Lilypad: Floating city of the future

As the climate warms up and the ocean level increases, there are two huge ice reservoirs that are not on the water and whose melting will transfer their volume towards the oceans, leading to their rising.

It deals with the ice caps of Antarctic and Greenland on the one hand, and the continental glaciers on the other hand.

The international scientific scene asserts that a temperature elevation of 1°C will lead to a water rising of 1 meter.

This increase of 1 m would cause ground losses: approximately 0.05% in Uruguay, 1% in Egypt, 6% in the Netherlands, 17.5% in Bangladesh and up to 80% approximately in the atoll Majuro in Oceania.

If the first meter is serious with more than 50 million of people affected in the developing countries, the situation is worse with the second one.

Countries like Vietnam, Egypt, Bangladesh, Guyana or Bahamas will see their most inhabited places swamped at each flood and their most fertile fields devastated by the invasion of salt water damaging the local ecosystems.

New York, Mumbai, Calcutta, Hô Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Miami, Lagos, Abidjan, Djakarta, Alexandria 0- not less that 250 million of climatic refugees and 9% of the GDP will be threatened if we do not build protections related to such a threat.

The findings by a climatological study of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) challenge our ideas of of eco-conception!

The water rising issue is not in the agenda of the Grenelle agreements on environment in France. It is important in terms of environmental crisis and climatic exodus.

While some islands prepare for the disaster, the issue does not seem to worry some of the governments beyond any measure.

More surprising is to see that populations of the developed countries continue to rush to the littoral zones to build houses and buildings.

Whereas the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates fatten their beach with billion of euros to build their short-living polders and their protective dams for a decade, the project Lilypad deals with a tenable solution to the water rising.

This floating Ecopolis has the double objective of not only widening sustainability in offshore territories of the most developed countries such as the Monaco principality, also grant housing to future climatic refugees of submerged ultra-marine territories such as the Polynesian atolls.

New biotechnological prototype of ecologic resilience dedicated to the nomadism and the urban ecology in the sea, Lilypad travels on the water line of the oceans, from the equator to the poles following the marine streams warm ascending of the Gulf Stream or cold descending of the Labrador.

It is a true amphibian half aquatic and half terrestrial city, able to accommodate 50,000 inhabitants and inviting the biodiversity to develop its fauna and flora around a central lagoon of soft water collecting and purifying the rain waters.

The multifunctional programming is based on three marinas and three mountains dedicated respectively to the work, the shops and the entertainments.

The whole set is covered by a stratum of planted housing in suspended gardens and crossed by a network of streets and alleyways with organic outline.

The goal is to create a harmonious coexistence of the couple Human / Nature and to explore new modes of living the sea by building with fluidity collective spaces in proximity, overwhelming spaces of social inclusion suitable to the meeting of all the inhabitants – denizen or foreign-born, recent or old, young or aged people.

The floating structure in branches of the Ecopolis is directly inspired of the highly ribbed leave of the great lilypad of Amazonia Victoria Regia increased 250 times.

Coming from the family of Nympheas, this aquatic plant with exceptional plasticity was discovered by the German botanist Thaddeaus Haenke and dedicated to the Queen Victoria of England in the 19th Century.

The double skin is made of polyester fibres covered by a layer of titanium dioxide (TiO2) like an anatase which by reacting to the ultraviolet rays enable to absorb the atmospheric pollution by photocatalytic effect.

Entirely autosufficient, Lilypad takes up the four main challenges launched by the OECD in March 2008: climate, biodiversity, water and health.

It reached a positive energetic balance with zero carbone emission by the integration of all the renewable energies (solar, thermal and photovoltaic energies, wind energy, hydraulic, tidal power station, osmotic energies, phytopurification, biomass) producing thus durably more energy that it consumes!

True biotope entirely recyclable, this floating Ecopolis tends thus towards the positive eco-accountancy of the building in the oceanic ecosystems by producing and softening itself the oxygen and the electricity, by recycling the CO2 and the waste, by purifying and softening biologically the used waters and by integrating ecological niches, aquaculture fields and biotic corridors on and under its body to meet its own food needs.

Lilypad is modeled on anticipation particular to the Jules Verne’s literature, the alternative possibility of a multicultural floating Ecopolis whose metabolism would be in perfect symbiosis with the cycles of the nature.

It will be one of the major challenges of the 21st Century to create an international convention inventing new special means to accommodate the environmental migrants by recognizing their rights and obligations.

Political and social challenge, the urban sustainable development must more than ever enter in resonance worldly with the human sustainable development!

Images and Text: © Vincent Callebaut Architectures