First Floating Village in Finland

The Marinetek Group and Sito are busy building the first floating village in Pori, Finland.  The floating homes are built to withstand extreme wind and wave conditions, as it could conceivably get choppy on the water.  The buildings will be energy efficient as well, equipped with heat recovery systems and solar panels, as the project will be applying for LEED certification.

Inhabitat reports:

Trucks or cargo ships transport the homes in prefabricated modules to the building site, where they are assembled and lifted onto heavy pontoons. The structures are then floated to their designated locations and anchored to the seabed. They are connected to the municipal water and sewage system with individual waste disposing shredder pumps, which are maintained via inspection hatches located in the piers.

See this website for a slideshow of images: http://inhabitat.com/marinetek-unveils-finlands-first-floating-village/marinetek-group-sito-pori-floating-village-finland-2/?extend=1

While this may look incredibly romantic, the reality is that more and more coastal areas will need to begin constructing floating structures as climate change continues to raise our sea levels.  This previous post, Floating Architecture: Climate Change Relief for Coastal Slums, outlines the increasingly vulnerable situation facing coastal slums as wealthier areas of the world continue to overconsume, and the floating urban modules that Waterstudio has designed to provide services to these areas.  Whether it is viable for human populations to live comfortably and safely floating along shorelines is yet to be seen, which makes these innovative moves by Marinetek (and Waterstudio) so important –if only to test what works and what doesn’t in floating architecture.  Still, we need to be taking every possible step towards a green energy economy so that floating villages like these are special cases, not the norm.  This will involve changing the energy sources we use to allow the economy to function (from fossil fuels to renewables), as well as changing the way the economy itself functions (from a corporatist neoliberal model to a more democratically controlled, social protectionist model).  These innovative new floating buildings and villages will likely prove to be very useful in mitigating climate-related sea level rise around coastal areas as we transition into a lower impact way of life.