Transcription
What if the ocean could become a city? A new economic zone impervious to climate change and unlimited in potential? We could put farms on the sea, host climate refugees, and solve our cities' overpopulation crises. That's what Japanese startup Enoch is proposing with its Dogan City, a floating, self-sufficient metropolis. But is this really a glimpse into the future of construction, or just a sci-fi fantasy?
Say you've got a beautiful coastal town that's simply running out of space. You could journey out into the water, fill it with a bunch of rock, sand, and clay, and build on top of it. In very simple terms, that's land reclamation, and it's an approach that's been used for centuries. But it hasn't always turned out to be the most sustainable approach. And as sea levels continue to rise, we need to change the way we build, and fast.
It's so scary, but like, for us, it's a chance to change our lifestyle, to expand on our habitable zone from the land to the sea. Floating developments aren't entirely new. There's the floating Eurosilas at Lake Titicaca in Peru, floating villages in Cambodia, and floating river homes, just to name a few. Even floating offshore platforms, like those used for oil rigs, can essentially function like small towns.
But these concepts are getting even bigger. The United Nations has backed a South Korean project to build a series of floating platforms off the coast of Busan. Over in Saudi Arabia, the kingdom has proposed Oxagon, a floating industrial city that's part of its mega-developments, NEOM.
Now, Japanese startup Enoch wants to take it even further. This is Dogan City. 1.58 kilometers in diameter and approximately four kilometers in circumference, measuring a total 390 acres. It's massive. The first module is designed to accommodate 40,000 people, functioning as a completely standalone city, but with a village-like atmosphere. The circular structure would have public housing, medical research centers, food production facilities, and even launch sites for spacecraft. Within the bay, you will be floating structures that can be reconfigured depending on what they're needed for. Meanwhile, the outer ring is designed to act as a sort of tsunami shield, with barriers that would protect the inner floating developments. And everything would be weighted in the water, almost like a wind turbine or an oil rig.
Since my background is in architecture, I try to make a company which is fusing deep tech with an architecture design. To say this plan is ambitious would be an understatement. It's essentially a tech-driven master plan for a floating utopia that aims to address the impending climate refugee crisis, affordable housing, and food shortages. According to the Global Center on Adaptation, if we continue to harvest and produce food the way we do, we'll have a shortage of land the size of North America by 2050. You may remember Singapore's bold plan to turn every last corner of the metropolis into urban farmland, and Rotterdam is already home to the world's first floating dairy farm. Enoch says Dogan City could grow nearly 7,000 tons of food each year, using cultivation technology that relies on seawater as a source of nutrients for plants.
So, a tsunami-resistant, self-sufficient, climate change refuge in the sea sounds great, but there's one big problem here: money. Building and maintaining something like this would take a lot of it. So, Yuki is shifting his focus from construction to profits.
Our original intention is to say, when a climate refugee, of course, so it is the biggest number. Our game, so that's why my mindset is a totally shifting into an unconscious business to a product and a business. Because a construction business is not profitable compared with Tesla and Apple, Microsoft. Business is very profitable because, like, they're a data business. That's why Dogan City is also being pitched as a medical tourism destination, complete with robot-operated surgeries and AI health monitoring. Yes, really.
If all of that were enough to draw in the profits, Dogan City's healthcare system will be run off the island's under-sea edge data center. Now, data centers use a lot of energy. In fact, they're projected to account for 20% of the world's electricity usage by 2025. A lot of that comes from simply cooling all the equipment needed to run the internet. One way to bring the temperature and cost down in a building full of hot servers? Put the whole thing underwater.
Now, to be clear, there are no actual plans to construct Dogan City yet. And when we asked about the price tag, Yuki told us he couldn't share the exact number yet, but that it would be huge. For now, he's hoping to develop the concept more so that it could eventually serve as a blueprint for other regions.
America and the Middle East are going to generate a lot of climate refugees. So our focus is to cope with climate refugees should be launched to the nearest ZL regions. That's my biggest dream.
While a lot of this may sound very far-fetched, floating cities are actually now an emerging industry in themselves. For the first time, floating urban developments were included in a report this year from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And there's a good reason why. From the Maldives to New York, Miami, Shanghai, and Bangkok, all of these cities along the water are facing the threats of rising sea levels. We're running out of the sand we need for land reclamation. Cities everywhere are in desperate need of more affordable housing, and we're simply running out of space. Today, cities are only going to be able to provide 40% of the space required to house the world's population by 2050.
Maybe Dogan City won't be built exactly as it's laid out right now, but Yuki's vision is helping us imagine how we could build better at a time when drastic change is needed. Climate change is going to force us in ways to reinvent the wheel, and science fiction concepts like this might one day become our reality.
Don't forget that we're raising awareness of construction's mental health crisis and supporting charities in this space through our Get Construction Talking initiative. There's a video series on our channel, and you can find support or donate over at getconstructiontalking.org. And as always, guys, if you enjoyed this video and you want to learn more about where construction is headed, make sure you're subscribed to Tomorrow's Build.