Why We Should Build Floating Towns and Cities

You forgot about freezing. Still water freezes easier than moving water and can crush boats not designed to handle these conditions. But this is nothing more than an engineering concern that should not be forgotten, not an insurmountable hurdle. Your idea is not at all a new idea. Many places, even Scandinavia have houseboats.

By constructing floating towns and cities it will surely affect marine living organisms which led to decrease in their number,and transmission of electricity and other basic things from land to water is quiet difficult and suppose natural calamities like tsunami which led to destruction and which lose many lives ?

WHY not

http://fidodido78.blogspot.com/2009/09/living-on-water-why-not.html

I would swap my house with this any day. The price is a bit steep but......

no trees

All it takes in money.

And about 20years of development.

Yea it will be nice, permanent holidays - like being retired.

Water services will be expensive. Where would you find a natural gradient to get rid of the sewage? It may be possible to dump the sewage in the pond - until you are floating on it .

The other problem that in low cost housing the area will turn into a wquatter area (squatter camp on water).

Kastrupsky would love this.

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/65787#comment711864

Drive across Hwy 10 and 40...tell me theres a shortage of land to build on.

Buckminster Fuller said that a city could be made to float if it was enclosed in a hemisphere (dome) using conventional materials.The dome would have to exceed 5 miles diameter.The weight of the air inside far exceeds the weight of building materials, and slight temperature differential would make it float.Natural ventilation would keep the city cool, and expel pollution due to the huge updraft caused by the hemi shape.This would make a city earthquake proof, as well a energy efficient.If covered with solar cells, it could be energy independent.

That won't work in the USA and I would say most European nations. There would be far too much opposition from environmentalists. Also few nations have coastal or swampy riverine areas that lend themselves to this type of development and still be reasonably safe from tropical cyclones. The best locations appear to straddle the equator. Brasil, Congo and South Asia.

Here's another thought. It could be that with global warming substantially less land will have adquate water available for crops. It may turn out that the very water areas that seem suitable for towns and cities will be more profitably used for aquaculture. At the same time land too dry to farm may be quite suitable for human habitation provided suitable protection from high temperatures can be built into living spaces. Enter into this picture a new breed of underground houses.

Ed Weldon

ga Marcot...

It is Nature, or Entropy. We create what we will... but nature has different ideas. Nothing lasts forever.

I'd also like to refer to my previous discussion on 'floating offshore energy island' stuff. (I too must admit to being fascinated with the idea, and finding a great deal of value in these sorts of schemes)

Adventurous people are always attracted by the unknown to the point of idealizing it.

This has been the loss of many but also the gain of others.

You have to take big risks to win big!

But as engineer, we have to see past the glamour and solve the real problems. Closing our eyes on difficulties will not help the project, it will turn it into a fiasco.

Politicians and artists can get away with impossible dreams but engineers cannot. We have to deal with the laws of physic and the "caprices" of nature.

Fortunately for us, some people dream "feasible" dreams that we can implement with just more work than anticipated...

Chris, I have followed your designs over the years and you are a very talented designer with enough dreaming power to come up with very interesting concepts. I hope that some of your designs will become reality and that your talent will get rewarded properly.

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As far as energy is concerned:

It is very likely that the alternative energy sources will become viable once we combine them to other activities in a symbiosis manner. We have to look at nature and use the wastes of one industry as the food for another.

Combine the advantages / infrastructure of the offshore windmill with that of the tide or wave energy to save on construction and maintenance cost. Etc...

Keep working hard for the greater good!

thank you.

I'm find a great deal of wisdom in your words.

Chris

Got one word for you, Weather. Tsunamis, Hurricanes, Cyclones, Water tornadoes, rogue waves not to mention rust. Well that was actually 12 words but you get the idea. It would make more sense to build sunken cities.

and numerous ideas and technologies to address all that. (we can just add sunken cities to that list)

In fact... there is an ancient tale of the god Enki living in a cube under the sea...
(as told by Zecharia Sitchin, in the Earth Chronicles, interpreted from sumerian clay tablets)

Why a cube, I wonder...Enki was not an engineer?

Enki was an engineer.. so it must have been technology so advanced, we can't understand it.. like the great pyramid.

I was thinking about how building on the water would add more space to Israel so that if or when water levels go down they will be right on top of the cities of origin that they seem to find more important than finding wide open spaces.

There are some PBS video on the pilings that were used to build Venice travels by Rick Steves.ds

Here is the primary reason we should be building floating towns and cities:

If/when all the ice in the world melts, the sea level will rise 80 meters above its present level. [see USGS FS 002-00: Sea Level and Climate ]

Since most of the world's cities are within 80 meters of sea level, they would all become under water cities.

If you now live within 80 meters of sea level, then sometime in the near future (geologically speaking or sooner),

you can/will be eligible to become, or just by default, be recruited to become a member of the Subsea Cities Team.

[cf http://www.subseacities.com/ ]

OK I am a bit partial to the sunken cities suggestion although being cold and dark seems to come with the undersea territory. And floating cities have merit too - ok I am partial to that too having working on the Hawaii Floating Cities Project. And by the way, do you know which ocean does not have hurricanes? Look here, you might be surprised to find where we should be building floating cities.

http://www.solar.ifa.hawaii.edu/Tropical/Gif/wld.all.gif

But the point is, there are benefits to building on a floating foundation and these could be turned to an advantage. One is life style. Seattle has many floating homes on fresh water and is attractive to many who want to live in a floating home. The other is perhaps more practical in the sense that homes built in flood prone areas should for example have a lower flood insurance cost if they are design to float if/when the area is flooded, which for example in the Red river area is almost yearly. For example fire insurance is less if you have a working fire hydrant in front of your house so buildings designed to float when flood waters rise should then also have lower flood insurance costs or at least then able to get flood insurance.

Obviously, you've never tried to get a floating dock permit through the Army Corps, Coast Guard, and local County Building Department permitting processes!