Floating Cities A Good Plan For The Future Or Magical Thinking

Oceanix, Bjarke Ingels and an interesting group of magical thinkers have a round table at the UN.

Floating cities are not a new idea, and we have shown many of them on TreeHugger, mostly proposed by libertarians hoping to build a new society without taxes or regulations. Others see floating cities as a way of adapting to climate change, and recently the United Nations held the first Round Table on Sustainable Floating Cities.

© Oceanix/ Bjarke Ingels GroupThe meeting was convened by Marc Collins Chen, CEO of Oceanix, who has put together a remarkable team to study floating cities. Bjarke Ingels Group are the architects, Olafur Eliasson is on board, Transsolar is doing their mechanical thing, The MIT Center for Ocean Engineering and The Center for Zero Waste Design are involved. Dickson Despommier of vertical farm fame is there to serve dinner. These are mostly serious people.

Bjarke describes the architecture:

UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told the Round Table that “floating cities can be part of our new arsenal of tools.”

Writing for National Geographic, Andy Revkin notes that on “first hearing, the concept of floating cities has the feel of magical thinking.” But he seems to have become convinced during the Round Table:

There are economic advantages too, since land is expensive and, as the joke used to go, they are not making any more of it.

Bjarke says it will all be green and sustainable: “All communities regardless of size will prioritize locally sourced materials for building construction, including fast-growing bamboo that has six times the tensile strength of steel, a negative carbon footprint, and can be grown on the neighborhoods themselves.”

A lot of thought has gone into this proposal, and it is definitely more Bucky Fuller than Peter Thiel, with systems thought out from food to waste to power. There are hydroponics and aeroponics and aquaponics, and according to Clare Miflin of the Center for Zero Waste Design, it would, of course, be zero waste. She tells Katherine Schwab of Fast Company how this would work:

Everything is on the table, even private ownership. Instead, it would be a true sharing economy where “everything will be rented rather than owned.”

It is all a grand vision, and one cannot complain about the United Nations looking at all options, even if they are a little out there in a Bjarke sort of way.

But as the climate heats up, storms at sea may well be more common and more violent. Some might think that heading for the hills is a better idea than setting sail. Others might also suggest that we should be doing more right now to stop climate change and less imagining how we will adapt to it. But there is nothing wrong with a little magical thinking; it’s kind of fun.