In the future, we could all live in giant cities floating on a sea that has risen dramatically as a result of global warming.
An architecture firm has stepped in with some bold concept images of just such a city that would be able to house up to 10,000 people.
The founder of Terrace Architecture firm BIG, showed off the images at a round-table discussion on floating cities at the United Nations’s New York headquarters.
It’s called ‘Oceanix City’ and it consists of buoyant islands clustered together in groups of six to form villages. These clusters would then be repeated in multiples of six to form a 12-hectare village for 1,650 residents, and then again to form an archipelago home to 10,000 citizens.
‘We’ve based it on this modular idea of a hexagonal island,’ explained Bjarke Ingels, the founder of BIG.
‘It has the omni-direction of a circle but it has the modularity and rationality of something manmade,’ he told the UN.
The name comes from Oceanix, a company that develops innovative ways to build on water. It was Oceanix that commissioned BIG to come up with the design.
The scheme was unveiled at the First UN High-level Roundtable on Sustainable Floating Cities, which Oceanix co-convened with MIT, the Explorers Club and UN-Habitat, a UN offshoot mandated to work with city development.
Oceanix City is intended to provide a habitable, off-shore environment in the event of rising sea levels, which are expected to affect 90 per cent of the world’s coastal cities by 2050.
Each of the modules would be built on land and then towed to sea, where they would be anchored in place. The miniature islands are also designed to survive a category-five hurricane.
Arrangements would be flexible so that the cities could be moved if water levels became too low. BIG intends the buildings atop to be constructed from locally sourced ‘replenishable’ materials such wood and fast-growing bamboo, which also offer ‘warmth and softness to touch’.
A number of renewable energy resources, such as wind and water turbines and solar panels are also incorporated into the design.
Climate scientists say that if global warming exceeds 1.5 degrees, there could be disastrous consequences including extreme heatwaves, severe droughts, the extinction of coral reefs not to mention the inevitable sea level rise.
‘It may sound frightening but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies,’ said acclaimed naturalist David Attenbourough in a new documentary that takes an unflinching look at climate change.
Time to start saving for a deposit for that floating city, then.
Source: Read Full Article