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Float On - Utopian scheming in the Maldives
Samaan Nazim was nine years old on December 26, 2004, when he woke to the sound of his shrieking aunt. Shirtless and shoeless, he dashed out of his house on the Maldivian island of GA. Villingili, where he lived with his family only two hundred meters from shore. Nazim was just in time to watch a wall of water smash into the beach. His grandma grabbed his hand and the two of them sprinted away as the wave flattened homes behind them. When the water pulled back out to sea a few days later, sharks lay rotting amid the rubble. The walls of Nazim’s family house were riven with fissures, but it was still standing. “It was a nightmare,” he said, and it showed Nazim how easily his home country—the lowest-lying nation on Earth—could be wiped off the map.
The Maldives has fortified itself against the ocean for decades by building walls, creating new islands, adding a little height to existing ones, and more, but the implacable rise of the sea is a problem that demands ever-more innovative solutions, and so in 2022 the government announced it would construct the world’s first large-scale floating city, creatively named “Maldives Floating City.” To do so, the island nation partnered with two Dutch firms—Dutch Docklands and Waterstudio.NL—to come up with a “sea-level rise-proof urban development” that will allow Maldivians to “rewrite their destiny from climate refugees to climate innovators.
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Samaan Nazim was nine years old on December 26, 2004, when he woke to the sound of his shrieking aunt. Shirtless and shoeless, he dashed out of his house on the Maldivian island of GA. Villingili, where he lived with his family only two hundred meters from shore. Nazim was just in time to watch a wall of water smash into the beach. His grandma grabbed his hand and the two of them sprinted away as the wave flattened homes behind them. When the water pulled back out to sea a few days later, sharks lay rotting amid the rubble. The walls of Nazim’s family house were riven with fissures, but it was still standing. “It was a nightmare,” he said, and it showed Nazim how easily his home country—the lowest-lying nation on Earth—could be wiped off the map.
The Maldives has fortified itself against the ocean for decades by building walls, creating new islands, adding a little height to existing ones, and more, but the implacable rise of the sea is a problem that demands ever-more innovative solutions, and so in 2022 the government announced it would construct the world’s first large-scale floating city, creatively named “Maldives Floating City.” To do so, the island nation partnered with two Dutch firms—Dutch Docklands and Waterstudio.NL—to come up with a “sea-level rise-proof urban development” that will allow Maldivians to “rewrite their destiny from climate refugees to climate innovators.
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Float On | Colin Daileda
In the Maldives, a plan to build a floating city is less a solution to the climate crisis than it is a potential escape for globetrotters with heaps of disposable income.
thebaffler.com