Years ago I read something about a Singaporean or Hong Kong billionaire who wanted o build a floating city. This would be basically a collection of (very) sturdy barge-like floats, connected together by giant universal joints. In area, the whole structure would be about 1 square mile, and the floating city would have a superstructure with housing units, There would also be a centrallake with aprks and trees,jogging paths, and greenery. The beauty of this approach would be that it could be towed to any desireable area-you could live off England, or the coast of Florida,or off Alaska (if the people wanted it).
At he time, he cost was estimated at >5 billion dollars, and the city could accomodate over 200,000 people. Electric power would be provided by diesal generators, with solar and wind power possibly added.
Will floating cities like this ever be built? 
Maybe, but I wouldn’t want to be on it in a storm.
It is always possible, but I would imagine many great problems such as waste disposal, human byproducts/pollution, supplies, etc etc would have to be overcome first. It would be far easier to start a city somewhere inland than use that many resources for an isolated city. And this isn’t even mentioning the social and economic effects of the floating city - I’d find it hard to imagine that many jobs open in that area, much less what would happen when the population expanded in the next generation.
SUPPLIES: No problem. Supply this city the same way we supply every other city: with a big road and regular truckloads of stuff. The road could be built as an elevated highway, or a bridge.
WASTE: Um… good question. Designing a sewer system to work on a series of interlinked barges would be a hell of a trick, and we sure don’t want to just dump all this stuff into the surrounding water.
POWER: Man, I wonder. Power lines would need to be flexible as all hell. So would conduits between the barges.
So far, I don’t see a “CITY” being very feasible. A theme park of some sort, maybe. A floating garden. A resort. But a city? An actual functional living and working environment for thousands of people? I really don’t know about that.
Oh, yes…
STORMS: Man, I wanna see the universal joint system that won’t get ripped to pieces by the first hurricane or typhoon that sweeps through there. And even if it could survive, would you want to be living there? True, Californians put up with earthquakes occasionally, but depending on where this city is built, it may well be more than an occasional thing. The Texas Gulf Coast gets at least one decent hurricane every YEAR!
After some more thought, it occurs to me that you MIGHT could manage a big umbilical – running under the main highway, perhaps – for sewer, fresh water, power, gas, and so on…
…at least, until I consider what a gaggle of terrorists could do with that…
Didn’t Norm MacDonald do this on Weekend Update when they were floating (ha!) the idea of a floating airport for San Diego?
“San Diego is pursuing the idea of building a flaoting airport off the Pacific coast. It’s part of a city strategy to host a giant disaster.”
My guess is that, if floating cities will ever be built, it will be well into the future. Just recently the Hong Kong Airport land mass was built by dumping large quantities of earth into the Ocean near the coastline. While I’m not sure about the area of this new land mass, I do know that it was large enough to fit a runway that is 3.8 km. long. So as long as creating new land out of ocean is the most financially practical means of dealing with crowded areas along the coastline, I don’t believe that floating cities will be practical.
If, however, for some reason, someone wanted to create a populated area on top of the Mariana Trench (something like 7 miles deep, I believe), then that’s a different story.
The new Chek Lap Kok airport in HongKong was built by enlarging an existing island, it is not built entirely over filled-in area. It just required moving earth by taking off the top of the island and dumping it into the sea. It is not a special thing which has not been done in plenty of places before and the Kowloon peninsula itself has a lot of area filled in to expand it…
The whole thing though is a great example of engineering and I admire it every time I go there. The airport itself, the highway, the bridges, the train, are all very impressive.
More along the lines of the OP are the floating bridges like the ones in Seattle.
I’m skeptical about the price tag. 5 billion/200,000 is what, $25K/person? Your average house costs more than that. I would guess that even apartment buildings cost more than $25K/unit. And the architects don’t have to worry about the myriad issues of hosting infrastructure on a boat – excessive humidity and corrosion, power generation, and so on. The only way you could get the per-person cost down to $25K would be to have tiny cabins immediately adjacent to each other with very little storage space. And we have those today – they’re called cruise ships. But I don’t think you’d want to live on one for an extended period.
If you did build such a city, waste reclamation would probably be necessary. You’d probably do a lot of composting. And you’d probably be better off not asking where your drinking water was coming from.
Just wanted to echo what sailor said – the amount of land reclaimation in Hong Kong is mind-boggling. Every time I go there, I feel like it’s a new city, with all the neighborhoods and areas that didn’t exist the last time I was there.
Didn’t Fuller design a floating pyramid a mile on a, (base), side
Dampen the flexing of the joints by means of hydraulic pistons; the action of these would generate usable pressure to drive a turbine generator - the added advantage being that, as you have extracted some energy from the wave, it has to get smaller - it ought to be possible to make the central section quite stable this way.
Another big floating structure is the dike at the Condamine harbor in Monaco which was built in southern Spain and towed to Monaco. Pretty big floating thing with garages and stuff inside.
http://www.structurae.net/en/structures/data/str04215.php
Materials:
dyke structure precast prestressed concrete
Dimensions & Quantities:
total length 352 m
weight 163 000 t
draft 16 m
base width 44.00 m
topside width 28.00 m
height 19 m
concrete volume 44 000 m3
reinforcing steel 10 500 t
prestressing steel 3 200 t
Well, I don’t know lot’s of people seem to like the idea.
Well, the apartments on that particular cruise ship don’t exactly resemble the budget cabins I was envisioning. And check out the price tags!
"Studio residences with verandas begin at USD$850,000, with additional floor plans available.
One-bedroom apartments featuring walk-in closets and verandas are available for pre-purchase at USD$1,800,000. Additional floor plans are also available.
The World’s selection of two-bedroom apartments commences at USD$2,255,000. Three-bedroom apartments commence at USD$4,342,000. "
This seems to confirm the point I was making – the per person charge for a floating city is more likely to be around $1,000,000 than $25K (although you could probably cut down on the cost considerably if you eliminate the luxury fripperies). For a 200,000 person city, you start venturing into numbers that need scientific notation.
Well, first of all, “land reclamation” and “floating island” are two different beasts. If you want to create more land by dumping stuff into the ocean until it pokes out at the top, and then build a house on the poking-out part, that’s one thing. Building a platform that floats atop the water, without ground support, is another thing entirely.
Sure, if we lop off mountains and drop them into shallow water, we can make more real estate, and if they can do this cost-effectively in Kowloon, well, more power to them. But there’s no real difference between building on this and building on ordinary dry land, is there?
I think what you’re looking for is the Freedom Ship
According to my copy of The Dymaxion World Of Buckminster Fuller (Anchor Doubleday 1973), two miles
I was thinking a bunch of interconnected Fuller domes might be the way to go. Stable, sturdy, cheap, etc.
Think, darn it!!
Icebergs.
Titanic.
Celene Dion.
We can’t let a diaster like that happen again.
And that ship sinking was pretty bad, too.