In the last few years, we started seeing these proposals
for floating cities all over the world. They're posed as solutions to the sea
level rise, which will affect about 40. This is a high tech, self-sustaining floating city
where every day is beach day. Everything we eat
or drink is recycled here. In fact, just by living here, you are saving the planet But what if this place sucks? not again. A portion of this video is sponsored by Dropbox. This is one of the very first
comprehensive floating city concepts: Triton City, developed in the sixties
by the architect Buckminster Fuller. Each of these tetrahedral platforms
anchor into the seabed, and it's got all the technologies
and the social amenities for it to be
a completely self-sustaining community. And you could add apartments or offices
by plugging in prefabricated modules into this framework. Each of these
could house a maximum of 6500 people. And the idea was that you keep adding more of these platforms
as the population grew. But just when things were getting
exciting, the main investor passed away. It did get picked up by the U.S. government for a while, but as it happens
with big public projects, it got buried in bureaucracy. A big part of it was that it was just
too ambitious and too futuristic, and the entire project
relied on technologies that were not available at the time,
so it died. The other part was that the community
was designed to be one big megastructure so the structural framework alone
was extremely expensive. And just like we've seen
with a lot of the metabolist projects, the amount of money
and planning required for the modules to plug in and plug out,
it was just not feasible. Let's fast forward 60 years. We have a new problem of climate change,
but we're still seeing the same problems with these new floating city projects
like Dogen City, which is a floating city for 40,000 people
using this habitation ring that's shaped like a ship to protect the inner body
from currents and tsunamis within the bay. You have buildings that can be arranged in a flexible way,
but the founder is actually considering completely switching gears
from a floating city into medical tourism because it's just not profitable. Pangeos is a turtle shaped, moving city for 60,000 people,
and it's estimated to cost $1,000,000,000. And honestly, it seems much
more like a luxury cruise ship than a city or the Lilypad,
which made a big splash in 2011. But it never left the conceptual stage
or the Oxagon The mega city that's a part of neom
estimated at $1 trillion. Well, this one might actually happen because it's funded
by a single authoritarian regime. So the way that they're designed,
it requires a massive initial investment from a billionaire
or a well-funded autocratic government. They can push these ideas
through and crush anyone who opposes them. But what if it wasn't designed
as a single megastructure tower, but an aggregate of smaller modules? Let's look at the Maldives. It's one of the high risk areas
and the Maldives floating city proposal could actually be feasible
because it's made up of an aggregate of individual units
rather than one giant megastructure. And it's using technology
that's already been tried and tested in the Netherlands
with their smaller scale floating homes. In fact, the entire city is staged
for completion by 2027. The floating buildings
are anchored to the seabed. It's creating artificial reefs
that help to stimulate coral growth. And the host city is designed around this
idea of a boating community using canals as an infrastructure and limiting land use
to walking and biking. And rather than creating this
massive structural framework like the other project, it uses
a natural lagoon as a protective barrier, creating a more controlled environment. And since the water inside
a lagoon is warmer and shallower, it makes it perfect for this
Maldivian lifestyle. It's also used
as docking stations for boats, and you could also use it
to build some of the infrastructure that you would need
for a city of 20,000 people. This entire region is filled
with these lagoons just like this. So you could see this multiplying,
creating all of these beautiful Maldivian communities. But there's something I just couldn't
figure out what happens when the sea level continues to rise
If we do not reverse this trend, the Maldives will cease to exist by the end of this century. Maldives is the lowest
lying region in the world, and something like 80% of its land area
is less than one meter above sea level. So can these cities exist
without the protection of the lagoons? They're anchored to the seabed,
so they're not going to float away. But I imagine it would feel and function
very differently without the surrounding landmass. So is it possible that they're not
actually designed for the long term? But if that's the case,
can we even call it a city? Or maybe the real purpose is not a city
at all. Apparently, the cost of one of these homes
is going to be around $250,000, which is actually a lot more
than what an average Maldivian can afford. And one of the main
features of their website is that you can get a residence permit
if you buy a home there. So it's possible, but in the end, they
just become vacation homes for foreigners. It does kind of
have that gated community vibe, which is weird because their main slogan
is turning Maldivians from climate refugees
into climate innovators. And the more we looked at the design
and planning of these floating cities, we started to wonder, are they really designed
with the goal of housing climate refugees? But one of the problems was that it's a message from our sponsor. Our business revolves around videos
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Dropbox for sponsoring this video. Feed the Hungry,
Enrich the poor, cure the sick Clean. These
are the eight great moral imperatives from the Seasteading Institute,
which has played a really big role in popularizing
this idea of floating cities. The founders wrote a book that delves
into all the aspects of establishing an independent,
self-sustaining community on the ocean. They ended up receiving seed funding
from Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, which helped kickstart the institute. But the movement is actually rooted
in a much simpler idea the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea,
which states that a country's exclusive economic zone extends
200 nautical miles from the shore. And anything beyond that, it's not subject to the laws
or regulations of any sovereign state. Based on this, their floating societies
would have innovative government structures that are privatized
and competitive and chosen by the people. But when you look at their projects,
it's a little hard for me to picture just how it could feed the hungry
or enrich the poor. Most of their projects are very expensive and they're not comprehensive enough
to be self-sustaining. Some other projects require
to live in the community on your own boat to first build the sense of community
before they start construction. There's no jobs or economy
on these islands, so you need to either have a job where you can work remotely or go over and work in a nearby area. The project that was closest
to being realized was in the French Polynesian lagoons,
where they teamed up with the local government
to set up these independent zones. But there was so much public backlash
from the locals on how this tax free, unregulated
zone could impact the local environment. So the project died. So this idea of a floating city, it's
more than just housing people or living sustainably
or creating innovative governments. It's rooted in this desire to be free
from the regulations and maybe the taxes on land. Hey, guys, I'm here in Busan, South Korea. And just behind me, that's where they're
planning on building a prototype for the very first floating city
for 10,000 people. Or at least that was the plan. It was going to be
this big part of the Busan Expo in 2013. But since filming this awesome intro
in the October of 2023, South Korea lost the bid for the big expo to big surprise, Saudi Arabia. But the South Korean president did see that the investments for the city
would proceed regardless. And it sounds like they're going
to be bidding for the 2035 World Expo. So it could still happen. And if not here,
they might find another place to build it,
because this project has a lot of promise. It's also backed by the U.N. and it's designed by,
I think, one of the few architecture firms that can make really big,
crazy ideas happen. So we'll see. The Oceanix Floating City was developed
by Oceanix. And again, it's
based on these self-sustaining modules that can scale from a small neighborhood
to a city of 10,000, but also it can scale indefinitely. It's supposed to be net zero
and close loop. And unlike some of the other floating city
projects, there is thinking around the jobs and schools
and things that make a society function. The platforms are anchored to
an artificial reef made out of bio rock, which is a new type of extremely resilient
concrete that's formed underwater. And although it doesn't have any barriers,
apparently it can withstand Category
five hurricanes and tsunamis. The buildings are between 4 to 7 stories
designed for lots of different uses. And this hexagon massing creates these intimate alleys
which are lined with shops and eateries. And the whole thing is designed
to be super walkable and cyclical. In fact, you can bike from one end
to another within just 10 minutes. And at the design level, it's really hitting a lot of the urban
planning principles for a healthy city. Before the prototypes
that were designed for the expo, they were going to build
just three of these modules, one for hospitality,
one for research and one for living. And I should point out that there are
some significant differences between the original Oceanix City idea
and the prototypes. In terms of scale, it's much denser. And while the prototypes are resilient
and sustainable, they're not self-sustaining, probably
because in order to create a solves sustaining community,
you need such a careful balance of not just the technology
or the food production, but the social, political
and economic structures all working together,
functioning as one ecosystem. These diagrams make it seem really simple,
but in reality it's much more complex, which is probably why we still don't
have it on land, despite all the ideas
that's come and gone. Also, it's not cheap,
according to Oceanix. Each of the platforms is going to cost
anywhere between 150 to $200 million. But with all this new tech, some of which
haven't even been invented yet, and the cost of maintaining them,
it's probably going to cost a lot more. So probably you're going to need to secure some major
funding from private investors. but wait, they're supposed to house
the climate refugees, the millions and millions of them, most of which
are from developing countries. It's not exactly a profitable investment. It seems like the whole floating city movement is tackling
a lot of different problems at once. There's the technology
and selling the aquatic lifestyle and all the challenges
of creating a self-sufficient city. So maybe it's a combination of low tech
and high tech solutions that take better advantage
of the local climate. Or maybe it just makes more sense
for these to be connected to our cities on land and design from the start
to share resources with existing cities. That could reduce
a lot of the risk and cost, and maybe they could even have
a kind of symbiotic relationship. Heuristic thinking tells us
that we often use mental shortcuts for complex decisions,
and especially when we're faced with astronomical challenges
like climate change. Floating cities seem like these shiny,
simple solutions. But this shortcut in our thinking
might lead us to overlook some of the intricate, long term
consequences of all of our choices. So what do you guys think is floating
cities are new future or are they just escapist fantasies? By the way, we've collected
all of our background research into a research booklet. I'll leave the link in the description. Let me know what you guys think
in the comments. And with that,
I'll see you guys in the next video.
