Floating Cities?

July 18, 2008

If you want to have some disturbing dreams tonight, check out this YouTube video. And I’m not just talking about the Eighties retro theme music by those mullet-coiffed lite-metal gods Night Ranger. 

No, what I’m obsessing about is the potential impact of coastal flooding from rising sea levels due to global warming. (By the way, for the handful of you climate-change skeptics out there who may get the urge to flood my email box with angry, hyper-detailed refutations, please instead refer to blogger Coby Beck’s excellent FAQ on the subject.) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is pretty worried about the effects of rising sea levels on U.S. coastal areas, as this online briefing paper details. But other nations ought to be even more worried. Take a look at this 2007 report with the ominous title, "Ranking Port Cities with High Exposure and Vulnerability to Climate Extremes: Exposure Estimates," by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  Here’s the upshot:

By the 2070s, total population exposed could grow more than threefold to around 150 million people due to the combined effects of climate change (sea-level rise and increased storminess), subsidence, population growth and urbanization. The asset exposure could grow even more dramatically, reaching US $35,000 billion by the 2070s; more than ten times current levels and rising to roughly 9% of projected global GDP in this period. On a global-scale, for both types of exposure, population growth, socio-economic growth and urbanization are the most important drivers of the overall increase in exposure. Climate change and subsidence significantly exacerbate this effect although the relative importance of these factors varies by location. Exposure rises most rapidly in developing countries, as development moves increasingly into areas of high and rising flood risk.

Indeed, the top two coastal metropolises on the endangered list are Calcutta and Mumbai in India, and of the remainder of the top 10, eight are also Asian cities. (Miami, Fla., in the U.S., which ranked ninth, was the only city from a developed nation on the list.)

So what are we to do? Obviously, as I’ve written in a previous blog, finding a way to dramatically slow the rate of climate change would be the best answer. But if we can’t accomplish that, we’d better find a way to protect the 40 percent of the world’s population who now live in coastal areas. We could try to relocate them to higher and drier places, or build a whole lot of seawalls like the one that protected the Indian city of Puducherry from 24-foot high tsunami waves in 2004.

Or we could get a little creative. Instead of fleeing from rising sea levels, why not  simply float above them? Belgian architect-visionary Vincent Callebaut recently unveiled his design for Lilypad: A Floating Ecopolis, a floating offshore community that from the air would look like, well, a species of giant water lily native to the Amazonian basin. (In trendy eco-circles, that’s what is known as biomimicry.) But this lily would be 250 times larger and have a skin of polyester fibers covered by titanium dioxide, which he says would act as a photocatalyst, absorbing pollution from the atmosphere. (From science blogger David Houle, here’s an explanation of how that works.)

It is a true amphibian half aquatic and half terrestrial city, able to accommodate 50,000 inhabitants and inviting the biodiversity to develop its fauna and flora around a central lagoon of soft water collecting and purifying the rain waters. This artificial lagoon is entirely immersed thus ballasting the city. It enables ... [life] in the heart of the subaquatic depths. The multifunctional programming is based on three marinas and three mountains dedicated respectively to the work, the shops and the entertainments. The whole set is covered by a stratum of planted housing in suspended gardens and crossed by a network of streets and alleyways with organic outline. The goal is to create a harmonious coexistence of the couple Human / Nature and to explore new modes of living [in] the sea by building with fluidity collective spaces in proximity, overwhelming spaces of social inclusion suitable to the meeting of all the inhabitants — denizen or foreign-born, recent or old, young or aged people.

Beyond that, each Lilypad city would, at least in theory, not only generate more energy than it would use from solar, wind, wave-energy and other sources, but also grow its own food, produce its own drinking water and totally recycle its wastes, giving it not only a zero carbon footprint but no environmental footprint whatsoever.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that someone has dreamed up the idea of floating cities (from WebUrbanist, here’s an assortment of other aquatic Xanadus, including Buckminster Fuller’s circa-1960s Triton City, which he claimed that President Johnson actually contemplated building in the Chesapeake Bay.) The idea obviously has enduring appeal. 

But would it work? Would Lilypads be economically feasible to build? (Callebaut noticeably doesn’t make any prediction about the cost.) How would such giant floating structures fare during hurricanes or earthquake-generated tsunamis? And perhaps most important, how many people would want to live in a self-contained aquatic community?

Offer your opinion below.

Photo: Courtesy of Vincent Callebaut Architectures 

Comments

[Angry Night Ranger Fan]

Hey, don't be talkin' trash about my boys--THEY ROCK!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Aquaman]

I think this is an absolutely brilliant idea.

[Angry Frank Stallone Fan]

If you're going to put in a plug for a song on the "Rocky III" soundtrack, it should be "Take You Back" by the great Frank Stallone. Night Ranger are a bunch of tools by comparison!!!

[Pedro]

Wouldn't it get a little claustrophobic, being stuck on an artificial island? How would you get a job? What would you do for fun?

[Mothra]

I was recently in Vietnam as part of the People to People Ambassadors program http://www.studentambassadors.org/. They have floating villages in Vietnam, on the border with Cambodia. Basically these are just collections of rickety boats that impoverished people live on. Sanitation is a very serious problem because they don't have any safe way to dispose of human waste. I realize these lily pod cities would be a lot more high-tech, but I'm still worried about how they would handle this issue.

[Angela]

How expensive would these floating cities be? Could developing nations even afford to build them?

[Sam]

That song was by Survivor, not Night Ranger. I stopped reading the article at that point. One inaccuracy leads to another...

[Kim Blair]

The idea is great in theory, but I think there would be too many problems to use in practice. Their would be the issue of where to bury the dead, population growth, how expensive it would be to expand an economy (since the city would be constructed there would have to be areas prepared for specific reasons, meaning that another area would have to be drastically altered for something else), there would be a multitude of invasive species because there would be no ecosystem already in place to fight them off, and a final issue would be preventing the city from drifting, an anchor would need to be constantly maintained.

[Patrick Kiger]

I must have been having a brain freeze--Thanks for pointing out the error. "Eye of the Tiger" was indeed a 1982 hit for Survivor, though it's been subsequently covered by Green Day and countless drunks in karaoke bars. (My favorite cover is the one in the French animated film "Persepolis," which you can see on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlIAmCfHzbg&feature=related)

Night Ranger, of course, was best known for the power ballad "Sister Christian."

[Even Angrier Survivor Fan]

What a dis--Night Ranger is so lame, they never could have come up with such a truly great song in a million years!!!!!

[I hate Survivor AND Night Ranger!]

I think these Lilypad cities are an INTERESTING idea. Some nation might build one or two of them to see how well the concept works and whether its cost effectiv.

PS if your going to mention rock bands, show some taste and go with Black Sabbath or AC/DC

[Glenn]

A modification of Paolo Soleri's Arcology.
Interesting, but science fiction rather than any kind of practical solution.
Use such brilliant imagination to develop a small portable solar cooker to replace cooking fires, or a simple means of purifying water, or sealed microhydroponic units for raising food in inhospitable environments.
Maybe a building design on high stilts for places like Bangladesh that flood.
Avoid megalomania; small is beautiful.

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[BMW Motorcycles]

Floating cities are becoming a home for the rich and famous.

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