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It is being partially funded by a project that has been using solar powered “boat schools” to deliver education to over 70,000 children in Bangladesh. WaterStudio has been working with UNESCO to build small floating schools for use in waterside slums. Many of the world’s slums sit beside large areas of water, making them vulnerable to flooding, but this also provides an opportunity. But Olthuis and his colleagues are also adapting this technology to provide food, sanitation shelter and energy to slums in some of the poorest areas of the world. It is an exciting vision, and one that only works because the city is floating. Koen Olthuis (pictured) explains the concept of adaptable floating cities “You could adjust the city for the season… to let the developments breathe.”
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“Imagine a city where you can plug and play floating houses and floating developments,” he explains. Initially they have focused on building single villas or offices, but Olthuis believes it may be possible to construct entire cities in this way. They are designing and building floating platforms that can act as the foundations to support buildings. “We have to start living with the water as a friend and not always as an enemy,” says Koen Olthuis, founder of the Dutch architect firm WaterStudio. These “aquapreneurs” say the solution to the housing shortages and social problems that exist in many of the world’s cramped, rapidly growing cities can be found by spreading out across the water. The authorities in Dubai have built entire luxury complexes on artificial islands while huge tracts of Holland have been reclaimed from the North Sea with an intricate system of levees and dykes that have been protecting urban areas from flooding for centuries.īut rather than trying to hold back the sea from the land, there are some who believe it is time to stop fighting the oceans and to work with them instead. In Singapore, for example, 25% of the city is built on reclaimed land, while 20% of Tokyo is built on artificial islands built out into the sea. It’s worth remembering that cities have long been encroaching upon the sea as they have searched for space to house their growing populations. Along with my fellow presenter Britt Wray, we spoke to designers who are proposing floating cities that could change with the seasons, tech entrepreneurs looking to create settlements on the open ocean and marine engineers who are putting these ideas to the test. Instead of building on land, they say, let’s make them float on the ocean.īut is this idea actually feasible? What might these cities look like in reality, and how would they work?Īs you can hear in the preview below, these were questions that we explored for a recent episode of the BBC Tomorrow’s World podcast. To cope with these changes, some engineers, researchers and technologists say we should reconsider how we build cities that perhaps it’s time to do something totally different. And they will have climate change to deal with too – about 90% of the world’s largest cities are situated on the waterfront and are vulnerable to rising sea levels. This is going to put huge strain on the world’s existing metropolises. That’s equivalent to the current population of San Diego or Kiev transplanting themselves into urban areas every seven days it’s almost a new Moscow or Rio de Janeiro every month.īy 2030, 60% of the world’s population will be living in cities. might introduce special design concepts for Mother Nature at it’s work.Every week, a whopping three million new people are moving to live in a city. I believe, the pics David Valley introduced would be more appropriate to define what floats and what does not and subjected to external forces due to the Geographic Locations of the U. I just based my observations on having never seen a building fly away in all the years I have been around in this World, but that has only been about 39 years, right.? I asked the Structural Engineer as to what the hell he was doing, and responded that it was designed for Ballast, I could not help but ask if he was afraid the Building was going to fly away.
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The last Hospital Building I built, had footings 15’ x 24’ x 4’ thick at all the corners of the steel columns of the Building. The building I am doing right now had footing under the steel columns 10’ x 10’ x 2 feet and bearing on ledge. Boy I would be happy to see floating foundations in this neck of the woods.