Tag Archives: floating city

Maldives is building a coral-shaped floating city to overcome rising sea levels

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While solving for global warming and rising sea levels isn’t easy (especially if you’re the tiny island nation of Maldives), a clever solution is to just build a new city that floats. Meet the Maldives Floating City, a pretty ambitious project by the South Asian country that’s projected to be home to 20,000 residents by the end of 2027.

This state-of-the-art buoyant borough assumes the shape of a brain coral as a hat tip to its marine environment. “The idea of having brain coral as the leading concept is that the goal of living with nature and learning to improve and respect natural coral is at the heart of the development”, say the Maldives officials. The floating city is projected to contain 5,000 interconnected units through walkways and canals within a 200-hectare lagoon located off the capital city of Malé. A ring of islands will surround the periphery of the city, protecting it from waves.

Designer: Waterstudio.nl (A development of Dutch Docklands in joint-venture with the Government of Maldives)

The Maldives Floating City is the world’s first of its kind with thousands of houses and complete governmental support. Houses within this unique floating framework are open not just to Maldivians, but also to the international community who can invest in residential permits and own houses within the city. Uniquely enough, every home will be a waterfront home, given the city’s coral-inspired layout, allowing all residents to be just mere feet away from the pristine waters of the Indian Ocean. The city, with its 5,000 houses will also have hotels, shops, restaurants, and will be connected to Malé via water-based transport (the floating city is just 10 minutes away). No cars will be allowed within the floating city – residents are invited to commute via bicycles and electric noise-free buggies/scooters, and boats dotted along the city will allow citizens/visitors to easily reach from point A to B.

The city, which is projected to be ready within the decade, will have all facilities needed to be self-sustainable. Pre-fab housing units will be constructed at a nearby shipyard before being carried on-site. The city will rely on green/blue energy and a smart grid will help distribute power between units, ensuring that surplus energy generated by one house can be used by another. Other challenges that the developers and the government are considering are waste management, environmental impact, and mooring/stability given the city’s unique floating nature.

The Maldives Floating City is a one-of-a-kind establishment that hopes to set a benchmark for the future by creating a novel solution that helps overcome environmental instability while also having a minimal impact on the ecosystem around and below it.

The post Maldives is building a coral-shaped floating city to overcome rising sea levels first appeared on Yanko Design.

The world’s first floating city designed by BIG & backed by UN can withstand Category 5 hurricans!

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OCEANIX, an ambitious floating architecture concept envisioned to be built off the South Korean coast by BIG – Bjarke Ingel‘s design group. It was first revealed in 2019 and now has received the green light from UN-Habitat and the Metropolitan City of Busan to begin construction. The futuristic sustainable city can also withstand category 5 hurricanes!

Given the rising sea levels, fast growing coastal cities have resorted to expanding into the ocean by creating new land using sand which causes harm to the existing marine ecosystem only to be partially submerged a few years later. BIG came up with a better solution with OCEANIX as it introduces a modular design system with net-zero energy that allows people to live sustainably and safely. The cities are made up of 2-hectare, 300-resident neighborhoods which then connect to form 1,650-person villages including systems like underwater farming and greenhouses to make it as self-sufficient as possible!

“Sustainable floating cities are a part of the arsenal of climate adaptation strategies available to us. Instead of fighting with water, let us learn to live in harmony with it. We look forward to developing climate adaptation and nature-based solutions through the floating city concept, and Busan is the ideal choice to deploy the prototype,” said Maimunah Mohd Sharif, UN-Habitat Executive Director.

Inhabitants can easily walk around or take a boat to navigate between the floating communities which will include residences as well as a public square, art installations, marketplaces, sports clubs, schools, and more. It is also designed to be able to withstand natural disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes. All structures will be under seven stories in height to create a low center of gravity, and platforms are built of locally sourced materials like fast-growing bamboo that has six times the tensile strength of steel, a negative carbon footprint, and can be grown in the neighborhoods themselves!

“9 out of 10 of the world’s largest cities will be exposed to rising seas by 2050. The sea is our fate – It may also be our future,” said BIG founder Bjarke Ingels who has time an again pushed the boundaries of architecture and design by bringing impossible concepts to life. OCEANIX is trailblazing a new industry with blue technologies that meet humanity’s shelter, energy, water and food needs without killing marine ecosystems. It is made to grow, adapt and tranform organically over time with humans and the climate while balancing the needs of both!

Designer: BIG

The post The world’s first floating city designed by BIG & backed by UN can withstand Category 5 hurricans! first appeared on Yanko Design.

The world’s first floating island city can help coastal communities survive climate change

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Coastal communities are one of the first to be impacted by the rising sea levels due to the ongoing climate crisis. A lot of architects are coming up with innovative solutions to protect the coastal communities and we might just see the first fully floating island city in the Maldives! The government officials of the island nation officially announced plans to build this ambitious yet sustainable urban project which could be a blueprint (or an experiment!) that could be replicated on a global scale.

According to NASA, Maldives is arguable the lowest-lying country with an average elevation of just 3.3 feet above sea level which means the island republic will soon have to rely on sustainable housing alternatives. The archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean has a total of 1190 islands and 1000 would be submerged at the current rate of sea-level rise. This project is called Maldives Floating City (MFC) and will be constructed just minutes away from Male which is the capital. The team comes from a Netherlands-based studio Dutch Docklands which happens to be a world-renowned leader in floating infrastructure. MFC’s shape will be series of honeycomb-like hexagonal maze rows inspired by the Brain

The system of floating rows is anchored to a ring of islands that form the base and also the stabilizing breaker wall for all the structures—the primary reason for placing MFC in an ideally suited small lagoon. More from the press release:

While MFC floats up top, island barriers around the lagoon will serve as breakers down below. This ingenious configuration lessens the impact of lagoon waves while stabilizing the structures and complexes on the surface.
The whole city is about three-quarters of a square mile, or 200 hectares, with low-slung residential buildings and commercial amenities built on separate structures. The designers say the MFC complex hearkens back to the history of seafaring culture and local architecture in the Maldives.

Thousands of homes will float on the hexagonal coral clusters, starting at $250,000 for about 1,000 square feet, plus a roof terrace. While that price point isn’t laughably low, it’s perfectly reasonable for the context of an island vacation wonderland.

It’s easy to imagine these units filling up as people’s winter homes, but hopefully, there will be some locals in the mix as well. In the press release touting MFC, the designers say their goal is to have local traditional fishing families live in the floating city. It’s not clear if the $250,000 price point is realistic for these families, or if there will be subsidized housing.

If the idea of a modular floating city makes you think of, say, Waterworld, you’re not alone. There are also traditional floating cities scattered around the world, and the Maldiveans are careful to say theirs is the first to combine the housing and other structures in this particular way, surrounded by a barrier lagoon and with an array of amenities.

The floating city will break, uh, sea in 2022. Eventually, the complex will include those thousands of homes, plenty of commercial space for stores and necessaries, and a hospital and school for locals to use. While the complex is anchored to the barrier islands, this will likely be a modular connection that can be extended as the sea level rises—perhaps even submerging the barrier islands in the future.

If MFC succeeds, the officials are likely right that it will be influential around the world. While inland territories have a lot more time to avoid the most literal effects of the rising sea level, the Maldives’ peer island nations like Nauru or Micronesia will have to act quickly to preserve their territories and cultures.

Designer: Dutch Docklands