What if the ocean could become a city?
A new economic zone impervious to climate change and unlimited in potential.
What if we could put farms on the sea, host climate refugees, and solve our cities’
overpopulation crisis.
That’s what Japanese start-up N-ARK is proposing with its Dogen City, a floating self-sufficient
metropolis.
But is this a glimpse into the future of construction, or just a sci-fi fantasy?
Say you’ve got a beautiful coastal town that’s simply running out of space.
You could journey out into the water, fill it with a bunch of rock, sand and clay and
build on top of it.
In very simple terms, that’s land reclamation and it’s an approach that’s been used
for centuries.
But it hasn’t always turned out to be the most sustainable approach.
And as sea levels continue to rise, we need to change the way we build – and fast.
It's so scary, but for us it's a chance to change in our lifetime, to expand our habitable
zone from the land to the sea.
Floating developments aren’t entirely new.
There’s the floating Uros islands at Lake Titicaca in Peru, floating villages in Cambodia,
and floating river homes just to name just a few.
Even floating offshore platforms like those used for oil rigs can essentially function
like small towns.
But these concepts are getting even bigger.
The United Nations has backed a South Korean project to build a series of floating platforms
off the coast of Busan.
Over in Saudi Arabia, the kingdom has proposed Oxagon, a floating industrial city that’s
part of its megadevelopment Neom.
One Japanese start-up wants to take it even further.
This is Dogen City.
1.58km in diameter and approximately 4km in circumference, measuring a total 390 acres,
it is massive.
This first module is designed to accommodate 40,000 people, functioning as a completely
stand-alone city but with a village-like atmosphere.
The circular structure would have public housing, medical research centres, food production
facilities and even launch sites for spacecrafts.
Within the bay will be floating structures that can be reconfigured depending on what
they’re needed for.
The outer ring is designed to act as a sort of tsunami shield with barriers that would
protect the inner floating developments.
And everything would be weighted in the water almost like a wind turbine or oil rig.
Since my background is in architecture, I tried to make a company which is fusing deep
tech with architecture and design.
To say this plan is ambitious would be modest.
It’s essentially a tech-driven masterplan for a floating utopia that aims to address
the impending climate refugee crisis, affordable housing and food shortages.
According to the Global Center on Adaptation, if we continue to harvest and produce food
the way we do, we’ll have a shortage of land the size of North America by 2050.
You may remember Singapore’s bold plan to turn every last corner of the metropolis into
urban farmland.
And Rotterdam is already home to the world’s first floating dairy farm.
N-ARK says Dogen City could grow nearly 7,000 tonnes of food each year using cultivation
technology that relies on seawater as a source of nutrients for plants.
So – a tsunami-resistant, self-sufficient, climate change refuge in the sea … sounds
great!
But there is one big problem here … money.
Building and maintaining something like this would take a lot of it.
So, Yuki is shifting his focus from construction to profits.
Our rudimentary mission is to save climate refugees, of course.
So it's a big numbers game.
So that's why my mindset is totally shifting [from] the construction business and architectural
business to product business.
Because a construction business is not profitable.
Compared with Tesla and Apple and Microsoft, those kinds of businesses are very profitable
because they are a data business.
That’s why Dogen City is also being pitched as a “medical tourism” destination – complete
with robot-operated surgeries and AI health monitoring.
Yes, really …
If all that weren’t enough to draw in the profits, Dogen City’s healthcare system
will be run off the island’s Undersea Edge Data Center.
Now, data centres use a lot of energy.
In fact, they’re projected to account for 20 percent of the world’s electricity usage
by 2025.
A lot of that comes from simply cooling all the equipment needed to run the internet.
One way to bring the temperature – and costs – down in a building full of hot servers?
Put the whole thing underwater.
Now to be clear, there’s no actual plans in place to construct Dogen City yet.
And when we asked about the price tag, Yuki told us he can’t share the exact number
yet, but that it would be “huge.”
For now, he’s hoping to develop the concept more so that it can eventually serve as a
blueprint for other regions.
Africa, South America, the Middle East are going to generate climate refugees, a lot.
Our focus is to cope with climate refugees.
So that's why Dogen City should be launched near the [affected] regions.
That's my biggest dream.
While a lot of this may sound far-fetched, floating cities are actually now an emerging
industry in themselves.
For the first time, floating urban development was included in a report this year from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And there's a good reason why.
From the Maldives to New York, Miami, Shanghai and Bangkok – all of these cities along
the water are facing the threat of rising sea levels.
We’re running out of the sand we’d need for land reclamation.
Cities everywhere are in desperate need of more affordable housing.
And we’re simply running out of space.
Today’s cities will only be able to provide 40% of the space required to house the world's
population by 2050.
Maybe Dogen City won’t be built exactly as it’s laid out right now.
But Yuki’s vision is helping us imagine how we could build better, at a time when
drastic change is needed.
Climate change is going to force us to reinvent the wheel.
And science-fiction concepts like this one might one day become our reality.
We’re raising awareness of construction’s mental health crisis and supporting charities
in this space through our Get Construction Talking initiative.
There’s a video series on our channel and you can find support or donate over at getconstructiontalking.org
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