, especially from rural areas, this was their first experience with the amenities of a modern kitchen. Said kitchens were all built open-plan to encourage a breakdown of traditional gender roles. The transition from a survival-oriented rural existence to a hyperconnected, postmodern, urban life was hard for many, and a bizarre economy of "teachers" and "helpers" existed to ease it. Many of these, despite the Authority's strident secularism, came in the form of one's local church or mosque, and those religious centres would become the backbone of communities that formed.
A small army of maintenance drones would ensure the proper functioning and cleanliness of all facilities for the maximum health, comfort, and security of the residents. Some of these would include Lizards, window-washing drones that cling to the prismatic glass rises and keep them pristine, and Birds of Paradise, atmospheric monitoring and scrubbing drones, tasked with measuring the air quality within a cell and to “clean up” particulates and allergens from the air as best as they could. Although certainly beneficial to residents’ health and well-being, their main purpose was really to keep the air congenial for plant life.
The jungle city was truly the residence of the future, but due to their high initial cost, between 2055 and 2060, few were built outside the tightly controlled and regulated environment of Zanzibar City. Mainland cities - Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, and Nairobi in particular - continued to have large areas of informal housing caused by local authorities' inability to keep up with urban migration. The Authority chose not to relocate residents from slums and break up local communities that had formed there; instead, their policy was to work to deliver and install services directly to informal communities, slowly bringing them up to a modern standard of living.
