Global Warming’s Latest Innovation – The Water City

Today, we face the nearly inevitable future of a very warm earth with oceans many metres higher than they are today. The mechanism for this to occur is something we are all familiar with – World gets Hot; Polar Ice Melts; Oceans Rise. With necessity being the mother of invention, the ever-resourceful people of Holland have come up with a means of surviving the post-apocalyptic water world that we face. Sadly, Kevin Costner is not a part of the grand scheme.

Instead, our urban planning seers have started to sketch out plans for Water Cities – giant floating citadels that are either anchored to the sea floor or drift around the planet peacefully as the residents inside them live their lives as normal. The great thing about these water cities will be the fact that they can move around.


Too cold here? We’ll just steer the city towards somewhere warmer. Too hot? We’ll just head somewhere a little cooler. What could feasibly occur is the development of the city of endless summer, a massive paradise citadel that chases the sun all year around. Think of it as being like Fairstar the Fun Ship, only you get to live there 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Taking it a step further, it would be possible to create more than just an endless summer. It may even be possible to create perfect weather conditions all year around. Even at the present level of meteorological  wisdom, we could plot a course around the earth’s oceans so that the weather was as close to ideal as possible. Anyway, back to the Dutch and what they are doing. We’re already seeing an increase in the number of houseboats in Europe. The key difference is these houseboats are not simply the glorified caravan-boats that people cruise around in for their holidays. No, we’re talking full scale houses that people live in 365 days a year. Life on these houseboats is not bad either, they are then moored in very still waterways, so there is almost zero rocking motion from water.

Already we’ve seen the floating neighbourhood. Collections of several houses that form a block, all tethered together to form the neighbourhood. There are even shared zones between the houses. Kids need to wear life-jackets when they play on the balconies, but as the size of these neighbourhood blocks increases, we’ll see less of that needed. In fact, only people at the edges need such measures to be taken. In terms of a huge floating citadel, it’s likely it would be contained in some sort of dome. The final consideration would be farming. The thing to consider is would there be a need to have floating farms as well, or would the remaining dry land be used for farms. These are questions that time may get to answer. All said, if water cities get invented and implemented, the promise of eternal summer means the post-apocalyptic water world may not be such a bad thing.

This light-hearted look at Global Warming and environmental issues was bought to you by the house cleaning experts at United Home Services.