XTU Architects, a Paris-based architecture firm, has released images and renderings of X Cloud, a new concept that showcase a future where humanity has had to build cities in the sky to escape from the, now inhabitable, earth.

Part of the Future and the Arts: AI, Robotic, Cities, Life - How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the X Cloud concept was inspired by zeppelin cargo ships.

The concept proposes a series of 'cloud-like super structures', essentially cities, made from a network of truncated octahedron air ships that hover in the earth's atmosphere. Powered by helium gas, which causes the structures to float, the X Clouds are designed to be completely self-supporting, with plankton greenhouses, ephiphyte forests and moisture sensors to facilitate agriculture, while bio-technology transfroms waste into resouces.

XTU co-founder Anouk Legendre says: "As in a space station, everthing on the X Cloud is recycled and re-circulated, water, organic matter, plants, objects."

"Biotechnology and living things transform waste into resources. Greenhouses in aquaponics, bacteria and microalgae recycle water and produce food. It becomes a model of circular metabolism."