This is the design for the world's first modern
floating city. It claims to be resilient to
hurricanes and sea level rise, housing a
sustainable and self sufficient population.
A city that is the most resilient city you can
imagine, but at the same time the most enjoyable
city that you can imagine.
A prototype is slated to be built in Busan, South
Korea, under the watchful eye of the United Nations.
By 2025, nearly 6 billion people will live within
200 kilometers of coastline.
So UN-Habitat is researching innovative
ways to protect both lives and livelihoods from
sea level rise.
Last year, flooding cost the global economy more
than 82 billion.
What's happening now doesn't follow historical
trends.
So a new industry of floating infrastructure is
emerging, drawing inspiration from all over
the globe.
Every inch of the moon has been photographed,
cartographed. A fraction of the bottom of the ocean
has been discovered.
But this kind of innovation is not cheap,
with a price tag of $150 to $200 million per
platform. Retrofitting homes so they can float on
occasion might be a more financially attractive
option.
I call them amphibious houses because most of the
time they actually live on the land.
When the flood comes though, then they become
sea creatures.
So is floating a good climate mitigation
strategy to rising seas, or will our coastal
communities be washed away?
We are literally like what Tesla would have been in
2005. That's how early we are in this novel emerging
industry for floating infrastructure.
Oceanix City, designed by architecture firm Big, is
the first prototype for the modern floating city.
So the idea of floating cities is to see if you
can actually create a well functioning, lively
urban habitat that is powered by renewable
energy, that uses the available resources such
as wind and water, to sustain and feed and
nourish the population and to make it a desirable
and enjoyable way to live your life in the future.
The design is modular, meaning it can easily be
scaled up or scaled down.
The city of Busan's project will start with a
lodging platform, a living platform and a
research platform.
The floating city will consist of multiple
islands, so to say, but one island is 1.6
hectares, which is about four acres and fits around
3000 people.
It's going to be like an extension of the existing
port areas.
It's functioning in concert with the existing
city as an alternative to create like neighborhoods
that are floating.
Ingels said his team wants to create a way for the
UN-projected 10 billion people that will inhabit
the earth by 2050 to have a lower energy bill, but
the quality of life enjoyed by people in
Denmark.
For a long time we've been working on an idea, we
called hedonistic sustainability, that the
sustainable city is not only better for the
environment, it's also much more enjoyable for
the people that live in it.
We are working, UN-Habitat are working
together with the world-leading architects
and innovators to pilot the floating city
structure. And Busan itself presented a perfect
partner in these areas because of its
long-standing role as a port city and also a
strong industry and academia in the field of
shipping and other ocean-related matters.
And one area is the commitment we need, the
commitment from the leaders.
The physical location of Busan also made it a good
testing ground. The calm waters of the bay will
protect the floating islands from big waves and
currents.
Right now, our primary focus is to go in
sheltered harbor or river deltas, areas where we can
just organically grow from the urban fabric onto
the water.
But of course, it will be able to adapt to rising
sea level in ways traditional land cannot.
The three key features of our solutions is that we
are able to adapt to rising sea levels, so
either by having retractable sea cables or
having these dolphin moorings that can go up
and down with the sea level. As this is a giant
sized platform, each individual platform, you
have to understand how big it is.
It's like the size of a football field and the
stability that is inherent with the inertia
of the structure protects us against 100 year
events.
100 year events are a benchmark that experts use
to define how likely a natural disaster is to
occur. Here, Hofmann means that the design can
withstand events that are only likely to happen once
in 100 years.
Unfortunately, the summer of 2022 has seen multiple
thousand year events.
Life on the platforms is designed to be sustainable
and self sufficient, recycling water, growing
food and generating power via solar infrastructure.
Mostly a pescatarian, vegetarian diet because
dairy farming requires a lot of land.
So you might have to make a few lifestyle choices to
choose to live in a floating city.
The architects and designers also want to
ensure equity in Oceanix City.
We don't want to have that, Oh the floating city
for the have but not for the have-not.
This is the duty of UN-Habitat.
To make sure floating cities program meets the
needs and the criteria of inclusivity, resilience
and sustainability.
That is our duty.
Oceanix's is infrastructure can be
built on any body of water, even America's
Great Lakes.
As long as you're in the harbor, this is governed
by the local government.
So there's rivers, lakes, open ocean is different.
We're not planning to be in open international
waters.
If Oceanix City thinks of itself as the Tesla to
floating infrastructure, then there must be a
hybrid model. Retrofitting our current
cities might be a more affordable solution to the
680 million people living in low lying coastal zones
across the globe. In the U.S., 29% of the
population lives in coastal communities.
I used to live in Louisiana and while I was
there, Hurricane Katrina happened.
I saw that the flood was the big issue and I got
angrier and angrier and angrier about how the
people who were flooded out were being treated and
the solutions that were being forced down their
throats that they didn't want.
I came up with the idea of trying to see if it was
possible to make the houses float.
Drawing on inspiration from the Netherlands, Old
River Landing in Louisiana and other
places, the Buoyant Foundation Project helps
makes homes amphibious.
It's not a floating foundation, it's an
amphibious foundation.
Because most of the time they actually live on the
land like an ordinary house sitting on their
original foundation.
That strategy works well on houses without
basements like shotgun homes in Louisiana.
First, what we do is jack the house up a little bit
and then put a new steel frame underneath the house
in order to tie the house, the existing house,
below the floor level to the elements that we're
adding. And we're just adding two basic elements,
the frame plus two.
And those two things are something to create
buoyancy, to lift the house and hold it above
the water floating on the surface, and the other is
to prevent lateral movement, to prevent
displacement, so that the house can only go straight
up and down and it can't float away.
And then we have to tie all of that back to the
house, but we do all of this below the first floor
level so that the rest of the house is left
completely untouched.
The houses can stay afloat until the water recedes.
It's a much more affordable retrofit than
building a brand new city block.
Which approach is better?
That depends on whether you're trying to make
money or not. And you don't make money
retrofitting houses for poor people.
But retrofits in general are not a good way to make
money because each one is individual and has to be
custom designed.
That's very expensive.
The floating city, by contrast, can have
commercial purposes outside of escaping sea
level rise.
It's a typical OpCo/PropCo model where you have a
property owner and an operator, maybe a hotel
operator that operates the property that is
owned by some other entity.
And there will be a rent charged, either for an
apartment or for a room or for an office space or
for a store. And that will be in a financial
model recovering the investment cost over the
lifespan of the structure .
There is likely going to be an offset, you know,
both from a from a tax perspective as well as
from a carbon credit perspective, which will
subsidize this development.
And it is also not just for housing or for real
estate. It could even be for floating wind turbines
or floating solar panels or even water treatment
plans or data centers.
The cost per square foot for Oceanix is about %500
to $700, although it is an entirely different
approach than retrofitting a home to be
amphibious.
If people want to try to do it themselves, as they
do an old river landing, then I would imagine the
cost would be between $10 and $15 a square foot.
If they have a contractor do it, it would be
probably more like $20 or $30 a square foot.
But I should say we are not allowed to do it in
the United States as a newbuild.
Now we can do retrofits.
FEMA allows retrofits.
English says that making houses amphibious is
better than elevating them onto stilts.
It preserves the accessibility of the house
and helps maintain the front porch culture of the
community. But that might not be enough of a reason
for the U.S. sovernment to encourage it.
FEMA has a very good reason for wanting to
discourage the development of amphibious
housing in general.
Because a community, a municipality that has a
lot of wetlands, is always under pressure from
developers to develop the wetlands, and the
community would like that too if they could, because
then it becomes taxable property.
But the wetlands play a very, very important role
in the ecosystem.
So I absolutely do not promote moving into
wetlands. What I want to do is preserve culture
where it already exists.
Either way, both approaches acknowledge
something that coastal communities have known for
a while. You can't stop the rising sea.
The summer of 2022 was already dubbed the summer
of floods and the 2022 hurricane season is
already predicted to be above normal.
Retrofitting homes to avoid sea level rise might
allow people more time to decide what they want to
do to protect themselves from climate change.
As a temporary solution, it prevents someone's
house and possessions and all of their belongings
being traumatically wiped out all at once.
It gives people a lot more choice.
The community can decide to move as a unit if they
wish, or they can all decide to try to resettle
in the same place. But people have a choice as
opposed to being wiped out in a terribly
traumatic way that will haunt them for the rest of
their lives.
Floating cities could help residents adapt in place
and extend the life of a country.
Island nations where you will actually need to move
the urban population onto a floating city because
they are somehow destined to go underwater.
All of the parties recognize that climate
adaptation is an evolving but necessary industry.
There will also be a tremendous amount of
competition with other players entering the
market, which will be super healthy.
You're like in the cell phone era, remember when
you had the big heavy things you had to carry?
And now everybody in Africa has a cell phone
and they never needed the grid.
I think the same will go in our era for floating
infrastructure.
The hope is one of these ideas might be able to
mitigate some of the worst impacts of our new
climate reality.
We have to look into adaptation, innovation.
We really hope that it will be a successful
project and we would like to replicate it in other
parts of the world. I'm not scared of failure, but
I think we learn from that.
So let's do it.