Floating Future Research Project

How can we keep our densely populated country livable? There is an increasing demand for space for living, industry, energy transition and food production. In addition, to date, approximately 60% of the Netherlands is flood prone, and due to climate change the threat of flooding increases. The water may however also offer an opportunity for creating safe space through large-scale floating developments. Initiated by Olaf Waals and Rutger de Graaf, the interdisciplinary applied research project ‘Floating Future: Scaling up floating structures as climate-proof space-creating solution enabling societal, industrial and ecological win-wins’, is led by research institute MARIN, funded by the Dutch Science Council (NWO) and consists of a broad research consortium including universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutes, public authorities, businesses and NGOs. The overall objective is to develop knowledge about the societal acceptance, the required governance and legal arrangements, the ecological impacts and the technological challenges of building large-scale floating islands. In this research project, 1 Postdoc researcher and 10 PhD researchers in the fields of governance, technology and ecology will be appointed and closely work together in concrete case study areas (inland, coastal port city and offshore). Participatory Action Research will be the Floating Future ‘integration engine’ where the different scientific disciplines and societal stakeholders meet and co-create knowledge about how large-scale floating urban developments can be realized, developing ‘maritime urbanism’ as a new field of expertise. To move from ‘proof of concept’ to ‘proof of scale’ all researchers will participate in Action Research in interdisciplinary case studies. The three study focus areas are inland (e.g. IJmeer), coastal (port city; Rotterdam, Amsterdam) and offshore (North Sea). In these case studies we will work interactively with societal stakeholders.