This Startup Wants To Build A Floating Village To Tackle Climate Change

As sea level rises, coastal settlements are at risk of being submerged. To deal with this threat, finding a way to fight climate change is the long term solution; however, in the near future, this startup thinks that we should live on the water surface instead of building walls to resist it.  Oceanix’s CEO Collins Chen said that our cities were not designed to cope with this kind of natural disaster, so they had come up with new climate-proof structures.

What the company imagines are concrete platforms floating on the sea surface. They are moored to the seabed and linked by walkways. To sustain life in this unique settlement, there are farms, gardens, renewable energy sources, and waste-recycling systems — different institutions design parts of the whole city. The platforms are under development by the Center for Ocean Engineering at MIT. Bjarke Ingels Group is in charge of the rest.

The new settlement will follow modular design so that when the population grows, it can expand accordingly. Six platforms can house 2,000 citizens, and when five other villages join in, they can accommodate up to 10,000 people.

Geoffrey Thün, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning's Associate Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean for Research and Creative Practice, said that this was precisely what we should think about. However, he also added that while the illustration looked nice, it seemed to lack certain features of urban life. Josh Sawislak of Center for Climate and Energy Solutions said that the model Oceanix came up with can give people an idea of what life in the future might look like.

This idea might sound exotic, but similar thoughts have been around for decades. Buckminster Fuller proposed the “Triton City” in 1967 that could accommodate 5,000 people. In 2017, Blue Frontiers also introduced a village that can house 300 people in Tahiti.

What is next for Oceanix is to develop a prototype, which only takes only a few months. Other details like the location and the size will be announced shortly.