Translator: Judy Klass Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Hello.
If you, by any chance, are planning a holiday to Mexico,
I would suggest you would visit this guy, Richart Sowa.
And if you go there,
don't forget to bring some empty bottles for him
because he really loves that.
He's lived there for 20 years.
The last 20 years, he's been collecting bottles
and bringing them in nets.
And in nets, he's been pushing together and making something that floats.
And one day he thought,
"Let's put some sand on top of it."
So he brought sand on it and some trees on it,
and it started to be an island.
And after a few years, the island was so green
that he thought,
"Well, maybe it'd be nice if I could bring my island to somewhere else
and to take it to another country."
But then the government of Mexico said,
"No, you can't do this. This is Mexico territory."
So he's the first man who built Mexico with his own hands.
(Laughter)
So, I'm not going to give you a blueprint to build a plastic-bottle island.
But I'm going to give you a blueprint to improve our cities.
And why should we improve our cities?
Well, we as architects, we don't do such a good job,
because the cities we build are made from buildings
that are, for a fact, for 50 years or 70 years in the same place.
And in that 50 to 70 years, everything changes.
Our demands change constantly because we live in a dynamic society.
We have the social changes, political changes, technical changes.
And even today,
the two most important changes that we need and seek
are climate change and urbanization.
And they both put so much force on our cities to adapt.
So we should see what we can do about it,
because I think all this passion make our cities too slow.
Our cities are not able to adapt and to adjust as fast as we want them to.
In an ideal world, we would have a city that is ready to build for change.
So each time when something happens, you can bring in new buildings.
So it would look something like this.
A city that is growing in a few weeks -
new buildings, buildings going away.
And in fact, this is not, of course, ten weeks; this is ten years.
So what can we do to make sure that we can reach these kinds of cities?
Well, for that, I think, we should look at response time.
So when there's a question, how fast can we react to that question?
Well if you're thirsty, and I'm often thirsty,
in 30 seconds I can take a nip.
If I want clothes, I go to a shop and buy some clothes.
If I want a car, within four or five weeks, I have a new car.
But if you want a house or new building,
first you have to find a spot in a very dense city,
demolish the building, get the license, get the architect, get the contractor.
It takes you so much time before the building is there.
It takes you more than three years.
So, if we want to make our cities better and have a shorter response time,
we have to do something else,
and that's change the perception.
It's not technology we have to change;
we have to change perception.
We have to have a new fresh look to our cities.
And for that, there are two mindsets that we have to change.
And the first one is that we think that cities are full.
But in fact, cities are not full; we have to search for new space,
and it's something that already happened for the last hundred years.
There were people who innovated the elevator.
They looked up in the sky and said, "Well, can we use the space?"
And they made elevators and built a vertical city.
Well, we have to do exactly the same.
Our generation has to look at water.
Most of the big cities worldwide are next to the water.
Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York - they all have water,
and we don't use it, not for building.
So if we start doing that, then we can build
exactly the same houses as we built on land,
but then on water.
And normal houses have a foundation of concrete or from piles,
and a floating house has a foundation of a concrete box.
In Holland,
we've been doing it for many years, and we built on concrete boxes,
and we tow them all over the water through all the country.
And even when we do bigger buildings,
we can have these concrete and foam foundations
of 20 by 20, 50 by 50, even 100 by 100.
And we see then houses and roads and green.
And while we do that, we can move slowly from land to water.
But then, of course, they are still static.
So we should grow into a dynamic city.
But also dynamic cities already exist.
This is an image of the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
And really fun.
A hundred thousand people build a city in two weeks.
And after two weeks, they take it away, and you go back to the original situation.
So flexible cities already exist.
And I think that by rethinking our city,
we should also take things that we already know.
You probably all have your smartphone,
and, before, it was always only to make a call.
But today you can personalize the thing, and you put your own apps on it,
and each of your smartphones look the same but are completely different
because you have your own apps.
And in two years' time, probably, your apps will be different
than the ones you have today.
So why can't we use the city exactly the same?
Why can't we have a city
in which we just move in floating functions, floating city apps?
And you get a city that looks a bit like this,
where you have the water, where you have the flexible solutions
and then the city itself is more the hardware.
Let me go from project to product.
Well, these two mindsets are absolutely important
because if you take these two mindsets, we can grow into the next step,
and that is what I think is floating cities.
And before I show you something of these floating cities,
I have to warn you:
these floating cities
won't look that different than the cities we see today,
but they will act very different.
And I want to show you the top 10 trends towards floating cities.
And each of the trends is already happening,
and each of the trends will give a new performance to our cities.
So, at ten,
it's safety.
We're going to use water in our cities to make our cities more safe.
We have cities all over the world that are threatened by floods.
This is, for instance, Miami.
And when you take houses on top of the water
and even bigger buildings on top of the water,
they will just go up and down with what the floods become.
Or even with a hurricane, if the wind is really sucking at your building,
and the building is on the water,
it can just move up and down a little bit, so it can absorb the energy.
So building on water is more safe than building on land.
And those could look like this
or even bigger, like floating apartment buildings.
And hopefully, we'll see the first one in 2014.
On nine, also a very interesting trend, and that's sustainability.
People have already talked about sustainability today,
but I think that water will give us new opportunity
to be even more sustainable than we can be on land.
This is, for instance, the design for a floating mosque.
It's for Dubai;
It's very hot there, 50 degrees.
And, of course, the water is only 27 degrees.
And by pumping water through the walls - the walls are one meter thick -
we can cool down the building to 27 degrees.
And then air conditioning and solar energy can do the rest.
So if you walk into that mosque, you see - beautiful -
all the water going through the columns back into the water.
Sustainable.
On eight, also an interesting one. Scarless developments.
We are talking about the future and about the children of our children.
And maybe the things we do today, they don't like.
So we have to give them the possibility and possibilities
to redo the things
and to take things away.
We are doing now projects in the Maldives, and the Maldives is a very dense country.
There is not that much land, and they want new land for tourism.
And we designed over there a project, which is called Ocean Flower.
It's 185 villas on the water,
but I can imagine that in 100 years, something else should happen there,
and you don't want to leave any scars.
So it's built of all these floating houses,
and if you take it away, there will be nothing left.
So in 100 years, we can go back to the original situation.
And that's not only for these kind of houses
but also for bigger developments.
For instance, a floating golf course.
32 islands on the water
connected with each other with little tubes underneath the water,
which you can go, with your golf cart, from one to another.
And even this kind of development, which takes up a lot of space,
you can take away through time and go back to your original, nice lagoon.
On seven, instant wind solutions.
By having this urbanization throughout the cities,
we get all this pressure on our green zones.
And the green is pushed out of the city.
Well, water gives you the possibility to give green back to the cities.
This is designed for a green tower; it's called the Sea Tree.
And this one is based on all the technology of the offshore industry.
And it's just a big concrete tower filled with green.
And here you see the original, the one in Norway.
And you can bring it to your city,
and in the city itself,
you'll see all the animals and the birds and the fish will make use of it,
and that the ecosystem is being affected
in more than two or three kilometers around this tree.
Of course, one tree doesn't affect the city.
But if you have like 100 around Manhattan, for instance,
it can really make a difference.
Next trend: we are already on six.
On six, we have private floating islands,
same as Richart Sowa in Mexico.
He made it out of bottles,
while we do it with concrete and foam.
And the rich people in the world, all searching for the next big thing.
You can buy a very big yacht. It costs you like 30 million.
But for 12 million dollars, you already get your own island.
You can enter this island with your submarine, just underneath it,
and the floor will open, and you can just go inside.
That's something that is exactly, in this moment, happening:
people are buying these kinds of islands.
On five, plug-and-play buildings.
The hotel industry is looking at these kinds of developments
and seeing new possibilities.
This is the Greenstar; it 's a hotel with five arms.
You can see it as five cruise ships connected to one center ring.
And in fact, we're not going to build five of these cruise ships,
we're going to build six.
So one of these legs will stay in the harbor,
and after seven years, once you have to refurbish your hotel,
you can just take one part off and bring the new leg on it.
And then the old one will go to the harbor and be refurbished over there.
So there's a continuing process.
So there's not more than a week that you can't use the hotel.
It saves a lot of money.
On four, the trend is expanding urban fabric.
Again, if you see floating cities in the future,
they won't look that different than normal cities.
In fact, what we as architects and urban planners try to do
is to diffuse the border between land and water.
And slowly, a city can grow
and even, after time, you can also take parts of it.
So we got into flexible cities, and on the cities, on the water -
the roads are the same, the houses are the same,
and the green is the same.
And if you take it one step further, to the next step,
then we talk about flexible urban components.
That means we have all these elements
of roads and houses and trees and electricity,
and by that we can grow into a city
that looks a bit like Venice with waterways.
But this is also a shuffle city.
That means when, through time,
we think that parts of the city are not in the right spot,
we can just move it along with it.
It gives a flexibility that we don't yet know in the cities we see today.
And it is happening. This is a floating tower for Holland.
It was made like 100 kilometers out of Rotterdam,
and then brought over the water and brought to its final destination.
So we can already move these kind of big urban components.
So we come to two.
And at at two, we have the reuse of city apps.
Every four years, we have the Olympics.
Every four years, we have the world soccer games.
And every four years,
we have cities that invest a lot of money in getting the city ready,
building all the stadiums, building all the hotels, and for what?
It's only for two or three weeks.
So we think that will be a new market,
a market for mobile global assets
where the rich countries, like, for instance, Qatar,
will invest in big functions
like a floating harbor, ready for all the cruise ships,
if you have hotel rooms there.
And then each, they will just rent it out, lease it out
to countries who want to organize these kind of events.
And then spend so much less money,
so also less fortunate countries
can start organizing these kinds of big events.
And then the most important one,
the trend that's already happening
and that will have the most affect on our future.
It's not one that you will see in our cities
because it will be happening in cities in developing countries.
We are talking about slums.
Slums, worldwide, is one of the biggest problems.
We have one billion people today, living in slums.
And all these people -
there is no possibility to upgrade them in a simple way.
But if you look at water,
and most of these wet slums are next to the water,
we see the possibility to find space
and also the possibility to bring products to that slum.
And by having products in the slum,
investors are more willing to do something for them.
Because if you put like 50,000 Euros
in a, for instance, in a floating school,
then you can take it away
in the moment that there is some eviction in these kind of areas.
The risk of making these kinds of areas better is getting less.
We are now building a floating school.
It is an internet school,
so it gives access to people in this kind of slum
to get connected to the internet.
And we built them in Holland
and will go on transport over the water to Kampala in Uganda,
and there it will be used for education.
Here you can see it; it's now almost finished.
And it will look fantastic. It will look like a spaceship.
So if you go into this container,
you see, then, 20 people just sitting behind iPads.
And I have small children myself, and they are like three and five.
And they can just work with these kinds of computers,
without having the ability to write or read.
So we can bring this to that slum too.
What I hope is that after this presentation,
you'll forever remember the word "float."
But I also want you to know what "FLOAT" stands for.
It stands for "Flexible Land On Aquatic Territory."
Okay. Thank you very much.
(Applause)