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Float On

Utopian scheming in the Maldives

Samaan Nazim was nine years old on December 26, 2004, when he woke to the sound of his shrieking aunt. Shirtless and shoeless, he dashed out of his house on the Maldivian island of GA. Villingili, where he lived with his family only two hundred meters from shore. Nazim was just in time to watch a wall of water smash into the beach. His grandma grabbed his hand and the two of them sprinted away as the wave flattened homes behind them. When the water pulled back out to sea a few days later, sharks lay rotting amid the rubble. The walls of Nazim’s family house were riven with fissures, but it was still standing. “It was a nightmare,” he said, and it showed Nazim how easily his home country—the lowest-lying nation on Earth—could be wiped off the map.

The Maldives has fortified itself against the ocean for decades by building walls, creating new islands, adding a little height to existing ones, and more, but the implacable rise of the sea is a problem that demands ever-more innovative solutions, and so in 2022 the government announced it would construct the world’s first large-scale floating city, creatively named “Maldives Floating City.” To do so, the island nation partnered with two Dutch firms—Dutch Docklands and Waterstudio.NL—to come up with a “sea-level rise-proof urban development” that will allow Maldivians to “rewrite their destiny from climate refugees to climate innovators.”

Should it ever be completed, the finished product will resemble an enormous brain coral made up of hundreds of interlocking platforms that will serve as the base for five thousand homes and an array of restaurants, shops, and schools. The platforms will be tethered to the sea floor, allowing the city to rise with the tide while making sure that residents don’t float off to India. Bicycles will be allowed, but there will be no cars, motorcycles, or mopeds. If residents want to get around more quickly, they can hop into one of the readily available boats that will be docked along the city’s canals. The capital, Malé, will be just ten minutes away.

Construction is set to begin this month. Assuming, optimistically, that the project encounters no delays, the whole thing will take five years to finish and will cost an estimated $1 billion, all of which will be paid by private investors. The colony will be, according to developers, “the backbone of future floating cities” around the world, providing “a solution in response to the urgency caused by rising sea levels.” But Maldivians and outside experts have their doubts. For many of them, the anticipated cost of housing alone—far more than the nation’s average household income—is a sign that the project isn’t a broadly applicable solution to a global crisis so much as a potential escape for globetrotters with heaps of disposable income. “There is no way any Maldivian can afford or compete in buying those homes,” Nazim said. “It’s just a marketing thing for tourism.”

Nazim now runs an environmental nonprofit called Maldives Conservational Society, and he and scientists from the Maldives and elsewhere believe there is at least one significant and more cost-effective way to provide a future for the country as a whole—if only it could generate the kind of hype that leads to funding.


I met Ibrahim Riyaz on an August afternoon at the harbor in Hulhumalé, an artificial island just across the China-Maldives Friendship Bridge from the capital, as a charcoal avalanche of clouds spilled across the sky. Riyaz is the director of the Maldives Floating City project, and his job for the last few years has been to wrestle project approvals out of different government offices. I was there to see a full-scale model of one of the platforms that will comprise the floating city, but the clouds suddenly erupted. We huddled under a covered part of the pier as waves crashed over the concretized shore and rain pelted everything around us.

These utopian schemes tend to leave out the workers required to make them function.

This is how storms in the Maldives behave now, Riyaz shouted over the roar. They used to pass by during predictable times of year at predictable times of day, but they now barrel through whenever, fierce tantrums that rush past as though they have somewhere more important to be. Tropical storms also swirl across the islands with increasing frequency and ferocity, and both flooding and coastal erosion are getting worse. By 2100, catastrophic “once-in-a-century” floods could very well become an annual occurrence.

The storm moved on in half an hour, leaving only its spitting remnants as the two of us climbed into a small boat. We zipped around yachts and fishing vessels anchored behind the harbor wall and soon pulled alongside a platform supporting a royal blue and sea green duplex across a sandy walkway from a butter yellow mock café. I stepped onto the manmade ground, startling two black crabs who scuttled away.

Riyaz envisions a community like the one he grew up in, back when Malé was more neighborhood than city, a place where kids can wander because everyone knows everyone. He hopes the Maldives Floating City will be filled with full-time residents, and he said that a portion of the city will be reserved for citizens, though he only mentioned interest from people outside the country. That’s partly because the project is aggressively courting foreign buyers. On its website, a green “expression of interest” button takes you to a survey that asks whether you’re looking for “a home to live in,” “a holiday house,” or “an investment property.” Even the renderings on the website don’t show anyone who looks particularly Maldivian.

Much of the reason for this is money. Homes in the floating city will range from $150,000 for a studio apartment to $250,000 for a single family home. Some Maldivians could afford this, but the country’s average household income as of 2016 was the equivalent of roughly $27,000 after adjusting for inflation, half of which many residents spend on rent alone. Even if they spent years saving up to afford a studio, many families would surely find it too small to live comfortably. Riyaz said he expected some buyers to rent their houses on Airbnb, where he estimated they could earn $20,000 every month, a fantastically high sum even in a country where tourism comprises more than 25 percent of the economy.

We stepped inside the model home, an open plan first floor that included a kitchen-dining room and a living room. The buyer will be able to customize every detail, Riyaz assured me. We walked up to the top of the stairs, where an open door revealed a room about as narrow as a hallway and only half as long, which Riyaz said could be a study or a bedroom for a live-in maid. There will be no housing units reserved for low-income individuals inside the city, so most anyone who works within its limits but doesn’t live with a homeowner will have to reside on nearby Malé or Hulhumalé. That’s the point at which Simon Marvin, an urban planning expert at the University of Sheffield, begins to see cracks in the floating city’s facade. The project “doesn’t say we can solve climate change—this says we can secede,” he said. But “[the wealthy] cannot totally insulate [themselves] from those sorts of relationships” with the workers on which their lifestyles depend.

Floating cities have long been a fantasy of well-off urbanites. In the 1960s, architect Buckminster Fuller was commissioned to design a waterborne counterpart to Tokyo that would solve the city’s overcrowding. He came up with Triton, a series of prisms to be built with what appeared to be off-brand Legos, single trees poking out of the floor like errant chin hairs. More recently, the libertarian broligarch Peter Thiel and a band of “seasteaders” envisioned floating sovereignties for rich people who hate taxes. None of these have ever gone beyond mock-ups, but accelerating sea level rise has given floating cities a renewed sheen of practicality. Even the United Nations has gotten behind a concept set to be tested off the coast of Busan, South Korea, which was chosen because it’s “one of the most important maritime cities of the 21st century,” according to a press release. Though the local government is enthusiastic, the design firm behind the project, Oceanix, plans to raise the $220 million in anticipated construction costs from private investors.

These utopian schemes tend to leave out the workers required to make them function. Even if residents of the Maldives Floating City will never have to deal with flooding, the people who work in the shops, teach the kids, sell groceries, run the hospitals, and clean the sewage systems will. If a storm cuts workers off from the city, or their homes are washed away by a flood, the colony’s monied inhabitants  will suddenly find themselves living in a place without the people who keep it going.


Ten minutes by boat from the future floating city to Malé, and another five minutes’ drive to the far side of the island, I met Yoosuf Rilwan on a recent August morning in a conference room at the Environmental Protection Agency building, where he works as a director. On the wall, a horizontal map of the Maldives’ roughly twelve hundred islands stretched the length of the long, ovular wooden table where we sat.

The idea of a floating city rests on the assumption that its engineers will have a techno-fix for every problem that residents might encounter, but Rilwan doesn’t think there are simple solutions to the challenges he foresees. Until 2021, for instance, Malé and many resorts dumped their garbage on the manmade island of Thilafushi, where it was burned. Smoke from the trash fires choked the capital, and though garbage-burning on the island was outlawed in 2021, the country still doesn’t have enough waste management facilities to handle its refuse. How will the floating city—with its many thousands of residents—be any different? Then there’s the constant upkeep required to sustain anything exposed to the sea.

“Maintenance cost will be a huge issue,” Rilwan said. Storm damage is one thing, but the corrosive effects of salt water are relentless. The sea will eat into home facades, sewage piping, and the solar panels that are a key part of the city’s plan to generate electricity. Solar panels installed along the roads in Malé two years ago are already caked with rust despite regular maintenance, according to Zammath Khaleel, a climate adaptation grants manager for the engineering firm Tetra Tech who helped service the solar panels in his previous job as a government scientist.

Climate change adaptation must be accessible to people who won’t be able to pay for their own protection.

The myopic techno-solutionism that animates Maldives Floating City also disregards indigenous techniques that have helped people live near or on water for centuries. Hundreds of years before the Maldives partnered with Dutch architects and private investors, the Uros in modern-day Peru fled from the Incas by wading into Lake Titicaca, where they wove reeds into a city of floating islands that they live on even today. Those islands form the kind of biodegradable system that Julia Watson, author of Lo-TEK, a book on indigenous design techniques, thinks climate-focused architecture firms should learn from. Otherwise, modern designs degrade into waste.

Cultures built around water already have technologies that can help them survive sea level rise. Island people all over the world have raised the ground under their feet for “forever,” according to Watson. And a recent study published by Khaleel and several other scientists finds that the Maldives could handle sea level rise with a modernized version of the same. “Creating and raising islands as the means to adapt has the potential to dissipate waves and act as artificial barriers,” the study’s authors write. “Island raising and advancing thus provides a positive future for island nations and expands the adaptation and development options far into the future.”

This is exactly what Nazim has been advocating for. When I met him at a bar called Dolphin on a weekday evening last month, he opened Google Maps on his phone and zoomed in on an island about twice the size of Malé that he thinks would be perfect. There are difficulties, of course. Moving hundreds of thousands of people from many islands onto just a few would be a biblical undertaking. Millions of tons of sand would need to be mined, which would inevitably damage underwater ecosystems. The Maldives would also need the money to pull this off, and internal migration probably won’t attract foreign cash like a utopian floating city whose pastel tones seem designed for Instagram.

Several scientists I spoke with said this kind of island-raising was possible, though they also noted that the number of solutions to sea level rise is similar to the number of islands and cities for which sea level rise is a problem. “I feel the raising, to my mind, is the best sort of solution that’s available,” said Robert Nicholls, one of the study’s coauthors. “It’s pretty simple—it’s a matter of piling up sand. I think that’s one of the attractions to it.” Still, he also said that, when it comes to adaptation, “you don’t generally do one thing.”

The Maldives is implementing all sorts of adaptations to mitigate the swelling threat of sea level rise, but if the nation’s government wants all of its people to keep living there, then it’s hard to see how building a luxurious, waterborne city for tourists is one of them. Climate change adaptation must be accessible to people who won’t be able to pay for their own protection. If it’s not, then projects like this become more about building disconnected utopias on an ever-more unlivable planet than they are about preventing the planet from becoming unlivable in the first place. In the end there’s little difference between this sort of adaptation and another rich person fantasy: the idea that the best way to save humanity is for a chosen few to leave Earth altogether.

After a few hours, Nazim and I left Dolphin. “Come, I’ll show you around,” he said. He meant that literally, since the trip around Malé takes about ten minutes by motorcycle. We drove by food stalls, the fish market, green soccer pitches lit up by fluorescent lights, and a swimming pool cut into the ground just meters from a sea wall, where for some reason a boy hopped out and started doing the Macarena. After one lap, Nazim came to a stop outside Artificial Beach, another example of the country’s talent for naming things exactly what they are.

The two of us climbed off his motorcycle and walked across the sand to a couple chairs. In front of us was a sloping mound of manmade earth that rolled down to the water. We sat there above the sea, watching kids splash alongside their parents as moonlight rippled off the surface. Waves frayed into white mist a few dozen meters beyond them, kept at bay, for now, by a curving wall of stone.