The Emergence of Floating by Laura Guimarães

The emergence of Floating Students: Diana Roussi, Laura Guimarães and Sridhar Subramani - MaCT 2021 Faculty: Mathilde Marengo

Abstract Waterfront urbanism is home to a large portion of the global population. From the beginning, the cities developed along the coast to meet their different needs. Coastal land pressure due to urbanization forces us to come up with new innovations to deal with this problem. Floating is one such solution that has been formulated to respond to this need for urban expansion. This paper focuses on the reflection about the topic through a series of interviews with experts and city planners from the floating industry. The report criticizes few emerging conversations about this new urban form in current and future scenarios. The need, challenges and impacts are investigated.

1. Do we need floating cities? The world is currently undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in history (UNFPA, 2016). Today, 55% of the world's population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050 (UN, 2020). Urbanization poses significant challenges to the world’s cities, as it becomes more difficult to manage them sustainably and control their spatial development. If we are to meet this target, not only curbing the loss of natural resources but also expanding our current land base, the sea suddenly becomes a variable option for expansion. The architecture community was fascinated with marine utopias between the 1950s and 70s. The technological optimism of this period led architects to consider whether we could build settlements in inhospitable places like the polar regions, the deserts, and the sea. The proposals were directed at solving the impending urban crises of overpopulation and pressure on land-based resources. Through time, due to climate crises, especially sea-level rise, certain countries look back for floating solutions as an alternative for land reclamation. We need new tools and approaches to addressing the challenges we will face in the coming decades. Sustainable Floating Cities give us an opportunity to reimagine how we build, live, work and play. Cities such as Amsterdam, Jakarta, and Mexico City have made way for houseboats and floating markets for some time. The relationship of these communities with the water they live on highlights how water is integral to cities. A thriving city has a symbiotic relationship with its water. And as our climate and water ecosystems are changing, the way our cities relate to water needs to change, too. So, today, we are looking at a different type of floating city — a different type of scale. Floating cities are a means of ensuring climate resilience, as buildings can rise along with the sea. Also, changes in the spatial demands and wishes of city dwellers, never happen in isolation, but in continuous interaction with other demands and wishes. The extent to which the urban environment is capable of meeting the changing requirements within these components and structures determines the flexibility of the city. The design of urban components and expansions that can hold their own for a longer time, without knowing all the things that are going to change. While cities are preparing to build dikes and focusing on how to prepare a flood protection strategy, one group of experts believe we have another option at hand to deal with all of these growing challenges. Rather than trying to physically resist the ocean overtaking urban areas, there is growing evidence that we must redefine our relationship with coastal waters. “We have to start living with the water as a friend and not always as an enemy,” says Koen Olthuis, founder, Waterstudio.NL (Cosgrave, E. 2017). Floating structures will help the coastal cities with expansion.

2. How is it different from the current cities? The floating emerges from the concept of creating a self-sufficient city. Designed by Delta Sync, the Blue21 proposes the idea of, not just a city, but an entire floating ecosystem. The team claims, “Blue 21 will have a positive impact on the planet by creating productive, rather than

consumptive communities”. It’s a step ahead of the concept of sustainable architecture, which seeks to exclusively minimize the use of resources. The project utilizes a ‘productive architecture’ where resource use is not only minimized but encourages the production of resources (Jain, 2020). Blue21 believes that its solutions will reduce the environmental footprint in comparison to other systems. Integration of sustainable features like hydroponic growing systems, biofuel production through floating algae, and protected fish and seafood habitats will result in “cyclical metabolism”, reinforcing the viability of a self-sufficient system. Furthermore, this could be “plugged in” at various existing city deltas, acting as the treatment plant for the local waste materials and CO2 emissions.

Blue Revolution (Source: Deltasync, 2012)

Bjarke Ingels, BIG architects tried to overcome those challenges while designing the “Oceanix City''. Although this is a conceptual idea, his works reflect the future visions for a floating city. Marc Collins Chen, the co-Founder, and CEO of OCEANIX, said “humans can live in floating cities in harmony with life below water” (Bjarke Ingels Group, 2019). Waste management, food production, water management, and an energy source, are all challenges that need to be addressed. With the current technology, we may be able to address those points. The impacts of urban areas on the environment may also be reduced. The following diagram shows the future vision of “Oceanix city” design by BIG and their ways of adapting to the problems.

Oceanix floating city (Source: BIG)

Maarten Flikkema, MARIN, Coordinator of Space@Sea, through the interview conducted, says the objective of the project was to develop a modular floating island approach to create new

space in coastal areas and at sea. Increasing population and shift of population to (coastal) cities increase the pressure on the land use of the coasts. Alternatives such as landfilling have a large environmental impact. With a floating solution, the environmental impact is much less while simultaneously much more flexible allowing for the gradual growth of the island.

Demonstrator design (Source:Space@Sea)

3. Do these solutions solve existing problems? As described before, urban structures need to become denser and more flexible to preserve the same level of growth. “I think the first steps in living on the ocean will be a coastal expansion of existing cities”, Rutger explained (Graaf R. d., 2017). “The most logical way is that we see urban densification in all port areas like we are seeing now in Rotterdam. Then the next step would be probably coastal expansions on the water. Then the step after that will be perhaps first floating cities in territorial waters and then floating city-nations” (Graaf R. d., 2017). Building on the water is the solution to the shortage of space in waterfront cities. Floating could start trading places, relocating functions that take up a lot of space but have low economic values onto the water. That makes it possible to rebuild highly profitable functions on the land freed up in this way. “Floating is a lot better than land reclamation because it protects the marine environment. It can be easily be removed or expanded, whereas land reclamation usually takes a bunch of sand and dumps it over a place, killing everything that lives there,” Mezza-Garcia, a complexity scientist who once worked with the Seasteading Institute, explained (Shepard, Floating Cities:

The Next Big Real Estate Boom, 2019). Large-scale land reclamation projects naturally had their effects on the environment, floating buildings have a minimal effect on the current, not much more at any rate than the boat docks that fill the edges of the seafront. Urban structures have a longer lifespan than the program of requirements on which they were based during the development. In the long term, the result will be large floating districts, following the pattern of the existing city in their expansion, that can relocate in due course with respect to each other or the mainland. At the same time, they will have given back part of previously developed land to nature. Technology is not a barrier to floating cities in international waters. Advances in technology enable us to create structures for habitation in deep-sea waters. These schemes have never really taken off because of political and commercial barriers.

4. What are the challenges to the emergence of floating? Regulation and governance pose a challenge to implementing these ideas in a real-case scenario, and from their perspective, it is still a blurry process to establish a regulatory framework for something so unknown. Currently, a floating island responds to the legal rights and obligations of the coastal states. It could fall under two isolated laws, of both urbanized and maritime areas, which do not intersect and fail to respond to the complexity of floating cities. And even if they are located far away from the shore, on international waters, these constructions would still not have a proper regulation to respond to: the term “floating cities/island” do not even exist in the international Law of the Sea Convention, LOSC (Flikkema et al, 2021). A clear representation of the legislation controversy would be the ownership of floating islands and floating objects. In the Netherlands, a country whose progress regarding the relation between land and water is already advanced, artificial islands are still considered as boats and therefore it is prohibited to own parts of a floating island or floating objects inside it (Flikkema et al, 2021). In order to create a city on water, multiple constructions and land uses would need to be placed in the same floating structure and therefore shared ownership is required for it to socio-economically function. On one hand, the obvious solution would be the development of specific legislation for floating islands by the governments. The ideal scenario would be a framework created through a collaboration with the private sector, in a sense that the companies experimenting with this technology could inform the policy, in the same way, that pilots’ first experiences in landing helicopters on Helipads were responsible for reshaping the new Helipad legislations (Czapiewska, 2021). On the other hand, the solution might be the creation of urban settlements that have their own legal system, and therefore would not have to respond to biased urban-focused regulations that do not make sense in this context. Many attempts have happened, such as the Principality of

Sealand, an anti-aircraft gun platform in the North Sea that was occupied by a pirate radio broadcaster, who tried to have it recognized as a nation-state, but failed to do so (Cosgrave, 2017).

Principality of Sealand (Source: Globalgaz.com)

Governments are still not willing to declare independence to their own waters, probably due to its value as a source of income for commercial purposes, trade taxes, amongst other reasons. Considering this lack of incentive, there is resistance from their side to understand this new concept and incorporate a new regulatory framework that embraces the needs of a different kind of urbanized zone. Governments could be perceived as the stakeholders most interested in a solution to the city problems their current proposals have failed to remedy, however they pose as the main barrier to the implementation of it. In opposition, other stakeholders such as research institutes and technologies providers, usually financed by investors and big companies, have been working hard on finding solutions to another complex challenge faced by the emergence of floating: the water itself. Artificial islands can resist extreme weather conditions in the water up to a certain point, especially on open seas. Luxury cruise ships and enormous water structures, such as oil and gas platforms, manage to remain stable during inhospitable conditions, but when facing hurricane-force winds, they are not stable enough for living conditions, in addition to the fact that these are extremely expensive. New research is being developed in order to achieve more stable, pleasant, and affordable cities, but no technology can endure such conditions yet (Cosgrave, 2017).

A ship washed ashore during the 2011 Japan tsunami (Source: Oglobo.globo.com)

One possible future solution could be a city that continuously moves. “When hurricanes and storms threaten, as is increasingly common on the fast-warming Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, modular floating cities could be partly disassembled and moved into safe harbor or to calmer waters, proponents say” (Cusick, 2020). However, the details of how this process would happen are still unclear, and under research as well. It is evident that the existing technologies cannot cope with the challenges our environment offers. This could be definite proof that floating cities are, indeed, not a realistic solution so far. In addition to that, in spite of their common agenda of making floating cities possible, investors and companies, who are the main stakeholders, refuse to share their acquired knowledge with their competitors, and governments who have had progress in implementing floating islands are not willing to help other countries to do the same. Oil industries could share their floating technology, and different sectors could learn from each other. This lack of integration between experts slows the process of development and postpones floating cities from finally becoming a reality.

5. What are the impacts of cities on water? From one side, we presented the impact of water conditions on floating cities. Nevertheless, from the other side, what would be the impacts of artificial islands on the water itself? It is well known that metals, paints and toxins from detergents have disastrous effects on marine

wildlife’s ability to survive, not to mention that aquatic fauna has specific requirements of light, temperature and pH level that could be affected by artificial elements. Even though the constructions are not permanently attached to the site, the contact with water causes interactions with the environment, which might not be positive. In the case of the Space at Sea project, the damage that the marine conditions and wildlife cause to their infrastructure is a challenge analyzed, whereas the other way around seems to not receive as much attention. They declare: “Two types of environmental impacts related to the lifetime and behavior of offshore islands are relevant to consider: the effect of corrosion on the reinforcement of concrete and the impact of fouling organisms. To minimize impacts on the structure, mitigating measures can be taken by setting up strategies for periodic inspection and maintenance of the floating structure and by covering cracks in the concrete. Organisms attached to concrete structures referred to as marine growth or fouling, may either protect or increase deterioration of their substrate. No clear conclusions can be drawn on whether fouling organisms should better be removed or not” (Flikkema et al, 2021). Although their Roadmap report recognizes the environmental impacts the project could cause, it does not address it as a primary concern. It is declared that alternative materials for the construction of floaters have not yet been considered, which was confirmed in the interviews conducted with team members of the project. Moreover, considering that more eco-friendly solutions do not necessarily mean more profit, it is disquieting that the search for materials and methods that reduce the influence of artificial elements on a natural location could end up playing a minor role. In a world that continues to deplete natural resources, the preservation of them should become a priority. Karina Czapiewska, co-founder of Blue 21 and DeltaSync, and one of the authors of the Report agree that the environmental emphasis needs to be made as soon as possible, even if with initial small interventions. One idea is to develop a technology that could monitor the environmental conditions: sensors that would keep a real-time track of water quality around each house, notifying the dweller in time to fix the problem before it harms marine life. It could be a first step in the pursuit of sharing data amongst different stakeholders, creating a global dataset that would allow a long-term analysis of the impact of floating cities in general (Czapiewska, 2021). In opposition to the harmful impact on water, it is important to state the possible good effect: as in the example of oil platforms, new wildlife can appear because of it, such as water plant species aggregations that are formed underneath the rigs, which serve as their shelter. The flora formed around these structures characterizes it as what is called an ‘artificial reef’. According to Koen Olthius, founder of Waterstudio.NL, the strategy should not be simply to neutralize the negative impacts on the water, but to enhance the ecosystem, causing a positive impact. The projects should thoroughly understand the local ecosystems and local ecologists should be consulted, in order to create a structure that could host marine life and improve the current environment (Olthius, 2021).

Rig converted into artificial reefs (Source: Nytimes.com)

On the other hand, we also have a potential economic impact of floating cities. Although they emerge as an appealing option for the growing housing demand, the choice of where to live nowadays remains as a luxury afforded by one social group and a distant reality for others, leading to an unequal distribution of social groups in the urban area. Considering the luxury floating complexes that have been advertised nowadays, it is worrisome that this new form of living could cause a greater disruption to the urban fabric and society. Notwithstanding projects of maritime extensions of coastal slums, it identifies the imbalance between the readiness to pay or lease the service by major local stakeholders of the location. Unlike the investigations on eco-friendly solutions, the search for economic ones seems to be a main goal of investors. New technologies, materials, and procedures are constantly being tried in order to reduce prices. Some low-cost interventions have happened in partnerships with entities like Unesco, proving their attempts. Waterstudio is a part of one, building small floating schools for waterside slums, delivering education to over 70,000 children in Bangladesh (Cosgrave, 2017). However, these proposals are still small compared to the enormous amount of investment for higher-class floating complexes. Floating constructions appear to still not be feasible for a whole society with diverse incomes, and government subsidies for financing a part of these researches might be crucial.

City App classroom designed by Waterstudio for Bangladesh (Source: Waterstudio.nl)

For instance, the solution of the Oceanix project for the high costs is aiming for a “mass manufacturing of the basic floating units, which can then be towed anywhere in the world, offering the same economies through manufacturing efficiency that so deeply cut the cost of everything from furniture to solar cells” (Revkin, 2019). Although large-scale production would indeed reduce the prices and therefore make this solution more affordable for every socio-economic context, the outcomes of standardization of floating constructions should be considered. This straightforward Fordism production and the promising idea that standard floating constructions could be moved from one city to the other according to their needs could solve one problem but create another one: the globalization of building typologies through a common floating architecture, which leads to a cultural loss of each urban landscape’s uniqueness. Existing cities have their own individual history, and their physical infrastructure is shaped by site, climate, culture and available materials and construction techniques. The built environment represents each place’s identity in the same way local dialects do. To create a standard replicable and movable form of shaping cities might be completely ignoring such an inherent part of that society. Although the general floating technology should be shared as a common base, the final product should be tailored to local conditions, which might not be occurring in current projects. Furthermore, the cultural loss could also be linked to the lack of involvement of each place’s community in the process of designing their own city. Most projects have top-down approaches, being developed by big offices in the Netherlands and other countries, who do not know about

the local identity and actual needs of the place they are doing the project for. It is imperative to have the local community and local professionals involved in the process, in order to preserve their own characteristics and respond to their demands. Another feature that these constructions generally lack is the presence of nature in all of its forms. Water is not the only natural element the human being needs for surviving, and that should not be taken for granted. Exposure to nature reduces blood pressure, heart rate and muscle tension, and therefore reduces the psychological effects behind it, such as anger, stress and fear. Projects that do not create green infrastructures for their new population would be responsible for creating less healthy societies. People’s psychological comfort could even be affected by other features of a floating city, such as sea motion, isolation and apparent instability. "People psychologically get nervous at the term 'floating city'. I used this term to my wife, and her immediate response was not technological but rather visceral, she didn't like the idea of something that could drift away", said Richard Wiese, president of The Explorers Club (Wright, 2019). People’s physical wellbeing could indirectly be affected as well, considering the dangerous conditions of living on the water, and perhaps people’s willingness to take risks. In the same way an adventurous person voluntarily enters hurricanes, causing accidents and death, people might need to be educated about the dangers of jumping outside their window into a sea of extreme conditions. New laws will need to be set, such as mandatory swimming lessons for residents and limitations to access the water. It would represent a whole new form of living, unrelated to how we have lived our whole lives on land. Lastly, aside from the impacts of floating cities on a floating context, the main question is which would be the impacts of the creation of floating cities on the existing ones on land? We are moving our society from depleting the earth’s natural resources in order to start depleting the aquatic ones. Consequently, we leave behind scorched earth that could still be useful for our society. Much has been said about the process of migrating to the sea, but not much has been thought related to what is done with what is left. If we are urbanizing somewhere else, could we un-urbanize the previous space we occupied? Could we let nature take a part back, or would we be jumping from one site to the other until there is no natural space left? The positive impacts of such actions on the World’s environmental conditions could be significant. Another reflection is that the existing built environment could be included in a circular process of creating new cities, through the exploitation of their materials and debris. Circular Economy poses a challenge between the existing city and the new one and should be taken into consideration.

6. Conclusions Although floating cities might seem obsolete, depicting an apparent lack of reason for such high investments and efforts as it is only associated with rising sea levels, it poses a solution to much more widespread and complex problems, such as crowded cities, lack of space for urban expansions and unaffordable housing on the land. However, the emergence of floating is still not on the horizon, as there are essential challenges left to overcome. Firstly, regulatory frameworks need to be adjusted, in order to meet the demands of these new cities instead of imposing restrictions on them. This challenge might take decades, as it involves all levels of governance, but the political and ownership issues are the main answer to why a floating city has not been built yet. And it is imperative that the new legislation also ensures that all socioeconomic classes are included in such projects, as the private companies might not be willing to do so. On the other hand, while technology advances to respond to all conditions and needs, the sharing of it should also increase and be incentivized. In the pursuit of floating cities, different sectors have to collaborate to speed up the process and make it feasible. It might take time and combined effort in order to make this technology advanced and affordable enough to support an inclusive community. Technology is also essential in order to measure and mitigate the impacts of new forms of living on the water but also on land. New developments need to be made in real-time monitoring of the quality of water and marine life, as well as in how to utilize the urban areas and constructions that will be left behind on land, integrating them in the process of shaping these new cities, in a circular manner. Moreover, the effects on social, cultural and psychological sides should also be tracked, shaping a new form of living that doesn’t completely override the existing one. It is evident that floating cities represent an outstanding solution. However, it might be an outstanding solution for the future, as the current conditions do not allow it to. Due to the ongoing barriers of governance, technology limitations, extreme weather conditions and lack of integration between stakeholders, floating is still not feasible. In fact, it might not be needed for the next 50 or 100 years, when the answers to these challenges could be found. Maybe the question now should be: what could we do to mitigate the existing problems in this intermediate period, before floating is able to provide a definite solution?

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