Their argument that 2/3rds the world is covered in water means it's a good place to build houses seems strained at best. Diversifying housing styles seems like a good idea in general but the number of problems you get probably outweigh the benefits, like your house could sink, get blown away in a storm, where would you "dock" it to begin with, and how do you manage all the utility connections. Good luck to them but leaving my home firmly attached to earth thanks.
> Their argument that 2/3rds the world is covered in water means it's a good place to build houses seems strained at best.
Agreed. The houses in the article's pictures are in a city canal and docked. They're basically using urban real estate that happens to be covered in water. Locations where you can do that are a very small fraction of Earth's area.
How this translates into using the 2/3rds of the world that's covered in water doesn't seem to be something they've really addressed.
Most of humanity lives near coasts and rivers. The idea of these houses is that they're flooding resistant: they just move up and down with changing water levels. They're well anchored, but indeed utility connection are a weak spot, perhaps modulated by having solar panels.
In either case, they obviate the need for precise and expensive regional water table control, for which the Netherlands is famous. That kind of control isn't a feasible solution for many countries, whereas floating houses would be.
I'm not sure these houses are the answer though, but perhaps they'll come with some other answers to questions related to living in this way.
Sure, floating houses in middle of ocean is awful idea. But one can imagine some habitats that could work in lakes and calmer seas and this could be important step. First learn which materials work over long periods, achieve structural stability, and solve numerous other practical matters in safe environment. It is easier to iterate and failure is less expensive.
I have bigger problem with sticking the open source label when all they share is couple of email addresses.
People have been living on docked boats in the Netherlands for very long. Lots of cities have old barges with students living on them. Some of these are very old. Going circular here opens up a lot more areas to habitation as you need less infrastructure to make it work. Those old house boats have electricity, water, sewage, and gas connections. You don't need any of that if you can do everything on site.
You are floating in water. All you need to do to use it is filter it. For waste water, you need to clean it up before you release it back to where it came from. Most of the tap water in Amsterdam comes from the water that surrounds it in any case. For energy, solar, wind, and batteries should go a long way. The main thing you need is enough square meters for the panels. 50KW should go a long way even on very cloudy winter days. If you insulate the houses/boats properly (i.e. lower your energy needs) it barely needs any heating or cooling. Also, you are floating in water, which makes heat exchange pumps really easy (no need to dig in the ground). Lots of nice engineering problems to solve there. Phone/internet can be wireless these days 4G/5G, or space link. There is no need for gas if you heat & cook electric. This looks like it still uses some shared infrastructure (probably for cost/efficiency reasons) but you could feasibly design something that is completely self sufficient. The key thing is to make durable structures that don't need a lot of maintenance, that are energy efficient, etc.
As for the other risks. Boats sink occasionally but rarely when they are safely docked in a harbor. You obviously don't want to dock in a place that has currents, large waves, etc. There are plenty of secluded lakes, channels, etc. that should be perfectly fine for this.
> There are plenty of secluded lakes, channels, etc. that should be perfectly fine for this.
No there are not plenty. Sure 70% of the earth is covered in water, but only 2.5% is freshwater, and a fair amount of that is lakes large enough to have currents and large waves as well (I don't know how to figure out how much is stable enough that you could consider living on a boat there. I think we can estimate that 2% of the earth is the type of place where you could consider living in a boat - and much of that isn't a place where you want to live (ie not a city), and the rest needs to a lot of land reserved for shipping lanes.
Living in a boat is an interesting niche that a few people can do. However it isn't a solution for any housing problem.
That's actually a lot. The Netherlands is a very densely populated area (one of the most dense in the world) and only a few percent of its land is actually city. Much of it is farmland or water. The housing shortages only exist in dense clusters of populations where arguably there is not even any land shortage; just artificial scarcity in the form of not having permission to build on that land. High rise buildings are controversial in a lot of places.
That's true in Amsterdam, and it's true in San Francisco. And it's true in Berlin where I currently live. Plenty of space to build cheap apartments on but it's controversial in all three to do so. So, this is a nice solution/workaround for this artificial scarcity. I imagine the Bay would be suitable for living on. But of course most of it is protected nature. That's a much more valid concern than the notion that there's not enough water.
I actually looked into what it would take to put a housing boat in the Spree (river that runs through Berlin). People actually do that and you can get some decent value for money! Obviously it won't scale before local authorities put a stop to that (to preserve the local artificially scarcity and locked up wealth). But it's an interesting loophole if you are a bit entrepreneurial. No expensive land needed to build on. Easy access to reasonably fashionable parts of town. Etc. All you need is a boat and permission to dock it somewhere. As long as that permission is still easy to get, it's a valid thing to pursue.
> This leaves only 37% for forests; 11% as shrubs and grasslands; 1% as freshwater coverage; and the remaining 1% – a much smaller share than many suspect – is built-up urban area which includes cities, towns, villages, roads and other human infrastructure.
that fresh water is rivers and ports used for shipping, so the water isn't available. Or fishing villages that have more than enough dry land to build on.
I think a more interesting thought might be - many if not most cities have been built next to water, and now the purpose of the water has disappeared.
Since the rise of container shipping, lots of city infrastructure near the water has been made obsolete. Loading docks, warehouses, manufacturing and all the rest have been replaced. Now you have a container parking lot and a gantry usually in a cheaper location with uncongested rail and freeway access, which is no longer directly in an urban center.
"This fundamental transformation of where warehouse work was performed freed up valuable waterfront real estate near the central business districts of port cities around the world for redevelopment and led to a plethora of waterfront revitalization projects (such as warehouse districts)."
If you're in the lowlands, then the risk of flooding during a storm is most definitely non-zero. In the UK, developers have been building on flood planes because the land is cheap. So a floating house just cuts out the middleman.
In holland, people have been living on barges for _years_. It's partly why I'd never swim in the canals in amsterdam, because those old barges discharge effluent. However hooking up utilities is trivial, pipes are bendy, and moorings are mostly fixed.
The advantage of floating houses in this instance is the portability. Not only can a house be built at a factory and moved, reducing price. But if the mooring terms and conditions are terrible, one can move.
No they don't. In 2008 the government decided that by 2018 all houseboats/barges/other boats that people live on had to be connected to the sewage system. It's possible that there are still a few stragglers but as a rule they don't.
No problem. I haven't lived in Amsterdam since the 80's but I do occasionally visit and the effect has been quite noticeable when walking along the canals, especially on summer days.
>Their argument that 2/3rds the world is covered in water means it's a good place to build houses seems strained at best
that's strained for sure, but it does follow that it is a good idea to solve the problem of building housing on water that solves the attendant problems.
Wikipedia on Almere: "Almere is the newest city in the Netherlands: the land on which the city sits, the Southern Flevoland polder, was reclaimed from the IJsselmeer from 1959 to 1968. "
This created buildable waters. But rather than just building land on the water and houses on the land, one can directly build houses on the (buildable) water.
Ohh now I see it, thanks. I was looking at the bottom of the picture and I didn't see it connected. I completely missed that there is stuff connected to solid ground under the bridge.
Processed by the bio-refinery, and turned into (mostly) energy.
These systems already exist; they're expensive, and not really modular, but for ~100 people it should be doable without too many problems. Harder and more expensive to do for a single family home.
I am working on a (side) project to plan and launch a small community of houses built on water, pretty much in a similar way. (in my case, the candidate site is the Venice lagoon in Italy).
The main advantage is that you can remove most of the senseless regulatory constraints - and if you do it right, there's mostly just upside. Building costs are slightly higher, but you also get other benefits, such as protection from earthquakes.
Granted, this has to be done in a water area that is not subject to unusual weather situations.
It is not for everybody, sure. But it is something probably worth experimenting with.
It is, and having spent much time in The Netherlands, I find this honesty to be typically Dutch. They usually don't mince words and seem to have a somewhat shared and implicit understanding that real cooperation can't happen without acknowledging and addressing the problems facing them.
> ...the cost of docking, water, garbage, sewer, and parking. In total, residents typically spend around $1,100 on these expenses, with additional budgets for other amenities like cable and Internet [which may be more expensive than normal?] Given the smaller house payments, however, these fees become less burdensome.
Fine by me, let people who actually need to commute live in housing close to where they work, and let the rich people who have the money to beta test eco tech do so, even if they're just doing it to flex on each other.
How important is the "floating" part here? How much of this can be adapted to inland dwelling?
Also how resistant is this type of home to storms? New York for instance gets big dangerous storm surges once in a while, not to mention areas farther south along the east coast of the USA.
> How much of this can be adapted to inland dwelling?
From a cursory glance - most of it.
But it's a semi-commune, anyway, so you need willing participants. I would _love_ to move into a place like that myself... but capitalist societies don't tend to encourage this type of communal projects as an alternative to atomized individualist social arrangements.
Communities like this pop up regularly but are naturally unstable. They sometimes (often?) work great while their members are like-minded, young and healthy. Over the years the population inevitably drifts and the community either collapses or becomes more and more embedded in the surrounding society, which has more stable institutions to deal with people not thinking alike.
Check out the Utopia series [0] from "The Theory of Everything" podcast for some examples.
I'm sure there's a term for this but it's a common marketing strategy to create a new buzzword to cause inquisitive minds to wonder and then make your website the only place where information is found.
I believe this is one of those cases, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were deliberate.
Maybe it's because I am visiting the site abroad but there isn't a Dutch version of this page? The Englishification of Amsterdam and other major cities in The Netherlands are starting to worry me.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadAgreed. The houses in the article's pictures are in a city canal and docked. They're basically using urban real estate that happens to be covered in water. Locations where you can do that are a very small fraction of Earth's area.
How this translates into using the 2/3rds of the world that's covered in water doesn't seem to be something they've really addressed.
In either case, they obviate the need for precise and expensive regional water table control, for which the Netherlands is famous. That kind of control isn't a feasible solution for many countries, whereas floating houses would be.
I'm not sure these houses are the answer though, but perhaps they'll come with some other answers to questions related to living in this way.
I have bigger problem with sticking the open source label when all they share is couple of email addresses.
You are floating in water. All you need to do to use it is filter it. For waste water, you need to clean it up before you release it back to where it came from. Most of the tap water in Amsterdam comes from the water that surrounds it in any case. For energy, solar, wind, and batteries should go a long way. The main thing you need is enough square meters for the panels. 50KW should go a long way even on very cloudy winter days. If you insulate the houses/boats properly (i.e. lower your energy needs) it barely needs any heating or cooling. Also, you are floating in water, which makes heat exchange pumps really easy (no need to dig in the ground). Lots of nice engineering problems to solve there. Phone/internet can be wireless these days 4G/5G, or space link. There is no need for gas if you heat & cook electric. This looks like it still uses some shared infrastructure (probably for cost/efficiency reasons) but you could feasibly design something that is completely self sufficient. The key thing is to make durable structures that don't need a lot of maintenance, that are energy efficient, etc.
As for the other risks. Boats sink occasionally but rarely when they are safely docked in a harbor. You obviously don't want to dock in a place that has currents, large waves, etc. There are plenty of secluded lakes, channels, etc. that should be perfectly fine for this.
No there are not plenty. Sure 70% of the earth is covered in water, but only 2.5% is freshwater, and a fair amount of that is lakes large enough to have currents and large waves as well (I don't know how to figure out how much is stable enough that you could consider living on a boat there. I think we can estimate that 2% of the earth is the type of place where you could consider living in a boat - and much of that isn't a place where you want to live (ie not a city), and the rest needs to a lot of land reserved for shipping lanes.
Living in a boat is an interesting niche that a few people can do. However it isn't a solution for any housing problem.
That's true in Amsterdam, and it's true in San Francisco. And it's true in Berlin where I currently live. Plenty of space to build cheap apartments on but it's controversial in all three to do so. So, this is a nice solution/workaround for this artificial scarcity. I imagine the Bay would be suitable for living on. But of course most of it is protected nature. That's a much more valid concern than the notion that there's not enough water.
I actually looked into what it would take to put a housing boat in the Spree (river that runs through Berlin). People actually do that and you can get some decent value for money! Obviously it won't scale before local authorities put a stop to that (to preserve the local artificially scarcity and locked up wealth). But it's an interesting loophole if you are a bit entrepreneurial. No expensive land needed to build on. Easy access to reasonably fashionable parts of town. Etc. All you need is a boat and permission to dock it somewhere. As long as that permission is still easy to get, it's a valid thing to pursue.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
It seems that human development and freshwater are the same.
Since the rise of container shipping, lots of city infrastructure near the water has been made obsolete. Loading docks, warehouses, manufacturing and all the rest have been replaced. Now you have a container parking lot and a gantry usually in a cheaper location with uncongested rail and freeway access, which is no longer directly in an urban center.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization#Effects
"This fundamental transformation of where warehouse work was performed freed up valuable waterfront real estate near the central business districts of port cities around the world for redevelopment and led to a plethora of waterfront revitalization projects (such as warehouse districts)."
In holland, people have been living on barges for _years_. It's partly why I'd never swim in the canals in amsterdam, because those old barges discharge effluent. However hooking up utilities is trivial, pipes are bendy, and moorings are mostly fixed.
The advantage of floating houses in this instance is the portability. Not only can a house be built at a factory and moved, reducing price. But if the mooring terms and conditions are terrible, one can move.
No they don't. In 2008 the government decided that by 2018 all houseboats/barges/other boats that people live on had to be connected to the sewage system. It's possible that there are still a few stragglers but as a rule they don't.
I haven't lived there since 2005 so my information is out of date
that's strained for sure, but it does follow that it is a good idea to solve the problem of building housing on water that solves the attendant problems.
Reclaimed isn't quite the right word. They turned ocean into land. This was possible because of a megadike construction project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuiderzee_Works
This created buildable waters. But rather than just building land on the water and houses on the land, one can directly build houses on the (buildable) water.
The scope of ambition is truly inspiring.
These systems already exist; they're expensive, and not really modular, but for ~100 people it should be doable without too many problems. Harder and more expensive to do for a single family home.
I am working on a (side) project to plan and launch a small community of houses built on water, pretty much in a similar way. (in my case, the candidate site is the Venice lagoon in Italy).
The main advantage is that you can remove most of the senseless regulatory constraints - and if you do it right, there's mostly just upside. Building costs are slightly higher, but you also get other benefits, such as protection from earthquakes.
Granted, this has to be done in a water area that is not subject to unusual weather situations.
It is not for everybody, sure. But it is something probably worth experimenting with.
> ...the cost of docking, water, garbage, sewer, and parking. In total, residents typically spend around $1,100 on these expenses, with additional budgets for other amenities like cable and Internet [which may be more expensive than normal?] Given the smaller house payments, however, these fees become less burdensome.
Open borders for thee; selective high trust community for me!
Also how resistant is this type of home to storms? New York for instance gets big dangerous storm surges once in a while, not to mention areas farther south along the east coast of the USA.
From a cursory glance - most of it.
But it's a semi-commune, anyway, so you need willing participants. I would _love_ to move into a place like that myself... but capitalist societies don't tend to encourage this type of communal projects as an alternative to atomized individualist social arrangements.
Check out the Utopia series [0] from "The Theory of Everything" podcast for some examples.
[0] https://theoryofeverythingpodcast.com/series/utopia/
If yes, why?
If no? What are our concerns and how can we take action?
The alternative interpretation sounds faintly new age to me.
I believe this is one of those cases, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were deliberate.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy