The original note, as written at the time
Try going large scale. What if we could have large floating cities in the near future.
Ongoing development
Try going large scale. What if we could have large floating cities in the near future.
The instinct is usually to get better at small things — a plot, a building, a street — and there is nothing wrong with that. But there is a class of problem that only appears when you commit to the very large, and our discipline keeps deferring it. A floating city is not a building with a building’s problems. It is a settlement with a hull, and the moment you accept that, the questions change entirely.
Where does the water come from. Where does the waste go when the sea is the only neighbour. How does the structure move under load and swell, and what does that motion do to a wall that was drawn straight. Who owns the water beneath it. What does a person do on the deck in a storm, and how do you evacuate something that cannot be walked away from.
These are not arguments against trying. They are the reason to try, because working them out at that scale produces solutions that do not appear when you design a car park. The life-support thinking in particular is worth exporting, since a city that has to close its water and waste loops for survival is a city that can teach a land city how to stop pretending its loops are infinite.
I am not proposing we float anything yet. I am proposing we stop treating the very large as unserious, because the very large is where the interesting constraints live, and we are at a point where the tools could answer some of them.