This Amazing Floating City Can Survive Massive Hurricanes, Tsunamis, And Climate Change
At a UN Habitat roundtable this past week, the attendees glimpsed a truly spectacular marvel of engineering. They got a chance to see a concept design for a floating city unlike ever seen before, designed to deal with the fallout of climate change and other factors.
The design comes from Oceanix, a company that's looking to build floating housing structures, in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Ocean Engineering. Chief architect on the project Bjarke Ingels presented the designs for a floating city, one able to host 10,000 people
Designed as a solution for the housing shortage, climate change-related disasters, and rising sea levels, the floating city is able to withstand severe weather conditions, as well as allow residents to produce their own power and food, as well as recycle water and dispose of their waste.
Oceanix City is comprised of a number of hexagonal islands covered with mid-level buildings. All of it would be built using sustainable materials, with each hexagon able to hold about 300 residents. The landmasses as it were are hexagonal because the creators believed it was the most space-efficient shape. The idea is to fit 10,000 people together in each city because, according to Ingels, that's the ideal number for the community to achieve full autonomy.
The idea is to make the city modular, so it can even be disassembled and changed by future engineers in case it needs to be shifted to a safer location. While in place though, it would be anchored to the ocean floor to better withstand tsunamis and hurricanes.
Oceanix City will also be environmentally-friendly, which means no gasoline-powered cars. Instead, electric vehicles will be used for transport, perhaps even self-driving in the future. There won't even be garbage trucks, with trash instead transported by pneumatic tubes to a sorting station, where it can be recycled. They even talk about using drones for deliveries to these cities in the future.
"The technology exists for us to live on water, without killing marine ecosystems," said Marc Collins Chen, co-founder and CEO of Oceanix. "It is our goal to make sure sustainable floating cities are affordable and available to all coastal areas in need. They should not become a privilege of the rich."