Late last century, I opened a climate talk in Manly with a little joke about my Redfern house becoming “absolute waterfront.” Not everyone laughed, partly because the image was a map showing that it was, in fact, no joke. This was the future – with Manly well underwater. Now, that future is significantly closer and sea-level rise is inevitable – a global mean of perhaps 480 millimetres by mid-century.1 The land loss will be huge. So, with exploding world population and shrinking land, how will we pattern our cities?
More Water, Less Land, New Architecture, a recent book by Boston-based architect Weston Wright, addresses this question. Accolades from the likes of Paul Goldberger (“an important book”), Kenneth Frampton (“well-researched, stimulating and disturbing”) and Karsten Harries (a “bold proposal”), create lofty expectations that the book does not altogether live up to. Nevertheless, the question it raises is flashing red. What might we mean by the rather soggy-sounding “wet urbanism”? A term not yet in general use, Wright and others use wet urbanism to refer to city-making that responds to the inundation in some human-protective way – by relocating from, floating upon or rising above the floodwaters. It’s no simple thing.
Water is life. Along with sunlight, it underpins both our sciences and our collective imaginings. Water’s particular molecular structure, with its gentle hydrogen-oxygen polarity and the low-level inter-molecular attraction so established, enables life. At the same time, the sparkle of dew on spider webs, the terror of cataclysmic flood and the fact that today’s rain was drunk and peed by dinosaurs have inspired countless poetic imaginings.
This straddling of the cultural divide should make water architecture’s natural medium. It is therefore surprising that so little thought has been given to what will happen to our cities as they are moth-eaten by the tides. It’s huge, this. It’s Noah on steroids. The biblical tale has a startling diagrammatic clarity: vast flood, ubiquitous death, chosen creatures only. You’re with us, or you’re dead, period. But the big wet facing us is broader, slower, deeper and more complicated by far.
All our systems will be challenged, including, first-off, property-based capitalism. From Boston to Sydney, London to Bilbao, innumerable world cities have, over recent decades, reinvested in their waterfronts, turning brownfield industrial land into high-end residential and retail territory, establishing waterfront urbanism as a genre. At the same time, riverside, harbourside and beachside living has become the universal goal. And it’s these prize peripheries that will vanish as sea levels rise.
Imagine if the coastal fringe were the preserve of the poor and indigent. Then, the world might remain as indifferent as it is to the fate of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Maldives (which is expected to lose almost 80 percent of its land area by 2100). But since our urban waterfronts are hogged by the rich and powerful, the sociopolitical ramifications of their loss will make the 2016 collapse of that private Collaroy pool into the waves of climate change look like child’s play.
According to Insurance Australia Group, waterfront property is already becoming uninsurable. Gradually, it will start to vanish. A section diagram in Wright’s book shows the drowned neolithic settlement of Atlit-Yam in Israel and documents others, such as Çatalhöyük in Turkey, which for 1400 years beat rising sea levels by building on top of itself, much as coral reefs do. In Australia, we have our own drowned villages, like the heritage-listed Old Adaminaby, the 1830s town that, sacrificed to the state’s energy appetites, now sits beneath Lake Eucumbene. The pathos of these images will soon become normalized.
Cities like Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, Shenzhen, Dubai, London, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Hamburg and New York are all at significant risk. In China, more than 43 million people will be affected by 2100. Governments and financial systems will face what we might call Lismore Syndrome, but on a mind-boggling scale. How to respond? Compensate? Rebuild? Relocate?
In parallel with this cadastral issue is the design question. How can we build towns and cities to withstand flooding? This is more challenging than it sounds. Humans are mainly water – “wetware,” as they say. But our architecture, especially as agglomerated into cities, is designed principally to oppose all liquefaction.
Most cities are built on water: harbours, coasts, wetlands or rivers. Yet nearly always, as they grow, they work to assiduously remove the water – draining swamps, canalizing rivers, leveeing against floods and reclaiming harbour land. Indeed, you might say that land manufacture has been one of urban planning’s primary tasks.
This relentless desire for dryness could denote our craving for permanence in the face of mortality, or it could signify some atavistic revulsion. (There’s no way, having once crawled from the swamp, we’re going back.) Either way, and Venice notwithstanding, the dryness instinct runs deep. Are we capable of reversing it? Can we see liquid as a viable substrate? Can we treat water as ground?
Here, Wright’s book offers some ideas. Faced with inundation, cities have three options. They can move away, grow taller or float. So, we look at Ron Herron’s legendary Walking City, developed with Archigram in London in 1964; at the eighteenth-century floating palace on the lake at Udaipur (which featured in the Bond film Octopussy); and at the Lausitz Geierswald resort that floats on one of several artificial lakes created to rehabilitate an opencut coal-mining landscape in Germany. Designed by Steeltec37, the resort’s “arks” are supported by a lightweight metal pontoon.
There are more contemporary proposals too, like the 2008 Gyre-Seascraper project from Canadian firm Zigloo – an immense floating submarine tower more than a kilometre in diameter and 400 metres deep. Wholly powered by sun, wind and ocean, it bills itself as a floating city for 2,000 people, complete with gardens, restaurants, tourism and retail. Wright also cites US business tycoon Robert Bigelow’s Mars Habitat, a cluster of living modules designed for the dry red Martian surface.
It’s all very dystopian – technically proficient but experientially punitive. MOMA describes Herron’s Walking City as an “instant and itinerant metropolis,” a series of military submarines that stalk across oceans “with insectlike exoskeletons and periscoping legs … linked by a superstructure of retractable corridors.” Zigloo’s hotel and residential quarters are slung deep below the surface, well into those depths where only blue light penetrates. There are views, mainly of krill and jellyfish – but, given that 50 percent of visible light is absorbed within 10 metres of the surface, not a lot.
There are practical issues here. Do we really think that, given not only rising sea levels but the dramatic increase in flooding rains and major storm events, a floating city on anything other than an artificial lake is plausible? Even a great ocean-top platform pegged down to the seabed starts (in my imagination) to look, after 20 years or so, like a vast, rusted and clanking container ship. Are we thinking we’ll bring up our children there?
There are plenty of precedents for such dissociative futures. Ridley Scott’s 2015 film The Martian, in which Matt Damon must grow four years’ worth of vegies from his own excrement, and the 2020 TV series Snowpiercer imagine futures where hermetic habitats protect humanity from an ultra-hostile environment. These propositions share the old modernist misconception we might call the Corbusian Fallacy, in which we see ourselves and our cities as machines, our needs merely material and mechanical.
Weston too falls into this trap, although I’m sure he knows it’s a fallacy. Neither we nor our cities are machines. Indeed, the city is our greatest collective artwork. An extraordinary, bustling, meaning-making matrix of yearning and endeavour, love and hate, misery and poetry and squalor, the city is reified desire. The objects – be they buildings, pods or insect-legged submarines – may be repositories of that desire. But its conduits – critical enablers of the flux and flow of the hive – are the streets.
This may be why, although we think of buildings as permanent and the spaces between as ephemeral, it’s actually vice versa. Typically, the streets of a city outlast the centuries, while the buildings are replaced. Street patterns ink our desire lines onto the sand. Can we even pencil them in on water?