The Pasts and Futures of the Floating City
If you follow architecture and urban design chatter online, it is likely that at some point you will have come across a thinkpiece describing “seasteading,” or “floating cities,” or offshore living schemes by some other name. Visions of marine settlements have encompassed everything from independent anarcho-capitalist societies, to mutual aid communities, to a world in which different political systems compete against each other for citizens. One thing they all share is anxiety about a global shortage of land combined with a distrust in the ability of any current government to address the problem. Yet the lineage of imagined ocean cities predates the contemporary urgency about climate change — in fact it dates back to at least the mid 20th century, when the threat of global nuclear annihilation began to loom.
These readings give a taste of the context within which predictions of floating cities have emerged. Their various authors see a coherent, nested planetary order as the way to alleviate the resource scarcity and imbalances that could precipitate mass destruction. Their proposals are rooted in the conviction that some sort of regionally organized, globally orchestrated order is the way to achieve world peace. They allow that local experimentation, providing it takes place within a unified world government, will help align social structure with ecology.
I. BEGINNINGS
The City of Man: A Declaration of World Democracy
This declaration is a response to fascism and the rise of Hitler, an attempt to create a peaceful, democratic world order in the form of what the authors call a “purposive organism.” Its signatories, including Lewis Mumford, propose that America must lead the world in creating a single universal state, one within which smaller units will be harmonized by this single structure.
Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution
Similarly, the Preliminary Draft document calls for a Federal Republic of the World in which the governments of the world “surrender their arms” and join “one government of justice.” Rexford Tugwell, a proponent of large-scale planning and part of FDR's Brain Trust, is among its authors. Elisabeth Mann Borgese — the wife of Thomas Mann and the daughter of G.A. Borgese, both signatories to The City of Man — is unlisted as an author, but she was a research assistant for the drafting committee. There can be no discussion of the Law of the Sea complete without her, and we will return to her later.
II. ARCHITECTS
Enter the architects. In the mid-20th century, various designers began to create projects for floating cities based on new materials, structural innovations, and social critiques. The lesser known ones include those by William Katavolos and Rudolf Doernach. Among the better known ones are those of the Metabolists, Archigram, and Paolo Soleri. The fluidity of the sea allows for the exploration of organic metaphors; discrete units merge, subdivide or detach, and reassemble into different configurations as needed.
Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan
Routledge
Here, Lin describes some of Kiyoniri Kikutake’s work in detail. Kikutake’s Marine City plan is to free social groups from land, from the troubles of states, and therefore ultimately from the need to engage in war. His plans exemplify the biologically-inspired, cellular designs of the Metabolists. A “mother body” is the floating center where new cities are constructed. Once an offspring city reaches a strict population limit, it splits off and floats away to “have its own life,” and, when it has outlived its usefulness, it moves away and sinks itself.
Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past
Monacelli
Banham’s 1976 work contextualizes the Metabolist floating city proposals within both the megastructural work and the pop culture of their time. The Beatle’s Yellow Submarine, the U.S. Navy’s experiments in underwater living, offshore oil rigs — all of these inspired the megastructure forms that the Metabolists would develop. Archigram’s plug-in city takes on marine megastructures were more formally playful. One of their most recognizable projects, Ron Herron’s enigmatic Walking City, is often seen walking across the sea.
Novanoah I and Novanoah II
Soleri’s biologically-inspired ideas echo those of the Metabolists (he describes his arcology infrastructures as enormous digestive systems), but he places a greater emphasis on their verticality. While the earth’s surface is a thin “pancake,” structures that can reach deep underwater can help us achieve a “rounded microcosmos.” His ideas are mystical, with these floating settlements ultimately bringing humans back in touch with “the same seas that eons ago saw the exodus of some of his creatures.”
Marine Ecumenopolis
Ekistics
J.R. Stewart finds it inevitable that by 2035 much of the world’s populations will live in marine cities. He models historical growth outwards from Doxiadis’s predicted terrestrial Ecumenopolis into a “Littoral Ecumenopolis” and finally offshore into a “Marine Ecumenopolis.” He offers an array of development typologies, including Richard Meier’s relatively low-tech houseboat villages, mining settlements that resemble existing oil platforms, and more complex ones like the Pilkington Glass Age Development Committee’s Sea City, which, with its amphitheater of apartment bleachers surrounding a lagoon of various land uses, is both advertisement for concrete and glass construction and preparation for doomsday.
III. ENGINEERS
In the 1970s, engineers begin to study the mechanical challenges of floating cities in earnest. Some of their solutions mimic large tanker ships, take cues from oil platforms, and even suggest cities atop ice fields carved from Arctic or Antarctic ice sheets to be towed to their destinations. They debate whether the best structures to withstand the sea’s harsh conditions are free-floating or tethered, monolithic or modular, and they test these either with scale models in pools and with digital simulations. Both the engineers and the lawyers exploring these futures are fully confident that the technical problems will be solved and that the gnarlier challenges are the legal and territorial ones. Even by today’s standards, these explorations of marine living still feel like science fiction, but the idea migrates to more staid contexts as well, as national governments and intergovernmental organizations devote some attention to them.
A Study of a Prototype Floating Community
Department of Housing and Urban Development
It won’t surprise Places readers that one of the earliest proponents of floating cities is Buckminster Fuller. He publishes one iteration of his in a 1968 issue of Playboy magazine: “I am an inventor … Edison, Bell, Marconi and the Wrights needed no licenses from anyone to light the night, to shrink the earth and to interlink all humanity.” His floating tetrahedron, efficient because of the ratio between its size and its capacity, can hold about 10,000 people in 4 square miles. Fuller envisions an entire network of these, floating independently but close enough that a small boat can travel between them. Here, he rejects politics and endorses technological progress, confident that fully heeding Corbusier’s maxim — “a house is a machine to live in” — means extending human settlement to the oceans, the entire planet and ultimately to outer space.
The same year, after seeing an earlier model that Buckminster Fuller had prepared along with architect Shoji Sadao, the Tetrahedron City Project, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development commissions from him a model for a floating city. Fuller claims that this city will heed the lessons of failed, soulless housing projects and suburbs, instead offering public spaces enlivened by “the glamorous view, the open vista, the light, sun, and cool, fresh breezes of the waterfront.” He adopts the metrics of walkability advocated by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of American Cities, claiming that they can improve upon the partial solutions that planners have so far offered as responses to the “personal alienation characteristic of life in large urban aggregations.”
Our Nation and the Sea: A Plan for National Action
A group of marine experts convened by President Johnson to address the problem of coastal management warns of the pressures of urban development. Their product, known as the Stratton Report, includes a photograph of Fuller’s HUD model. “Theoretically,” it says, “the Nation's shoreline could be increased almost without limit.” The Stratton Report itself is no mere exercise in tale-spinning. On the contrary, President Nixon will adopt its recommendations to create both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and to draft the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) of 1972.
The Drama of the Oceans
Abrams
Borgese is best known as the “Mother of the Oceans” for her role in drafting the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Here, she zooms out to place the oceans within geological time, and she zooms back in to place human lives against its backdrop. She narrates it as the medium for human history and future. Within this future, floating cities, she says, are “not just a pipe dream.” The materials already exist, and while comparable marine structures are fixed in place, mobile ones could be built by the early 21st century. What will floating cities will do to our notions of territory, she wonders. Quoting Marx, she predicts the “withering away of the state” as communities cohere around culture and function rather than around territory.
Floating Cities: A New Challenge for Transnational Law
Marine Policy
Are floating cities ships, are they offshore structures, or are they states? Keith foresees numerous reasons for which coastal states might want to grant floating city-states diplomatic recognition. He speculates that the best response of existing states to floating cities “might be simply a hearty welcome.” Sea cities, he suggests, might actually strengthen the ties between terrestrial states, as they float between them offering services and “collecting” new citizens.
Floating cities: Further thoughts on their legal status
Marine Policy
This piece is a direct response to Kieth. Woodliffe argues that, to prevent legal ambiguities, the international community must establish clear definitions of terms. Interestingly, embedded in this response is a discussion that precedes and anticipates today’s interrogations of the city. He points out that to fully consider the legal complexities of ocean cities, we must first ask what a “city” is. He is in favor of defining it as “an aggregation of dwellings of other structures that is of such size or importance as to suggest a city.” In other words, if it seems like a city it’s a city. While not nearly as expansive or incisive as today’s investigations into planetary urbanization, Woodliffe’s tautological reminder that “city” is not an uncomplicated category begins to unsettle the categories that critical urban theory is today more seriously engaged with deconstructing.
The ‘Urban Age’ in Question
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
Brenner and Schmid present a UN map that marks urban spaces as dots, distinct from the rural zones surrounding them. They argue that it presents a “chaotic conception” of the city, grouping things with no salient relation to each other together and analytically severing the links between those that are inextricable. Plans for floating cities make the same mistake. While their proponents often represent them as free-moving points, materially independent of earthbound spaces, they are as entrenched in processes of planetary urbanization as the settlement patterns of our terrestrial spaces, and in fact any examination of these plans reveals just how impossible it is to clearly demarcate the bounds of a city.
IV. SPECULATIONS
Whether due to alarm over rising sea levels, whether a result of the amplified voices of a few wealthy entrepreneurs, or whether a result of standing out as enticing clickbait on social media platforms, a simple online search of “seasteading” or “floating cities” yields thousands of links to shiny renderings of ocean settlements. Most of these are the stuff of design competitions. There are not very many such projects, but those there are draw a lot of attention. These recent schemes weave together the threads of somewhat disparate worlds — off-the-grid living, cryptocurrency, ecosocialistm, vanlife, anarcho-capitalism, Burning Man, techno-utopias, and more.
Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians
Free Press
“Aquapreneur” Joe Quirk is perhaps the most prominent advocate of sea cities. He is president of the Seasteading Institute, which was originally founded by Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton). Endorsed by the likes of Reason, the Libertarian Institute, and the Federalist, he writes, “A market of governance is an engine of moral progress.” Instead of the global socialisms inspiring earlier sea city designs, this dream is for a marketplace of societies, one in which different societies can compete for citizens. Quirk speaks of this “age of float” one of “life rafts for the bottom billion.”
High-Level Round Table on Sustainable Floating Cities
In April of 2019, the United Nations hosted the first High-Level Round Table on Sustainable Floating Cities, convening representatives from Oceanix, BIG, and MIT’s Department of Oceanic Engineering. The press release is full of tech-speak. “Retooling” cities, “hotspot innovation hubs,” “incentives for innovation to thrive,” “a platform to co-create breakthrough innovations for a better urban future.” Not surprisingly, climate change has replaced overpopulation as the driving concern. And this language of start-up states is worlds away from the global democracy that Lewis Mumford, Thomas Mann, G.A. Borgese, and their comrades proposed in “The City of Man.”
Prototype Cities in the Sea
Journal of Architecture
Architectural scholars Kaji-O’Grady and Raisbeck posit that leftist new-state proposals fall out of favor in the 1960s and 70s precisely because of architecture’s embeddedness in the status quo. New proposals lack the structural and formal inventiveness of those of the 60s and 70s, and their defensive stance is reflected in their “a mélange of retrospective architectural styles, resort and nautical architectures such that the sea no longer provides a site of the future, but permits a fantasy of the past.”
Never Get off the Boat: The ‘Seavangelist’ Scam
The Baffler
Byrne is not so sympathetic to would-be seasteaders. This piece is succinct and needs no annotation.
V. COMMUNITIES
In all of these discussions of legal authorities and structural complexities, it is easy to lose sight of the sociopolitical imaginaries that spur floating city plans in the first place. More recent plans don’t embed themselves within harmonious, integrated global governments or web of interactions that make up more complex wholes. Instead they shift to small, independent communities that can experiment with various social structures free from outside interference.
How to Start Your Own Country: How You Can Profit From the Coming Decline of the Nation State
Loompanics Unlimited
This is a quixotic little book. Strauss presents models for new countries that run the ideological gamut. The book’s heterodoxy is on display in the form of an index of resources, which range from the libertarian writings of Ayn Rand, to boat parts catalogues, to Machievelli’s The Prince, to a wealth of manuals on cheap nuclear weapons, to pirate radio guides, to Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. One of the best known of the experiments Strauss catalogs is the Principality of Sealand, which claims an offshore platform in the North Sea as an independent state. What is interesting about Strauss’s book is its shift from what is basically a spoof to a more extended consideration of what makes up the fundamental basis, structure, and operations of a nation-state. This includes its physical infrastructure, from such details as designing and printing stamps to working out transportation logistics.
Anarchism, Libertarianism and Environmentalism: Anti-Authoritarian Thought and the Search for Self-Organizing Societies
Handbook of Environment and Society
White and Kossoff place environmental thought within the related traditions of anarchism and libertarianism, both responses against a strong centralized state form. They map out an intellectual landscape within which we can place the strains of ecological thought, social structure, and government authority that each vision of sea cities illustrates.
Urbanism in the anthropocene: Ecological urbanism or premium ecological enclaves?
City
Sea cities fit well within the category of ecological enclaves. Hodson and Marvin ask us to scrutinize eco-cities: In whose interest are they are built, and whose do they exclude? They confront the impossibility of understanding new imagined communities without interrogating the power dynamics from which they are born. While they warn that exclusive enclaves are only becoming more and more common, they also suggest that an inclusive, experimental ecological urbanism is possible.
Atlas Swam: Freedom, Capital, and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision
Antipode
Even if the seasteading movement turns out to be a collection of renderings for a future that does not come true, or, as they say, “the idle dream of a few men with too much money and too much imagination,” it has something to tell us in the way of a critique of neoliberal capitalism. One of the major contradictions they identify within the movement is that taking it seriously requires legitimizing the notion of statehood, as what provides it with the rationale that the high seas is a free space, while at the same time seeking to operate outside of it. Their comparison of the movement’s internal contradiction between New Urbanism’s planned environment and the idea embedded in it that, with correct zoning, the rest can be left up to the market, reminds us of Fuller’s reference to Jane Jacobs and the floating megastructure as the contradictory expression of the free-floating city as a way to actualize a unified, planned world order.