South Korea is building a floating city for 10,000 inhabitants – as protection against flooding

Oceanix
Guaranteed flood protection: South Korea is building a floating city for 10,000 people

An ambitious project is planned in South Korea’s second largest city, Busan, to build a flood-proof floating city on the ocean. It will consist of a number of interconnected platforms and, according to the planners, could accommodate up to 10,000 people. The coastal areas of South Korea in particular are increasingly threatened by rising sea levels. The Oceanix project is supposed to offer a solution for this. Most recently, CNN reported on it.

Oceanix: Project was created in 2019

The Oceanix project is a collaboration between designers, architects and engineers. Since the project was presented, the organizers have been looking for a suitable location where a prototype of the new city can be built. Last month they signed an agreement with the city of Busan and UN-Habitat, the United Nations urban development agency, to build the first neighborhood of its kind off the South Korean coast.

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The trick behind the floating city is that the respective platforms should rise and fall with the sea level. Each of the five hectare quarters is designed for 300 people in buildings up to seven stories high. These settlements can then be linked to form larger networks that are connected to one another via footpaths and cycle paths.

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According to Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the Danish architecture firm largely responsible for the design, the quarters could be grouped around a central port. Then one could also form larger villages with up to 1650 inhabitants. Theoretically, they could then merge into a larger metropolis with 10,000 inhabitants – called Oceanix City – with everything that goes with it: from restaurants and co-working spaces to urban farms and leisure facilities.

Self-Sustaining Settlements

The city from the Oceanix project is designed for the self-sufficiency system. Residents should produce their own food and energy in “waste-free circulatory systems”. The districts are to be equipped with community and fish farms with attached compost gardens. It should also be possible to breed marine animals in the surrounding waters. Uninhabited platforms could meanwhile house floating wind turbines and solar cells or be used to grow bamboo for the construction of new buildings.

The city map proposed by BIG also takes into account the production of drinking water by means of on-site sewage treatment plants and systems for storing rainwater. For the infrastructure, architects have envisaged fleets of electric vehicles – from water taxis to solar-powered ferries – that will connect the platforms to other parts of the city and the mainland.

Oceanix co-founder Itai Madamombe, told CNN via email that the first prototype neighborhood in Busan will be completed and inhabited by 2025. She added that the project is currently in talks with 10 other governments.

South Korea’s coasts are threatened by floods

South Korea’s coastal cities, which include Busan, are particularly at risk from rising sea levels. According to media reports, Greenpeace Korea warned last year that the city’s famous Haeundae Beach could disappear by 2030.

And the effects are already being felt – a study in Sustainability magazine found that by 2020 the city had suffered worse damage from flooding than anywhere else in South Korea.

Sources:CNN, Oceanix

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