SITE SELECTION, WHERE ON WATER: the shore versus the open sea
I can hardly imagine another landscape allowing such creative freedom as the expansive mirror of the sea. The benefits to founding the first-of-its-kind floating metropolis out on the water by the shore greatly outnumber the challenges.
The present paper argues that the surest means to bringing the project to fruition, considering its scale and difficulty, may be not simply to convince of its plausibility and benefits, but to prove its indispensability.
I can hardly imagine another landscape allowing such creative freedom as the expansive mirror of the sea. The benefits to founding the first-of-its-kind floating metropolis out on the water by the shore greatly outnumber the challenges.
The present paper argues that the surest means to bringing the project to fruition, considering its scale and difficulty, may be not simply to convince of its plausibility and benefits, but to prove its indispensability.
An entity sufficiently powerful to trigger and later nurture the nascent floating urban typology is the existing coastal Metropolis: an entity in actual critical need of such a massive undertaking, as a means for its further proliferation if not survival. Ever expanding beyond its means, the established coastal city is ever fumbling for balance and the means to safeguard its integrity and prosperity. Its voracious appetite for resources may be channeled into sustainable expation over sea instead of continued expansion over land at the cost of global non-renewable resources. The prize of this approach is the opportunity of applying only mostly the best of ourselves into building these brand new cities.
Why not far out on the unregulated open sea instead of by the shore? It is difficult to argue for regular people numbering in tens and hundreds of thousands to volunteer in a rickety socio-political experiment in the middle of some ocean, given the reputation of the sea and seaside sovereign nations as consistently unforgiving actors. The first Floating City by the shore must succeed, so that others may follow in order to de-sress the land, restore natural overland habitats and repair and expand the marine ones.
EMERGENCE: “budding, in biology, is a form of asexual reproduction in which a new individual develops from some generative anatomical point (the first Borough Islet) of the parent organism (the Land City). The initial protuberance of proliferating cytoplasm or cells (- the multitude of Borough Islets), the bud (- aggregated as the greater Mirror City) eventually develops into an organism duplicating the parent”, in the same way the floating city increasingly mirrors its original host, the land (dry) city. – Encyclopedia Britannica.
The added notion, that “the new individual may separate to exist independently, or the buds may remain attached, forming aggregates or colonies“ (E.Brit.), is also relevant to the experimental science of the new floating urban typology. It could mean that the floating city becoming partially or completely segregated over time, in an administrative and ultimately even in a morphological interpretation, possibly through a process of shedding some mature floating islet units (- and them floating off to seek out other existing coastal conurbations, appropriate to seeding new Mirror Cities).
The added notion, that “the new individual may separate to exist independently, or the buds may remain attached, forming aggregates or colonies“ (E.Brit.), is also relevant to the experimental science of the new floating urban typology. It could mean that the floating city becoming partially or completely segregated over time, in an administrative and ultimately even in a morphological interpretation, possibly through a process of shedding some mature floating islet units (- and them floating off to seek out other existing coastal conurbations, appropriate to seeding new Mirror Cities).
CONTEXTUAL SHAPE: Where it is located and who it’s meant for will influence what the Islets and the greater floating city look like. Floating Alexandria and Floating Montpelier will be decidedly different looking (and perhaps functioning )places. The manner in which the Mirror City Islet is conceptually and functionally programmed allows the employment of localized functional typologies, building skins, construction materials etc.
PROLIFERATION: driven by few geographical limitations and by using easily renewable, locally abundant food and mineral resources (accretion, etc.), while employing durable advanced technologies.
REPRODUCTION OF THE CITY: shedding, an Islet lifting anchor and drifting to a fresh location; seeding (- the notion and the know-how); growing (a new floating Mirrored City from the resettled prototype Islet)
PERPETUATION: enabled by sustainable expansion, competitiveness, adaptability, durable and easily replaceable building materials, cataclysm resistant design (anthropic or natural). The concourse of the two cities. over-sea and over-land joined at the shore, is their coalescence into the future perpetual Metropolis.
Functional and structural hierarchizing
The Borough Islet prototype is made up of a borderless leisure ground sandwiched between a waterline public macrostructure and a residential superstructure. The people go to school and to public events inside the macrostructure, they have their picnics on the boundless beaches and on the greens, and later climb to their private perches in the sky.
The manner of zoning the Flagship is dictated by a necessity for COMPETITIVE COMMUNITIES, interpreted here as a pursuit to foster not a single unified Isle persona, but from the very beginning to differentiate a borough islet into a multitude of neighborhoods with compatible and competitive identities. The approach to facilitating this is to break up the total number of residents of a Borough into as many groups as there are neighborhoods. Each group of people, represented in the Islet prototype case by an appropriately sized Apartment Block, will cluster to establish a vertical neighborhood inside a residential tower: a clustered Apartment Block and it’s mix of distinct semi-public spaces, and the immediate vicinity of Walkway trade venues and Macrostructure public functions.
The Borough Islet prototype is made up of a borderless leisure ground sandwiched between a waterline public macrostructure and a residential superstructure. The people go to school and to public events inside the macrostructure, they have their picnics on the boundless beaches and on the greens, and later climb to their private perches in the sky.
The manner of zoning the Flagship is dictated by a necessity for COMPETITIVE COMMUNITIES, interpreted here as a pursuit to foster not a single unified Isle persona, but from the very beginning to differentiate a borough islet into a multitude of neighborhoods with compatible and competitive identities. The approach to facilitating this is to break up the total number of residents of a Borough into as many groups as there are neighborhoods. Each group of people, represented in the Islet prototype case by an appropriately sized Apartment Block, will cluster to establish a vertical neighborhood inside a residential tower: a clustered Apartment Block and it’s mix of distinct semi-public spaces, and the immediate vicinity of Walkway trade venues and Macrostructure public functions.
A public building (or any other most loved location of a vicinity), ultimately names and sets apart its very own neighborhood, distinct from all the others on a Borough Islet. Kids from Kino’s will venture out on weekly fruit forays into Orchard Grove, while their parents are away to the sky Bazaar for the weekend market fair. A neighborhood delivers as a socio-economic microcosm. The apartment towers may constitute more than simple living retreats. They may serve as ateliers and container gardens, giving the owners the choice to pursue their crafts and trades to fruition.
The Mirror City may employ superstructures of varied purposes, designed to function as entertainment or industrial grounds, intensified floating greenhouses, etc. Some single-purpose macrostructures may themselves be differentiated by necessity into static or mobile facilities: e.g. a type of floating farms meant to speculate the seasonal patterns by floating across the Mediterranean.
One purpose for the aggregation into strongly defined neighborhoods is to build the city as a place for memories, with countless and varied places for adventure, discovery, nurture, such as cool secret gardens in the shadow of a particularly ivied tower, moody alleys and colorful street clocks, a stream somewhere by a lavender knoll and a well-known secret beach for lovebirds. The design requirement is for a thousand places of a thousand different and authentic kinds. Arched walkways and secret courtyards, dead-end streets patched up with empty ancient shops – a successful city is perhaps foremost a place of reminiscence and great stories, and such focuses for the design process of this project are no less important than the principles of sustainability, ecology and habitat generation. The aim is to realize an elegant and novel urban development model, equally environmentally positive and humane.
Cities bring close together trade, production and private living spaces. It is this closeness that makes them such efficient organisms, and efficiency is good for business- a fact that ultimately reflects in the overall quality of life. The stacking design aims to work out some of the bigger compromises of ultra-efficient density, while keeping the obvious advantages of downtown living (social diversity, modernity, prosperity).
Citywide constitutive and administrative considerations
In the context of New Urbanism, an Urban Village is a planning and design concept mainly characterized by a pursuit to achieve mixed-use, human-scale developments, comprised of tight-knit, self-involved village sized communities, with a compact city focus and of sustainable size. These autonomous amalgamations of leisure, shopping, community and housing uses would recall a sense of proto-industrial pastoral wholesomeness, with all amenities within easy walking distance and non-invasive transportation.
It amounts to literally building everything from the ground up around the notion of enabling and nurturing a sustainable community. Therefore the term of “Urban Village” appears to translate well to the proposed building blocks of the Mirror City: its self-contained autonomous floating islands.
In the context of New Urbanism, an Urban Village is a planning and design concept mainly characterized by a pursuit to achieve mixed-use, human-scale developments, comprised of tight-knit, self-involved village sized communities, with a compact city focus and of sustainable size. These autonomous amalgamations of leisure, shopping, community and housing uses would recall a sense of proto-industrial pastoral wholesomeness, with all amenities within easy walking distance and non-invasive transportation.
It amounts to literally building everything from the ground up around the notion of enabling and nurturing a sustainable community. Therefore the term of “Urban Village” appears to translate well to the proposed building blocks of the Mirror City: its self-contained autonomous floating islands.
Urban Villages as they exist today in architectural theory and practice have some significant differences to the desired floating islets that constitute the Mirror City constellation: they are single core, simplistic entities, whereas each Mirror City Islet has a number of equally significant public building cores as focal points to all local island neighborhoods; Each conventional Urban Village is thought of as a self-contained, small scale collective. The Villages are ultimately all clones of each other. Their focus is on leisured retreat and not competitive interdependence, as they are not designed from the ground up to be parts of a consistent greater whole. Ultimately the Urban Villages become a reinvention of suburbia, as a coagulation of the homogenous urban sprawl into a mimicry of traditional village typologies – evolutionary cul-de-sacs, modernized self-sufficient variations on the suburban gated communities;
On the other hand The Mirror City Islets are physically autonomous, socially interdependent entities. Albeit structurally similar, they are designed to compete and complement each other functionally and administratively, as constituting parts of a general Urban Master Plan. There is only one city present - the greater floating city, part of the land-and-sea metropolis -, wherein the islets are diverse amalgamations of neighborhoods, segregated into physically autonomous bodies of sustainable size. Surely the islets may function independently for a while, offshore in a new location, but are meant to work in numbers and synergistically as complementing parts of the greater floating city.
From an organizational and functional perspective the Mirrored City subunits are Floating Ilets: whose waterline public Macrostructures function as administrative boroughs, responsible for running local public services, such as schools, social services, public functions, waste collection and infrastructure, independently or as shared services, have commercial semi-public Elevated Walkways and Plazas andhave primarily private Residential & Business towers
Financial and demographic considerations
Building the floating city is determined mainly by a combination of necessity and incentives. This chapter discusses the incentives.
Each or the three Islet levels is designed in such a way that they can pay for themselves. What they have to offer is: public spaces for cultural events and numerous leisure activities and their facilities on the Macrostructure, business ventures opportunities on the vast Walkways level, and state of the art residencies inside the Superstructures – all on the first of its kind landmark waterfront, downtown.
As an alternative to a single developer building everything and then selling and renting the entire Islet bit by bit, one easily identifies four possible parties, paying to make the project float: the permanent residents (the Islanders), the public/private investors, the renting business owners, and the visitors. If each Islet would be a simple gated community, then the added costs of the Macrostructure, Infrastructure and residential Superstructures would go into the apartment prices. It is not the case here, as the public and private sectors play major roles in the construction and capitalization of the complex. While the Flyer Superstructures are mostly bought and paid for by the permanent residents, the business oriented Walkway Level and the leisured Macrostructure advertises themselves as new landmark real estate just across from the old downtown waterfront, open to any interested public or private business interests.
The public Macrostructure: The major player on this level is the municipality (and/or other private investors). Islanders, land residents and tourists alike are the recipients of the nature parks, beaches, marinas, culture domes and public facilities.
The public and semi-public Walkways: A good measure of seasonal small business from outside the Islet, rent the new waterfront property at a premium. The Islanders themselves also trade on the Walkway levels. Necessary administrative facilities are permanently located on this level.
The private and semi-public Flyers: Apartments privately owned and servicing the Islanders. Also other spaces such vertical subsistence gardens, gyms, libraries, ateliers, hotel, open restaurant.
This general purposing model of the three prototype Islet levels, is to some extent flexible and open to interpretation, as long as heavy pedestrian traffic is kept midway between a waterline green level and a sky private level, as this is the spirit of the place.
The permanent size of an Islet (or at least initial, as the Islet can be augmented at any future date), is dictated by the number of residential superstructures that the Islet in question will incorporate in its initial design – the Flyers in this case -, and their size. In the present case of the prototype Borough Islet there are six Flyer superstructures, with two apartment wings each x 7 floors x 7 apartments per floor. That amounts to 588 apartments x 4 max. occupants = 2352 Islet residents as permanent inhabitants, or Islanders.
Each Islet, as a village-sized administrative district of the larger Floating City, requires a number of public and semipublic buildings to function. For its size, the prototype Borough Islet will incorporate for the Islanders alone, an elementary school, local convenience stores and services. As more Islets are added to the floating city, the population increase will consequently demand a greater diversity of public services. Five to eight interconnected Islets will have the equivalent capacity of a town (12.500 – 20.000 people), which needs a high-school, light industry, a civic center, that will be spread among the Islets. The equivalent of five to eight towns congregated on the waterfront already constitute a city (80.000 - 130.000 people), which translates into additional public functions, such as a city centre, hospital, community colleges and heavy industry.
The numbers and functions discussed in this paragraph regard the Flyer superstructures and the Islanders exclusively, and may physically reflect across all three levels of the Islet, not just inside of the Superstructures. Nevertheless, the Islet’s other two levels, the Macrostructure and the business Walkways, are designed to work as part of the extended Metropolis (Land City + Floating City), meaning that the constant influx of commercial and touristic interest from the mainland will manifest itself into the structure and functionality of the respective levels, by having them permanently incorporate added public (cultural and administrative) and semi-public (business and services) functionality. This design philosophy sets the Borough Islet further apart from a Triton City floating unit.
Building the floating city is determined mainly by a combination of necessity and incentives. This chapter discusses the incentives.
Each or the three Islet levels is designed in such a way that they can pay for themselves. What they have to offer is: public spaces for cultural events and numerous leisure activities and their facilities on the Macrostructure, business ventures opportunities on the vast Walkways level, and state of the art residencies inside the Superstructures – all on the first of its kind landmark waterfront, downtown.
As an alternative to a single developer building everything and then selling and renting the entire Islet bit by bit, one easily identifies four possible parties, paying to make the project float: the permanent residents (the Islanders), the public/private investors, the renting business owners, and the visitors. If each Islet would be a simple gated community, then the added costs of the Macrostructure, Infrastructure and residential Superstructures would go into the apartment prices. It is not the case here, as the public and private sectors play major roles in the construction and capitalization of the complex. While the Flyer Superstructures are mostly bought and paid for by the permanent residents, the business oriented Walkway Level and the leisured Macrostructure advertises themselves as new landmark real estate just across from the old downtown waterfront, open to any interested public or private business interests.
The public Macrostructure: The major player on this level is the municipality (and/or other private investors). Islanders, land residents and tourists alike are the recipients of the nature parks, beaches, marinas, culture domes and public facilities.
The public and semi-public Walkways: A good measure of seasonal small business from outside the Islet, rent the new waterfront property at a premium. The Islanders themselves also trade on the Walkway levels. Necessary administrative facilities are permanently located on this level.
The private and semi-public Flyers: Apartments privately owned and servicing the Islanders. Also other spaces such vertical subsistence gardens, gyms, libraries, ateliers, hotel, open restaurant.
This general purposing model of the three prototype Islet levels, is to some extent flexible and open to interpretation, as long as heavy pedestrian traffic is kept midway between a waterline green level and a sky private level, as this is the spirit of the place.
The permanent size of an Islet (or at least initial, as the Islet can be augmented at any future date), is dictated by the number of residential superstructures that the Islet in question will incorporate in its initial design – the Flyers in this case -, and their size. In the present case of the prototype Borough Islet there are six Flyer superstructures, with two apartment wings each x 7 floors x 7 apartments per floor. That amounts to 588 apartments x 4 max. occupants = 2352 Islet residents as permanent inhabitants, or Islanders.
Each Islet, as a village-sized administrative district of the larger Floating City, requires a number of public and semipublic buildings to function. For its size, the prototype Borough Islet will incorporate for the Islanders alone, an elementary school, local convenience stores and services. As more Islets are added to the floating city, the population increase will consequently demand a greater diversity of public services. Five to eight interconnected Islets will have the equivalent capacity of a town (12.500 – 20.000 people), which needs a high-school, light industry, a civic center, that will be spread among the Islets. The equivalent of five to eight towns congregated on the waterfront already constitute a city (80.000 - 130.000 people), which translates into additional public functions, such as a city centre, hospital, community colleges and heavy industry.
The numbers and functions discussed in this paragraph regard the Flyer superstructures and the Islanders exclusively, and may physically reflect across all three levels of the Islet, not just inside of the Superstructures. Nevertheless, the Islet’s other two levels, the Macrostructure and the business Walkways, are designed to work as part of the extended Metropolis (Land City + Floating City), meaning that the constant influx of commercial and touristic interest from the mainland will manifest itself into the structure and functionality of the respective levels, by having them permanently incorporate added public (cultural and administrative) and semi-public (business and services) functionality. This design philosophy sets the Borough Islet further apart from a Triton City floating unit.