What happened to floating cities?
Last week’s post, on learning curves, is an important subject, but one that I admit can be a bit dry. And so this week we are going as far away from dry as I can with floating cities. Cities at sea are a perennial idea, and there have in fact been some limited forms built and others under construction, but to a large extent, cities at sea are a solution in search of a problem. Today’s we’ll review some of floating city projects out there today, the rationale for such projects, and a couple of niches for which they may turn out to be useful.
Before we get to the specifics of floating cities, it is always important to review some basic concepts in urban economics. Agglomeration economies are the well-known phenomenon of economic benefit that results from lower transportation costs that cities provide. A well-functioning city facilities easy and fast transportation of people, of goods, and of information.
The importance of efficient transportation within cities is well-established, but the importance of efficient transportation between cities is not as well understood as it should be. For example, airports and highways are well-known to enhance a city’s wealth by fostering the agglomeration effect. Large cities are, and historically always have been, on the coast or at strategic waterways with easy coastal access. The reason is that long-distance trade, which historically has been dominated by shipping and still is, is one of the most important ingredients for city prosperity.
Also because of agglomeration economies, building new cities from scratch has historically been difficult, and the majority of new city concepts fall short of expectation, fail outright, or never get off the ground. The most “successful” planned cities are purpose-built capital cities. The scare quotes are to indicate that these cities are not necessarily good policy from an economic perspective, but that they succeed due to the sheer force of national investment.
Keep these principles in mind as we review some floating city concepts.
Floating urban developments are not a new idea. One might start with this brief overview, which highlights several floating cities that already exist. Zhujiajiao, a suburb of Shanghai dating to around AD 300, makes heavy use of floating development. The Uros Islands are floating islands built by indigenous Andean people on Lake Titicaca.
Freedom Ship is (was?) a proposal for a resident-owned cruise ship. It is envisioned to have 50,000 condominium units to house 80,000 people and most of the amenities that would be expected for living: schools, libraries, a hospital, banks, plenty of shopping, and light manufacturing. There is to be an airport for small aircraft at the top. The ship would travel around the world and dock at ports periodically. A much more modest resident-owned cruise ship, MS The World, exists with 165 residences. There are a few other resident-owned cruise ships proposed, such as Utopia, which was supposed to be completed in 2017 with 199 residences and 218 hotel rooms. We thus see that, though the idea of living on a cruise ship is doable, the market is very limited.
Visionary (i.e. never built) floating city concepts date back decades at least. One example is Kiyonori Kikutake’s Marine City concept from 1958. Kikutake was a Japanese architect and a founder of the Metabolism architectural movement. Metabolism, suited to rapidly growing and industrializing postwar Japan, was developed around biomimicry principles and emphasized impermanence in architecture. Marine City was temporarily actualized in 1975 as Aquapolis with the Okinawa Ocean Expo. Marine City was envisioned to house 50,000 people and would have been centered around six cylindrical towers.
Oceanix City, with lead architect Bjarke Ingels, is the most prominent project now. The project would be based on modular 4.5 acre floating platforms, which are envisioned to house 300 people apiece. The collection of platforms would house 10,000 people. Oceanix City has some institutional heft with UN-Habitat. The city is intended to be built off the cost of Busan, South Korea.
The Maldives Floating City, from the Dutch firm Waterstudio, is a proposal for 20,000 residents in 5000 homes. Unlike many other concepts reviewed here, the Maldives Floating City is under construction as of this year. Prices are estimated at $150,000 for a studio apartment and $250,000 for a single family home, numbers that should look reasonable to residents of wealthy countries, and purchase of a home enables one to gain Maldives residency. The Maldives is a low-lying island country in the Indian Ocean that faces existential threat from sea level rise, and so floating habitats are one obvious solution.
Luca Curci Architects and Tim Fu Design have collaborated on a 25 acre project entitled Floating City (if you, the reader, have any intention of getting into this space, please be more creative in your naming), which would house 50,000 people. Like some other projects, Floating City would combine high- and low-rise residences on multiple interconnected platforms. This project was announced last year, though the aesthetics are reminiscent of the Fruitiger Aero aesthetic that is characteristic of conceptual city design, especially floating cities, and already appears to be dated retrofuturism rather than actual futurism.
Next we have the Floating Lilypad City, by Vincent Callebaut Architects, a floating city that sort of looks like—do I have to explain everything?—and is meant to house 50,000 people. Here’s a write-up from 2011. Then there is the Green Float from the Japanese construction firm Shimizu and Ark Hotel. Paolo Soleri, who coined the term arcology and design Arcosanti, also proposed floating cities.
We can go underwater too, at least theoretically. Once such project is H2OME, which was covered in this 2014 article, but about which I have not been able to find recent information. Another is the Ocean Spiral from our friends again at Shimizu. The Ocean Spiral is envisioned to harvest aquatic resources, would house 5000 people, and would cost $26 billion. For those keeping score, that’s just over $5 million per resident, which would not be practical. There does exist an underwater hotel in Dubai (probably many underwater hotels in the sense of having more debt than value), for which rooms are around $500-700 per night right now by my calculations.
I could go on, but the last floating city project I want to discuss in detail is that of the Seasteading Institute. The Seasteading Institute was founded in 2008 by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman, and it catapulted into prominence after a $500,000 donation from Peter Thiel that year. Their ambitions are as much political as architectural: the Seasteading Institute hopes to develop politically autonomous cities outside of the jurisdiction of existing nations.
To date, the Seasteading Institute has not built anything tangible. They had formed an agreement to build a project off French Polynesia, but that agreement fell through in 2018. In 2019, a couple that attempted to seastead off the cost of Thailand was busted by the Thai Navy.
For those interested, the consultancy Seaphia has produced an extensive reading list on seasteading, including on the technical aspects of building cities, on governance, and on many other topics.
In 2014, the Seasteading Institute published a report on their Floating City project (again with the uncreative names!) and found that the capital cost of commercial and residential space would be $978 per square foot, which adjusted for inflation is around $1300/sqft now. Some recent price figures include $249/sqft in Chicago, $548/sqft in Washington, DC, $723/sqft in New York, $1000/sqft in San Francisco, $1612/sqft in Manhattan, and $1987/sqft in Hong Kong. This is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. For one thing, I am comparing a theoretical study of seasteading to actual prices in various cities, and for another thing, actual prices include things beyond the capital cost of construction. But this comparison shows that the cost of seasteading may be comparable to that of the most expensive cities in the world.
The first purpose of floating cities that I can see is as an alternative to land reclamation. Unlike floating cities, land reclamation has been used extensively. This paper estimates from satellite data that from 2000 to 2019, 2530 square kilometers of land have been reclaimed worldwide. Compare that to this (woefully incomplete) list on Wikipedia which shows around 25,000 square kilometers of reclamation historically. Land reclamation functions by pouring material, such as sand, concrete, or rock into shallow water to create new land.
Land reclamation is controversial from an environmental perspective, with impacts including destruction of sensitive coastal habitat, vulnerability to earthquakes and extreme weather, land subsidence, and water pollution. Rigorous analysis on this topic is limited, but worries about the impacts have led to serious restrictions on land reclamation, such as in China. For this reason, floating structures are considered as a more environmentally benign alternative, such as the Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan.
Unfortunately, floating platforms are probably much more expensive. This article details land reclamation at Manila Bay in the Philippines, which, adjusted for inflation, would cost around $90 per square foot. The postponed Lantau Tomorrow Vision is a land reclamation project in Hong Kong which would cost around $350 per square foot (not CPI-adjusted, but the figures appear fairly recent). Environmental objections and the high cost are the cited reasons for the postponement. The Durrat Al Bahrain came in at around $35/sqft (CPI-adjusted).
Furthermore, as I noted in a recent post on elevators, the fastest rate of urban growth outside of Africa is mostly behind us, and so the future demand for additional land does not look all that great. Furthermore, I noted the trend to more suburban and distributed work arrangements, as the importance of physical proximity in cities diminishes, which should further depress the demand for costly new land, whether from reclamation or floating platforms. Cities comprise at most 1-3% of world land area, and so in most of the world, there is no shortage of space for habitats on land. The one use case that I envision corresponds to the one major project that is under construction today: low-lying island nations that are losing land to sea level rise and with few alternatives.
I like the idea of floating cities, and this is something that I very much want to see happen. The most compelling rationale in my mind gets back to what the Seasteading Institute argues: political autonomy. New cities are vital for economic, political, and intellectual rejuvenation, and it is no secret that much of the world is falling into stagnation and decay on these fronts. But there is a difference between wanting to see something happen, and that something being a practical solution.
Quick Hits
A few weeks ago, I mentioned the new Abundance Institute. Since then, they have posted some articles on understanding current technology issues from a policy perspective.
I recently learned about the Dispilio Tablet, a wooden tablet estimated to date to around 5200 BC. The tablet may show some evidence of writing, which would upend the story of writing having been invented in Sumer around 3500 BC. But as far as I can tell, there is no conclusive evidence that this is actually writing.
Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) recently proposed a major defense bill, which would fund a wide range of defense priorities. Brian Riedl, himself hawkish on defense spending, is skeptical that the bill is realistic. As I wrote last year regarding the U.S. defense budget, American defense spending is near post-World War II lows, but any major new spending will require more thoughtful analysis of how it will fit with other budget priorities, including dealing with mounting deficits.
Caspian Report (Shirvan Neftchi) recently reported on the Lobito Corridor, a 1300 kilometer stretch of railway going through Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Lobito Corridor has significant financial backing from the EU and the U.S. and can be seen as a belated response to China’s Belt and Road investments in Africa. A purpose of foreign investment is to gain security over critical minerals.