The weather in the Maldives has been terrible for the past week.
Incessant rains and slowly pounding waves flooded the streets of the small island.
“Usually this is the time of year when the government needs to provide millions of dollars to build temporary shelter.” For the past 15 years, Ibrahim Riyaz, a Maldivian, has been deeply aware of the impact of climate change in It's becoming more and more evident in the land.
Higher temperatures, more dangerous sea journeys, more frequent extreme weather phenomena, some seaside landscapes different from childhood memories... Global change is shining into the reality of Maldivians.
"Our islands are being submerged by the ocean one by one." At the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), Maldives President Saleh said, "If we do not reverse this trend, the Maldives will be gone by the end of this century. exist."
This is the anxiety of Saleh, or the anxiety of hundreds of thousands of Maldivians.
Here, there has been talk of escaping the "doomsday" through immigration, but that has never been an option for Male resident Afrah.
"Is it safe in Australia? No one can escape climate change." Evra told the Beijing News reporter.
Now, with the Maldives' first floating city taking shape, Riaz sees new hope.
As the director of the floating city in Maldives, in an interview with the Beijing News, he said, "We believe that the floating city in the Maldives will set a new standard of living and at the same time change the way of thinking in other countries to solve this problem (climate change)."
At present, all parts of the world are facing the challenges of climate change and urban diseases, and floating buildings are quietly appearing in every corner of the world.
Floating parks in Norway, floating harbours in Panama, floating theaters in France... More and more architects are eager to embed "blue architecture" into the future of mankind.
Perhaps, floating cities will become the next stop for human development in the future.
When the city floats on the sea
If cities could float, rising sea levels would be nothing to fear.
In an emerald-colored lagoon in the Indian Ocean, the outline of a floating city emerges.
Shaped like a brain coral, the city consists of 5,000 buildings, including houses, restaurants, shops and schools, traversed by 17 kilometers of floating roads.
This floating city could be a new hope for hundreds of thousands of Maldivians.
The floating city is expected to accommodate 20,000 people.
From Malé, the capital of Malaysia, it only takes 5-10 minutes by boat.
According to the plan, starting in 2023, an average of 1,000 houses will be transported to the lagoon every year, and the whole city will be completed in 2027.
South Korea has announced similar plans, and another Dutch company, Blue 21, has plans to build a series of floating islands in the Baltic Sea, but none are as ambitious as the Maldives.
According to CNN, the floating city in the Maldives outperforms other projects in terms of scale and construction efficiency.
In an interview with the Beijing News, Koen Olthuis, founder and CEO of Waterstudio, the Dutch architecture firm that designed the floating city, painted a rosy picture.
He called it the "blue city".
In his words, this is a celebration of the ancient culture of the Maldives: rainbow-like houses, sand-paved paths, water taxis, etc.; they will act as "urban doctors", using water as a remedy, eco-friendly, sustainable A continuous, green approach to extending the city on the water; here, residents will no longer be constrained by the overcrowded living spaces of Male.
Under this vision, they will "construct floating cities through the technology of Dutch floating architecture, transforming Maldivians from climate refugees to climate innovators."
The floating city will be connected to a huge underwater hull, which is fixed to the seabed by means of retractable stilts, which will allow the city to move vertically within a certain range.
This design protects the city from flooding, and even in the face of a tsunami, the floating city acts like a floating blanket.
They will also pump out the lagoon's 700-meter-deep, 5°C seawater to cool the city.
However, the floating city still faces various challenges: how to ensure the supply of raw materials in the Indian Ocean with nothing?
In order to protect the ecological environment of the lagoon, all construction works will be carried out on a dry dock near Male. How to transport the constructed and assembled floating modules to the lagoon is also an important issue.
And for Maldivians, their biggest concern is: How much does it cost to rent or even buy a floating house?
1% choice?
For Evra, a floating house is a wonderful luxury, but its audience is not Maldivian.
"Most Maldivians don't even have the money to buy their own house, how can we pay for a floating house?" Evra told the Beijing News reporter, "1% of the world's people hold most of the wealth, and the same is true in the Maldives. The gap between the rich and the poor is huge here, and the middle class is shrinking.”
Evra said that compared with income, housing is an unbearable burden for Malé residents, and some families need to spend all their wage income on housing.
Mimrah, a resident of Diversi Island in the Maldives, also told the Beijing News reporter that Male' is highly crowded and the housing burden is extremely heavy.
Riaz said that initially, floating cities would be more expensive than social housing, but they could also be cheaper in the future.
Orseus said the starting price for a 25-50-square-meter studio apartment in the floating city is $150,000 (about 1 million yuan), and a small family house of 80-100 square meters starts at $250,000 (about 1 million yuan). 1.67 million RMB).
In Orseus' view, at the beginning, all innovative buildings are inevitably costly, but as more and more architects and real estate developers enter the field of floating buildings, the technology continues to mature, and the cost will also increase. reduce.
"Making the cost of living in floating buildings affordable for ordinary people is our next big goal," added Orsius. "It's an answer to the majority, not the few (rich) people."
The first floating apartments in the "blue city" are due to open in August this year, and it remains to be seen whether they will actually win the hearts of Maldivians until residents start living in the floating city in 2024.
Mimla had never heard of a floating city before, and when asked if he would live in it, he, who has lived on Divesey his whole life, said his love and attachment to the island far exceeds that of a new floating city. Attraction of the city.
And Evra has always been skeptical about the project. "Although floating cities can resist rising sea levels, this is not the only challenge posed by climate change. It has to be very solid." He added, "Floating cities might be the way to go, but unless I see them in person, it's hard to convince me."
Maldivian anxiety
Mubashir also lives on Divesey Island.
Four years ago, the well water in his home was unusable due to salt water pollution, and they could only live by collecting rainwater.
At the time of an interview with ABC last year, his family's storage of fresh water could only support them for three months.
For some Maldivians, "my country will disappear in the future" is no longer a distant anxiety, and global warming has become a real problem for them.
Former Maldivian President Nasheed said that 97% of the Maldives no longer has fresh groundwater.
Aminath Shona, Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Technology of the Maldives, also said that under the influence of global warming, the island nation has run out of fresh water that is not polluted.
Freshwater pollution is not the only climate problem facing the Maldives.
In recent years, the waves have become more and more rough, and 90% of the coast of the Maldives has been severely eroded.
The so-called sea erosion is the process of erosion and damage to the coast and the seabed by seawater through its own power (waves, tides, ocean currents, turbidity currents, etc.).
This means that the islands of the Maldives are shrinking, along with their natural protective barrier – coral reefs.
Studies have shown that healthy coral reefs can absorb 97% of wave energy and slow coastal erosion.
But in 2016, about 60 percent of the Maldives' coral reefs were bleached, and they lost most of their frontline reef defenses.
“For us, the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C (global warming) is a death sentence,” Shona said.
The new crown epidemic also reminded them once again: the Maldives is alone in the Indian Ocean.
Maldives spends 50% of its national budget on adaptation to climate change, such as building sea walls to protect coral reefs.
But the Covid-19 pandemic has hit the Maldives' tourism sector hard, and the economy has shrunk by a third.
Of course, Mubashir, who needs to worry about freshwater resources, cannot represent all Maldivians, Mimla said, and Mubashir is one of the few who live offshore.
Evra also said that although most of the Maldives faces the problem of freshwater pollution, desalination plants have been promoted.
The Maldives government has promised to build desalination plants on all inhabited islands by 2023.
For more Maldivians, the anxiety of climate change may be like an undercurrent of calm living.
If the Maldives fails to make it by the end of the century, tourists will only be lamenting the disappearing tourist paradise, and as environmental activist Maeed Mohamed Zahir put it, Maldivians will lose Their coconut trees, their beaches; they will lose a people, an identity, a cultural history, a language and a script.
Collapsed Makoko floating school
In 2003, when Orsius established Waterstudio, the extremely crowded cities and the few remaining urban land were their biggest concerns. Nearly 20 years later, population expansion, traffic congestion, environmental pollution, food safety, and garbage siege, these Urban disease and urbanization go hand in hand, like a fishbone stuck in the development process of modern society, which is difficult to remove.
And it's not just the Maldives that has low elevations.
According to the "New York Times" report, by 2050, the land where about 150 million people live will be submerged, and Vietnam's economic center Ho Chi Minh City, Thailand's Bangkok, India's Mumbai, and Egypt's largest port Alexandria are all facing this risk.
As Evra points out, migrants are just a few feet away, and no one can escape climate change.
In the face of global changes and urban diseases, more and more countries are turning their attention to floating buildings.
From the Maldives to the west, on the vast African continent on the west coast of the Indian Ocean, someone once built a floating school in a slum in Lagos, Nigeria. At that time, the media called it the prototype of a floating building.
Located on the Atlantic coast, Lagos is the largest city in West Africa.
Over the past half century, Lagos has developed rapidly and has become an important economic and financial center in Africa.
Nigerian local media even claimed that if Lagos were a country, it would be one of the five largest economies in Africa.
However, economic development and rapid population expansion have also caused great pressure on the local environment, and Lagos is also facing the risk of being submerged.
Lagos is one of about 10 cities around the world that could be submerged by 2050, according to Clement Nze, director-general of the Nigerian Hydrographic Service.
In 2013, when the floating school was built in the Makoko waterfront slum in Lagos, Lagos residents saw new possibilities, and the Makoko community was even more ecstatic. The timing was perfect - 2012 , the Lagos government has just outlawed the Makoko waterfront slum in an attempt to evict all its residents.
The floating school, which has won multiple international architectural awards, led the city government to abandon its original plan.
But after full of anticipation, disappointment followed.
The Makoko Floating School, built in 2013, was not open to students until October 2015, and can only safely accommodate 60 students, which is far from meeting the demand.
In March 2016, the Makoko School was severely damaged by the storm, and students moved back to the old school building.
On June 9 of the same year, the Makoko Floating School collapsed in a major storm, less than a year before its official opening.
Nicholas architect Konle Adeyemi, who designed the floating school, said months of wear and tear caused the school to collapse.
"As a first prototype, the structure has a limited lifespan," he said. Its construction firm, NLE, wrote in public filings that the Makoko Floating School collapsed due to "deterioration caused by a lack of proper maintenance and collective management."
It would be unfair to define the failure of the Makoko Floating School by the result of the collapse. However, the most controversial part of the project may not be here. The residents of the Makoko Waterfront Slum may still have difficulty understanding why they-this The most marginalized groups in the Lagos community become the subjects of the architect's experiments?
Lagos-based architect Omotayo said what was supposed to be an innovative project had unknowingly become an "experiment".
Why are they still experimenting here, knowing that Makoko's economic and social problems are involved, and that children are involved?
"We believe this project has been, and will be, an important learning process for all parties involved and for many people around the world, in building water structures in resource-scarce areas," the NLE insisted.
Sustaining the impetus for technological innovation is as important as taking the first step in innovation. The collapse of the Makoko Floating School has taught us lessons and lessons, but it will not stop the development of floating buildings.
So far, it has been 6 years since the collapse of the Makoko Floating School. During these 6 years, architects around the world have never stopped trying to extend the city on water.
The "Past and Present" of Floating Architecture
In 480 BC, when King Xerxes I of Persia led his army through Hellespont, they crossed two bridges that floated by boats - some call these two bridges the earliest floating structures.
While it may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, in fact, humans have lived and farmed floating habitats for centuries.
Julia Watson, a lecturer in design at Harvard University, has written a book detailing the cases of 64 floating Aboriginal communities around the world, some of which are still worthy of reference for the sustainable design of floating buildings.
Floating buildings have an extremely rich history, perhaps never far from human life.
Today, we can still find floating indigenous communities, such as the Bajau people in Indonesia and the Moken people on the Andaman coast, who have lived with water bodies for a long time and built many floating facilities, such as the Bolivia and Peru borders. From the reed islands of the Uru people on Lake Titicaca, to the floating gardens of Bangladeshi farmers, etc., floating building techniques are constantly evolving around the world, influenced by climatic conditions, cultural differences and local building materials.
In theory, floating infrastructure has long occupied the human imagination.
In the 1960s, American architect Buckminster Fuller designed a bold utopia known as Triton City.
It is assembled from tetrahedral modules and has a floating community for 5,000 people, a primary school, a supermarket and several specialty shops.
3 to 6 communities can form a town, 3 to 6 towns can form a city, and at each stage, the corresponding infrastructure will be increased.
Almost at the same time, a Metabolism arose in the Japanese architecture circle, which strongly advocated the use of new technologies to solve problems. Among them, architects proposed plans such as "Marine City" and "Floating Cities".
Back in the 21st century, the South Korean port of Busan is also building a floating city.
The city's base is made of a special ecological rock, harder than cement and strong enough to withstand floods, tsunamis and even Category 5 hurricanes, and the project is expected to be completed in 2025.
In a crowded urban environment, the French government of Lyon has also turned its attention to the water, where a floating theater is under construction and is expected to be completed in October this year.
Last year, the headquarters of the Global Adaptation Center, which focuses on adapting to climate change, moved into its largest floating office to date, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
In 2019, the city launched the world's first floating livestock farm, which can raise 40 cows and supply the city with milk, cheese, yogurt, etc., while the city's waste products, from restaurant scraps to the leftover turf of the stadium, have become feed for dairy cows.
Dutch architects can now be seen in most floating building projects, and the low country Netherlands, known as a "man-made" country, is at the center of this revolutionary movement.
"God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands." In the country with the lowest elevation in Europe, 24 percent of the land area is below sea level.
The Dutch have long learned to fight and coexist with water, and have pioneered the idea of sustainable floating buildings.
Over the past 20 years, Waterstudio has designed more than 300 floating houses, offices, schools, medical centers and more around the world.
For Orseus, in the face of an uncertain future, the flexible floating building is like a master key that can open the door closed by the rapidly changing future.
In the context of rapid urbanization, many people have turned their attention to the construction of floating infrastructure in an attempt to build a large-scale and integrated maritime city for the sake of innovation to improve urban life and to cope with challenges such as climate change.
Floating buildings have opened up a new horizon - human beings no longer have to be obsessed with a static city that has remained unchanged for a century.
Orseus explained that you can move, rotate, and add or remove specific functions in the city, such as renting a floating stadium, and then moving it elsewhere in 20 years.
The flexibility of floating buildings offers a whole new way of thinking.
Patrick Verkooijen, CEO of the Climate Change Global Adaptation Center, told the Beijing News that if we want to protect coastal communities and maintain the livelihoods of local residents, the need for floating buildings is bound to increase in the future. urgent.
floating principle
● Vertical movement
The floating city will be connected to a huge underwater hull
The underside of the hull is fixed to the seabed by means of retractable stilts
'Stilts' will allow cities to move vertically within a certain range
●Response to tsunami
Since the floating city can move vertically, the design can protect the city from flooding
Even in the face of a tsunami, a floating city can be like a floating blanket
● cooling down
Designers plan to pump out the lagoon's 700-meter-deep, 5°C seawater
to cool the city
Beijing News reporter Hou Wuting