World's first floating village to breathe new life into old dream.

Cities at sea, afloat on the waves, have long been a cherished dream for forward-thinking architects and science fiction writers. Now the world’s first fully floating community is set to take shape in the turquoise waters of a Tahitian lagoon.

Blue Frontiers, a Singapore-based start-up, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the French Polynesian government to build a $60-million floating village on the south side of the main island of Tahiti, with a prospective starting date of 2020.

The village will serve as a showcase and test bed for technologies that will be needed to create much larger floating communities, says Joe Quirk, president of the Seasteading Institute, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that is the driving force behind Blue Frontiers. The institute hopes one day to establish full-scale floating cities that could flourish outside the territorial waters of existing nations.


Tahiti’s floating village will be just inside the island’s protective coral reef, in water about 100 feet deep some 1,000 yards from shore. Plans call for 200 to 300 people to live and work there on a dozen or so floating platforms, each about the size of a baseball diamond. The platforms will be connected by walkways into a combined area of 7,500 square feet.

Quirk says he expects the floating village to thrive through a combination of eco-tourism and new aquatic industries like seaweed farming and wave power.

“We’re going to have bungalows, we’re going to have apartments, we’re going to have research institutions, we’re going to have an underwater restaurant,” Quirk says. “It will be a tourist attraction in its own right, and a showcase for sustainable societies. We plan for these platforms to increase the density of sea life as animals and plants attach to it. You’ll go down into the basement and look through the glass walls and see the sea life… to really introduce people to how floating societies can be environmentally restorative.”

UTOPIAS AT SEA

A community afloat on the ocean, sometimes known as a “seastead,” has appealed to generations of thinkers and dreamers. Among the notable ideas is Triton City, designed in the 1960s by the American inventor Buckminster Fuller: a town of 5,000 people floating on Japan’s Tokyo Bay, as a seaborne extension for one the world most densely populated cities.