In the last few years, we started seeing these proposals for floating cities all over the world.
They're posed as solutions to the sea level rise,
which will affect about 40% of the This is a high-tech, self-sustaining floating city, where every day is beach day!
Everything we eat or drink is recyclable.
In fact, just by living here, you are saving the planet.
But what if this place sucks?
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This is one of the very first comprehensive floating city concepts, Triton City, developed in the 60s.
by the architect Buckminster Fuller.
Each of these tetrahedral platforms anchor into the CPED and it's got all the technologies and the social amenities for it to be a completely self
-sustaining community.
And you could add apartments or offices by plugging in pre-fabricated modules into this each of these could house a maximum.
of 6500 people, and the idea was that you keep adding more of these platforms as a population group.
But just when things were getting exciting, the main investor passed away.
It did get picked up by the US government for a while, but as it happens with big public projects, it got buried in broccoli.
A big part of it was like it was just too ambitious and too futuristic and the entire project relied on technologies that were
not available at the time.
So it died.
The other part was that the community was designed to be one big megastructure,
so the structural framework alone was extremely expensive and just like we've seen with a lot of.
the Metabolist projects, the amount of money and planning required for the modules to plug in and plug out.
It was just not feasible.
Let's fast forward 60 years.
We have a new problem, climate change.
But we're still seeing the same problems with these new floating city projects,
like Dogen City,
which is a floating city for 40,000 people
using this habitation ring that's shaped like a ship to protect the inner bay from currents and tsunamis.
Within the bay you have buildings that can be arranged in a flexible way.
But the founder is actually considering switching gears from a floating city into medical tourism because it's just not profitable.
Pangios is this turtle-shaped moving city for 60,000 people, and it's estimated to cost $8 billion.
And honestly, it seems much more like a luxury cruise ship than a city.
Or the lilypad, which made a big splash in 2011, but it never left the conceptual stage.
Or the Oxagon, the megacity that's a part of neon, estimated at $1 trillion.
Well, this one might actually happen because it's funded by a single regime.
So the way that they're designed, it requires a massive initial investment from a billionaire.
or a-funded, autocratic government that can push these ideas through and crush anyone who opposes them.
But, what if it wasn't designed as a single megastructure, but an aggregate of smaller modules?
Yeah.
Let's look at the Maldives.
It's one of the high-risk areas, and the Maldives floating city proposal could actually be feasible.
Because it's made up of an aggregate of individual units rather than one giant megastructure.
And it's using technology that's already been tried and tested in the Netherlands with their smaller-scale floating homes.
In fact, the entire city is stated for completion by 2027.
The floating buildings are anchored to the sea beds,
creating artificial reefs that help to stimulate coral growth, and the whole city is designed around this idea of a boating community.
the main infrastructure and limiting land use to walking and biking.
And rather than creating this massive structural framework like the other project,
it uses a natural lagoon as a protective barrier, creating a more controlled environment.
And since the water inside a lagoon is warmer and shallower, it makes it perfect for this Moldavian lifestyle.
It's also used as docking stations for boats,
and you could also use it to build some of the infrastructure that you would need for a city of 20,000 people.
This entire region is filled with these legumes, just like this.
So you could see this multiplying, creating all of these beautiful Moldavian communities.
But there's something I just couldn't figure out.
What happens when the sea level continues to rise?
If we do not rehearse this trend, the Maldives will cease to exist.
by the end of this century.
Maldives is the lowest line region in the world,
and something like 80% of its land area is less than one meter above sea level.
So can these cities exist without the protection of the lagoons?
They're anchored to the seabats, so they're not gonna float away, but I'd imagine it would feel and function very differently without the surrounding landmass.
So is it possible?
they're not actually designed for the long term.
But that's the case, can we even call it a city?
Or maybe the real purpose is not a city at all.
Apparently, the cost of one of these homes is going to be around $250,000, which is actually a lot more than
what an average mother being can afford.
And one of the main features of their website is that you can get a residence permit if you buy a home there.
So it's possible that in the end they just become vacation homeless for foreigners.
It does kind of have that gated community vibe,
which is weird because their main slogan is turning melodivians from climate refugees and to climate innovators,
and the more we looked at the design and planning of these floating cities,
we started to wonder, are they really designed with the goal of housing climate refugees?
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Feed the hungry, enrich the poor, cure the sick, clean the...
These are the eight great moral imperatives from the C studying Institute,
which has played a really big role in popularizing this idea of floating cities.
The founders wrote a book that delves into all the aspects of establishing an independent self-sustaining community on the ocean.
They ended up receiving seed funding from Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, which helped kickstart the Institute.
But the movement is actually rooted in a much simpler idea.
The UN's convention on the law, which states that a country's exclusive economic zone extends 200 nautical miles from the shore.
and anything beyond that, it's not subject to the laws or regulations of any sovereign state.
Based on this, their floating societies would have innovative government structures that are privatized and competitive and chosen by the people.
But you look at their projects, it's a little hard for me to picture just how it could feed the whole world.
hungry or enrich the poor, most of their projects are very expensive and they're not comprehensive enough to be self-sustaining.
Some of their projects require to live in the community on your own boat to first build a sense of community before they serve construction.
There's no jobs or economy on these islands.
so you need to either have a job where you can work remotely or bow over and work in a nearby area.
The project that was closest to being realized was in the French Polynesian lagoons,
where they teamed up with the local government to set up these independent zones, but there was so much public backlash from the locals.
on how this tax-free unregulated zone could impact the local environment, so the project died.
So this idea of a floating city, it's more than just housing people, or living sustainably, or creating innovative governments.
It's rooted in this desire to be free from the regulations, and maybe the taxes.
on land.
Hey guys!
I'm here in Busan, South Korea.
And just behind me, that's where they're planning on building a prototype for the very first floating city for 10,000 people.
Or at least, that was the plan.
It was gonna be this big part of the Busan Expo in 2030,
but since filming this awesome intro in the October of 2023, South Korea lost a bit for the BIE Expo.
Too big surprise, Saudi Arabia.
But the South Korean president did say that the investments for the city would proceed regardless,
and it sounds like they're going to be bidding for the 2035 world expo, so it could still happen.
And if not here, they might find another place to build it, because this project has a lot of promise.
It's also backed by the UN,
and it's designed by I'd say one of the few architecture firms that can make really big crazy ideas happen.
So we'll see.
The floating city was developed by Oceanics and again it's based on these self-sustaining
modules that can scale from a small neighborhood to a city of 10,000, but also it can scale indefinitely.
It's supposed to be net zero and closed loop,
and unlike some of the other floating-city projects, there is thinking around the jobs and schools and things that make a society function.
The platforms are anchored to an artificial reef made out of bio-rock, which is a new type of extremely resilient concrete that's formed underwater.
And although it doesn't have any barriers, apparently it can withstand category 5 hurricanes and tsunamis.
The buildings are between 4 to 7 stories,
designed for lots of different uses,
and this hexagonal massing creates these intimate alleys,
which are lined with shops and eateries, and the whole thing is designed to be super walkable and cyclical.
In fact,
you can bike from one end to another within just 10 minutes,
and at the design level, it's really hitting a lot of the urban planning principles for a healthy city.
Before the prototypes that were designed for the Expo,
they were going to build just three of these modules, one for hospitality, one for research, and one for living.
And I should point out that there are some significant differences between the original oceanic city idea and the prototypes in terms of scale.
It's much denser, and while the prototypes are resilient and sustainable, they're not self-sustaining.
Probably because in order to create a self-sustaining community,
you need such a careful balance of not just the technology or the food production,
but the social, political, and economic structures all working together, functioning as one ecosystem.
These diets...
really simple,
but in reality it's much more complex, which is probably why we still don't have it online, despite all the ideas that's come and gone.
Also, it's not cheap.
According to Oceanics, each of the platforms is going to cost anywhere between $150 to $200 million.
But with all this new tech,
some of which haven't even been invented yet, and the cost of maintaining them, it's probably going to cost a lot more.
So you're going to need to secure some major funding from private investors.
Oh, but wait, they're supposed to house the climate refugees, the million.
millions and millions of them, most of which are from developing countries.
It's not exactly a profitable investment.
It seems like the whole floating city movement is tackling a lot of different problems at once.
There's the technology and selling this aquatic lifestyle and all the challenges of creating a self-sufficient city.
So maybe it's a combination of low-tech and high-tech solutions that take better advantage of the local climate.
Or maybe it just makes more sense for these to be connected to our cities on land
and design from the start to share resources with existing cities that could reduce a lot of the risk and cost.
And maybe they could even have a of symbiotic relationship.
Heuristic thinking tells us that we often use mental shortcuts for complex decisions.
And especially when we're faced with astronomical challenges like climate change, floating cities seem like these shiny, simple solutions.
But this chore cut in our thinking might lead us to overlook some of the intricate, long-term consequences of all of our choices.
So, what are you doing?
Is floating cities our new future?
Or are they just escape as fantasies?
By the way, we've collected all of our background research into a research booklet.
I'll leave the link in the description.
Let me know what you guys think in the comments.
And with that, I'll see you guys in the next video.
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