World’s first floating city, in South Korea, might be completed by 2025

Team Udayavani, Nov 24, 2021, 10:48 AM IST

Source: Times Now

The world’s first floating city, to be built off the coast of South Korea, is expected to be finished by 2025.

The city, backed by the United Nations, will be built off the coast of Busan to combat rising sea levels. It will be a ‘flood-proof infrastructure,’ according to the project leaders, consisting of many man-made islands that will rise with the sea to eliminate the possibility of flooding.

According to a Mail Online report, the self-sufficient city, which is a collaboration between OCEANIX and the UN Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habit), will generate its own electricity from solar panels, produce its own food and fresh water, and ferry tourists and residents between the island on specially-made boats.

According to local estimates, the city would be 75 hectares in size and will house 10,000 people. The neighbourhoods will be arranged into six clusters around a central harbour that will be protected. This means that each hamlet might have a population of up to 1,650 people.

Floods, tsunamis, and Category 5 hurricanes will all be natural disasters that the city will be built to resist.

That’s not all, though. The city will be built in such a way that it will dynamically expand, evolve, and adapt over time.

Construction on the project, which is expected to cost $200 million, will begin soon. The ‘historic agreement’ has already been signed by the Republic of Korea’s Busan Metropolitan City, UN-Habitat, and New York designers OCEANIX.

“It just happened that Busan is the best place for us to deploy this prototype. But this is something that we hope will be useful to all coastal cities around the world, and all coastal communities who are facing the challenge of sea-level rise,” Itai Madamombe, co-founder of OCEANIX, told Business Insider.

To meet the needs of the community, OCEANIX will cooperate with local designers. According to sources, the work’s findings will be presented at a UN panel in April.