Koen Olthuis (1971) "the Floating Dutchman" studied Architecture and Industrial Design at the Delft University of Technology.
In 2007 he was chosen as nr. 122 on the Time Magazine list of most influential people in the world due to the worldwide interest in water developments.
The French magazine Terra Eco chooses him as one of the 100 green persons that will change the world in 2011.
In his vision today's designers are an essential part of the climate change generation and should start to enhance their perspective on urban components to become dynamic instead of static.
His solution called City Apps, are floating urban components that add a certain function to the existing static grid of a city.
Using existing urban water as building ground offers space for new density, offering worldwide opportunities for cities to respond flexibly to climate change and urbanization.
The first city, in which this vision is being developed, is The Westland, near The Hague in Holland. This project incorporates both floating social housing, floating islands, and floating apartment buildings. In 2010, the government of the Maldives agreed to develop a floating city, floating islands, floating golf courses, floating hotels and a floating conference centre in a joint venture, as a solution to the problems caused by rising sea levels and also to encourage social and economic advancement.
A sustainable future lies beyond the waterfront!
From The Guardian by Jessa Gamble
From schools at sea to a city that perpetually sails the oceans, is
climate change creating a bold new era of floating urban design?
Until the late 1980s, nestled behind the Yan Ma Tei breakwater in
Hong Kong's Causeway Bay, you could find tens of thousands of
boat-dwellers who formed a bustling, floating district.
The residents
were members of the Tanka community, and their ancestors were fishermen
who retreated from warfare on land to live permanently in their vessels.
Until the mid-20th century, these traditional outcasts were forbidden
even to step ashore.
The typhoon shelter was famous for its
restaurants' cuisine – including Under Bridge Spicy Crab – and it was a
nightlife hub, alive with mahjong games and hired singers.
Shops on
sampan (flat boats) catered to the floating district's needs.
It
may seem like science fiction, but as rising sea levels threaten
low-lying nations around the world, neighbourhoods like this may become
more common.
Whereas some coastal
cities
will double down on sea defences, others are beginning to explore a
solution that welcomes approaching tides.
What if our cities themselves
were to take to the seas?
Grocery store in Makoko, Lagos, Nigeria. Photograph: Devesh Uba
A floating village at London's Royal Docks has the official nod, and
Rotterdam has a Rijnhaven waterfront development experiment well under
way.
Eventually, whole neighbourhoods of water-threatened land could be
given over to the seas.
After decades of speculation and small-scale
applications, the floating solution is finally enjoying political
momentum – and serious investment.
The immediate and most numerous victims of climate change are sure to be in the developing world. In Lagos,
the sprawling slum of Makoko regularly suffers floods, and its stilted houses are shored up with each new inundation.
It's under threat of razing by authorities.
The Nigerian-born architect
Kunlé Adeyemi
proposes a series of A-frame floating houses to replace the existing
slum.
As proof of concept, his team constructed a floating school for
the community.
Still, many buildings do not make a city: infrastructure
remains a problem here.
One solution would be to use docking stations
with centralised services, rather like hooking up a caravan to power,
water and drainage lines at a campground.
You could extend an
existing city like London into the water quite far before ever being
seriously challenged by infrastructure issues.
But some ideas for
floating life move well beyond the urban extension model.
In the 1960s,
futurist Buckminster Fuller designed a floating city, Triton, for
100,000 residents, and even had his plans approved by the US Navy. UK
designer Phil Pauley has updated Fuller's geodesic concept: a ring of
spherical modules, his
SubBiosphere2 would float in fair weather, then submerge whenever the seas became rough.
Florida
architect Jacque Fresco, meanwhile, foresees a time when humans must
colonise the sea, to escape land made uninhabitable by overpopulation.
He has spent his career designing cities of the future, and himself
lives in a dome-shaped prototype. Fresco's floating city designs –
generally gear-shaped – prescribe the use of "memory metals". Compressed
into small cubes, they are easily towed out to sea, where they can be
snapped back to the size of buildings.
Sub-Biosphere 2 is a closed, self-sustaining underwater habitat designed by Phil Pauley
Mobility among the waves lends floating communities a degree of political independence.
The Seasteading Institute,
founded by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton), proposes a series of
floating villages, and claims to be in active negotiations with
potential host nations that would give the villages political autonomy.
Billed as a startup incubator for political systems, the aquatic
communities would serve as experiments in governance – and represent a
rejection of what Seasteaders see as big government intrusion.
The Seasteading Institute proposes a series of floating villages – and
claims to be in active negotiations with potential host nations.
Photograph: Seasteading Institute
In
an implementation plan for these Seasteading cities
[pdf], the Dutch engineering firm DeltaSync has proposed a modular
building strategy.
It too would have movable parts, for gradual growth
and financing, and a dynamic geography: if new friends decide to be
neighbours, they could simply tow their houses together.
At first
the villages would aggregate in protected waters.
Later, they would cut
ties with land altogether.
That's when all the trappings of civic life
would be either abandoned or reproduced in microcosm on the rafted
village.
Many of the technical components of DeltaSync's plan are
well-trodden territory for engineers.
Platforms and mooring systems are
not so different from those required for large boats or oil rigs.
Along
with reclaimed land, floating additions to city infrastructure are
becoming a regular part of municipal planning.
Airports are particularly
prime for floating: they essentially require a large platform that is
close to the destination city without being intrusive.
As for
infrastructure solutions, they range from the well-tested to the
speculative.
The abundant wind available at sea could power turbines.
Ocean thermal energy conversion could harness the temperature difference
between the surface and the depths – a process that also provides fresh
water as a byproduct.
DeltaSync even envisions residents cultivating
aquaculture in lieu of gardens, manufacturing their food requirements
from nutrients found in upwellings at the edge of continental shelves.
A
so-called "Blue Revolution" in aquaculture would be required for the
oceans
to provide this level of sustenance.
(Even without cities at sea,
though, ocean harvesting may be our best hope, as land-based agriculture
faces salinated soils and a critical phosphorus shortage.)
Ooffshore eco-platforms : The Stewards of the Seas
For
untethered floating societies, it's not just physical infrastructure
that needs to be planned out – it's the social infrastructure, too.
Floating citizens still need jobs to do; they need to do their shopping
and educate their children.
When the worst happens, they need access to
medical care.
A full-service floating city already exists for residents of
The World,
a 644-foot yacht that continuously circles the planet.
Launched in
2002, the ship contains 165 condominium spaces that sell for millions.
And it may soon be upstaged.
Freedom Ship
would essentially be a mile-long flat-bottomed barge with a high-rise
building on top.
Weighing 3 million tonnes and with a top speed of 10
knots, the floating city would circle the globe every three years,
stopping 12 miles offshore at each port for a week at a time.
High-speed
ferries would connect the 40,000 residents and 20,000 crew to the
mainland and bring back visitors.
"We won't just be visiting those
countries," says Freedom Ship director and executive vice president
Roger Gooch.
"We anticipate those countries visiting us."
Freedom
Ship's size – and its $11bn price tag – gives it a credibility problem.
But Gooch has "two or three irons in the fire in Asia" to secure his
team's capital for the three-year construction process.
It will be too
big for any existing shipyard to build, so the ship must be constructed
in pieces and – a familiar idea by now – towed out to be assembled at
sea.
Credibility problem? … the perpetually sailing Freedom Ship would
have enough room for 50,000 permanent residents.
Photograph: Roger
Gooch-FSI
The thriving Hong Kong sampan-dwelling community of Causeway Bay was
not to last.
There was no garbage or sewerage treatment system, and fire
constantly threatened the wooden structures.
Breakwaters that made up
the typhoon shelter also limited water circulation,
leaving pollution to accumulate in the harbour.
The wastewater from the moored vessels combined with leaked sewer
discharge and storm drain runoff to create unsanitary living conditions.
When Tanka families were offered public
housing
on land in the 1980s, most chose this option.
Now only a few
traditional sampans are left, used as ferries to take tourists to their
luxury yachts. Despite sewerage improvement schemes, E Coli levels
remain high, and tests show alarmingly high levels of tributyltin, a
toxic biocide, in the water.
If floating communities are the way of the
future, we will have to learn this lesson well: we can no longer simply
outrun our own refuse.
Untethering from land seems a big moment
for a floating city, akin to blasting off to colonise another planet.
To
reject our ancestral habitat to this degree seems like hubris.
How
could a group of people survive alone among the waves?
But it is a
fallacy to imagine we're self-sustaining even in our land-based
communities.
Many of our essential goods arrive by tanker anyway – a
sea-based location would be all the more convenient.
Far from
impractical utopias, floating cities could be every bit as integrated
into global society as the ones we already have on land.
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