This week, two architecture studios have looked to the skies with concepts for structures climbing over one mile (5,200ft) in height.

International design and innovation office Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) have proposed the world’s highest vertical park and observation deck, called The Mile.

Developed together with German engineering firm Schlaich Bergermann & Partner (SBP) and British digital design studio Atmos, The Mile would be the tallest man-made structure ever created – around twice the height of today’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

From base to apex, the structure would be covered by plants and greenery and inhabited by hundreds of animal species. It would be built using a lightweight structure, based on a structural, 20m-wide shaft, kept in compression and secured through a net of pre-stressed cables. Various orbiting capsules – equipped with open-air Virtual Reality screens – would elevate people to the summit.

“Imagine you take New York’s Central Park, turn it vertical, roll it and twirl it”, said Professor Carlo Ratti, founder of CRA and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab.

“Following the example of the 1972 Munich Olympic complex, engineered by Joerg Schlaich and Rudolf Bergermann, which pushed the boundaries of the possible and became a milestone in architectural history, the structural concept for The Mile is technically feasible because of its consequent and uncompromised light-weight approach”, said Boris Reyher, associate at SBP.

The proposals will be presented to the public at the forthcoming MIPIM real estate show in Cannes, France.

The second mile-high concept comes from Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates and the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, who have collaborated to visualise a new district in Tokyo in the year 2045, featuring a supertall megacity at its heart.

The scheme would be contained in a large district on a man-made archipelago which has already been earmarked for development. A 420-storey skyscraper called Sky Mile Tower would house 55,000 people and include leisure facilities such as sky lobbies, gyms, shops, restaurants, hotels, libraries and open-air terraces.

Low-elevation areas in the neighbourhood would be protected from natural disasters and rising sea levels by infrastructural features such as breakwater bars and operable floodgates.