Seascape One--Floating City, Home on the Sea

Seasteads are floating cities--meant as both permanent residencies and vacation destinations. David Grassi has gone beyond the preliminary planning stage to the more detailed planning phase. His Seascape One seastead venture is actively seeking investors to make the dream into a reality. Here is more:

Unlike a cruise ship, Seascape One will serve as both a destination and its own port of call. Seascape One will never dock, tooling around the Mediterranean Sea 365 days out of the year under the power of its own massive sail and cruising past the many cultural hotspots that dot this historic part of the world. At a total height of 3,000 feet, Seascape One will be the tallest habitable structure in the world, dwarfing even the Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan.

Another thing that sets Seascape One apart from its nearest cousin, the cruise ship, is that, while vacationers will be welcome aboard for shorter-term stays, this unique, car-free and totally green floating environment will serve as a year-round home for many of its passengers.

....Wind turbines, hydro turbines and millions of square feet of solar cells will provide electrical energy for guests and businesses, onboard desalination stations will provide fresh water, and recycled wastewater will be used to irrigate landscaped areas and hydroponic crops for food production. Grassi expects that the fully sustainable environment he envisions will serve as a model for future generations of developers.

Over the course of the last three years, Grassi has collaborated with a team of architects, designers and animators to flesh out his idea. Last year, with a proposal and pages of artist renderings to show to potential investors, Grassi began the arduous process of trying to raise money to pay for the project’s final design. The design process, he estimates, will cost between $3 million and $5 million, and take two or three years to complete.

Construction will then take another three to four years to complete, according to Grassi, and will cost several billion dollars. He proposes that a host country, probably Third World, provide seaside land on which to build a dry dock, where the floating island would be constructed. The dry dock could then be used to build more of these structures.

Much more at source.

Seasteads can be built as a form of arcology, or as a loose conglomerate of individual floating structures. Given the relentlessly destructive nature of the sea toward manmade structures, seasteads will have to be one of the most carefully planned and constructed classes of structures ever built.