Are floating cities our future?

Floating cities may seem like one thing straight from the pages of science fiction, however in fact, people have been residing, and farming, on floating habitats for hundreds of years.

„We’ve compiled a listing of 64 case research of floating indigenous communities world wide,“ mentioned Julia Watson, a lecturer in design at Harvard College and writer of LO-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism, a guide exploring design classes we will study from indigenous cultures. „What’s extra, these indigenous techniques have all the time been inherently sustainable, one thing our cities at the moment are usually not.“

Examples of floating communities can nonetheless be discovered in the present day, such because the cultivated reed islands of the Uru individuals on Lake Titicaca, on the border of Bolivia and Peru. Floating gardens are extra frequent nonetheless, notably in Bangladesh, where farmers sow seeds on „rafts“ made out of buoyant weeds, which rise and fall with flood waters following the annual monsoons.

Considerably paradoxically, it was the development of huge cities that led to the disappearance of many of those aquatic habitations and practices, which are actually being touted as the way forward for city residing.

„In Europe and China, the event of cities and the filling of wetlands and lakes sadly erased quite a lot of these applied sciences,“ mentioned Watson.

Again in Amsterdam, van Namen was rattling by one more drawback as we stood on the finish of Waterbuurt’s principal jetty, watching one of many residents information a paddleboard between two floating properties.

„The floating doubles [semi-detached houses] gave us an actual headache. Particularly at first, when was one was occupied and the opposite was not,“ he mentioned, a smile already flickering throughout his face. „Now, a traditional family has roughly a few tonnes of stuff being introduced in, so you’ll be able to think about there was quite a lot of these doubles that appeared a little bit… imbalanced.“ Van Namen held his arm at a 45-degree angle as an example his level, earlier than slapping his knee on the reminiscence.