The Silicon Review ^Asia

The First of 5000 Units of Floating City will be Unveiled This Month

In a turquoise lagoon, just 10 minutes from Male, a floating city is rising from the water of the Indian Ocean. This Maldivian city is big enough to house 20,000 people. The project is a joint venture between the Government of Maldives and Dutch Docklands, and designed by the architecture firm Water Studio in a brain coral pattern. The city will consist of 5000 floating units, including restaurants, houses, schools, and shops, with a canal running in between. This month the first unit will be unveiled, and the residents can start to move in early 2024. 

The city is designed to attract local people with rainbow-colored homes with expansive balconies and seafront views. This city is not meant to build for a futuristic vision or wild experiment but as a functional solution to the brutal reality of rising sea levels. The Maldives is one of the most vulnerable nations to climatic change as a land area of 80% is less than one meter above sea level, and by the end of the century, the entire country can submerge. This city is new hope for the Maldives because it can rise with the sea if the city floats.

Water Studio aims at completing this project within five years. Other plans for floating cities, such as a series of floating islands on the Baltic Sea and Oceanix City in Busan, South Korea, have been launched by Blue21, a Dutch company. Still, none could compete with the timeframe and scale of the Maldives Project.