25% of Singapore is built on reclaimed land from the ocean and 20% of Tokyo is built on artificial islands. Given that 90% of the world’s cities are built on the water’s front, expanding cities into the seas, rivers or lakes does make sense. These developments are incredibly expensive however and often destroy sea life. Dutch architect Koen Olthuis has therefore come up with a plan to overcome the need for space as well as making our cities more dynamic and flexible.
Olthuis’ idea is to build floating land that is tethered to the static land. This floating land can vary in function hugely from high density housing blocks to agricultural space or solar panel fields. These city blocks will be able to be moved around and rearranged allowing the city to adapt to changes in season or population, for example.
One of the applications of this is to improve the prosperity of slums. Floating social housing, sanitation facilities and schools can be towed in to areas where the slums meet the water for use by the occupants. This generates land cheaply that the residents would otherwise not have had. Floating buildings will also not be effected by flooding which is obviously important due to changing sea levels and the fact that slums are often located in areas that are heavily impacted by natural disaster. The name of this service of delivering essential supplies and land to slums in need is City Apps inspired by the molecularity of applications moving around a home screen.
If part of the city that has been towed in is no longer needed, this can easily be taken and used in a different city across the world creating a network of functional land that can be traded and moved across the globe. An example that Olthuis gives in his TED talk is that Olympic stadiums and villages could be built and moved every four years preventing the development being used for a few weeks and then being left unoccupied.
As well as city apps, Olthuis and his firm Waterstudio have designed floating housing in Europe as well as exclusive floating islands in Dubai and the Maldives showing how diverse and widespread his technology could be. He currently holds a contract for 42 private island villas in the Maldives each costing $12-14 million.
The floating foundations for the buildings and islands are built from a concrete caisson, a hollow box of concrete that is then filled with styrofoam to create an unsinkable platform. The foundations for the City Apps containers are filled with thousands of re purposed plastic bottles. The building materials for the structures themselves are then the same as any other building allowing for a large amount in diversity across the world from different architecture styles and building materials. Waste can be dealt with on the islands themselves through the use of bioreactors. This means that the islands can function completely independently without the need for sewage pipes as well as generate their own energy. The buildings are anchored to the ground through telescopic piles meaning that the islands move up and down with the water level without floating away.
Sources:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171128-the-future-of-floating-cities-and-the-realities
Jess Vinnels' Design Blog 