With 200,000 people moving from rural to urban spaces every day, they will also be more crowded, which means flooding will wreak even more havoc than it does now. But they’re going to have to learn to live with lots more water in the coming century, when seas are forecast to rise up to 60 cm. Cities have always been built near water: about 90 of the world’s 100 biggest cities are built on coasts or rivers. With the planet’s population set to hit 9 billion by 2050, the world is going to need more housing, mostly in urban areas. Floating buildings, they argue, could help tackle three of the gravest problems facing the planet: rising seas, growing urbanization and ever greater numbers of people. “It changed our vision of what a house is.”Īltering preconceptions on a broader scale is now the aim of a whole cadre of Dutch water architects and engineers. “Normally you think of a house being stable,” Spierenburg laughs. Gardens grow on pontoons moored next to the houses, which rise and fall with water levels but are anchored to piles so that they don’t float away - unless the owners want to, in which case tugboats can move them elsewhere. Kids wear life vests when they play on the jetties that serve as streets. But the floating houses in the neighborhood of IJburg are aquatic life 2.0: they’re not boats, but buildings with plots of water instead of earth. Amsterdam has a history of watery habitations, of course, its houseboats having long attracted free-spirited types. Like neighboring dwellings, Spierenburg’s house floats. Recently she had the painters in, but midjob they downed tools and ran out in fright. Spierenburg shows a visitor around her three-story house, pausing to point out her husband’s woodworking shop and their sauna. Potted olive trees line balconies, and windows afford glimpses of minimalist kitchens and airy rooms decked with art. The Amsterdam street that Monique Spierenburg lives on is a portrait of 21st century prosperity.
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