Sustainability and resilience assessment of a planned floating city

Coastal urban spaces are home to a large portion of the global population. In recent times, climate change and the increasing need for new housing due to population growth are profoundly influencing these delicate realities, threatening the lifestyle of millions of people living near the coast. In response to these challenges the whole world is mobilizing with new ideas, investing in new and revolutionary projects, building ingenious infrastructures. The Korean city of Busan, in collaboration with the United Nations, has proposed the world first floating city design scheme, OCEANIX Busan. This adaptive solution to sea level rise envisions to accommodate a community of more than 10,000 residents and visitors, with the capacity to expand and house more than 100,000 people, being at the same time fully sustainable with solar panels, wind turbines, locally sourced recyclable materials and other green solutions, and with all the water used treated and recycled. Although this topic is not entirely new and there exist numerous case studies and research papers about this idea, for some reason a floating city has not yet been successful. Various designs have been presented at different times but, so far, no one has truly succeeded. Besides, it's not an everyday thing to build a floating city. These trailblazing projects face with huge responsibilities and challenges but if they turn out to be feasible and their realization turns out to be possible, floating cities could be really a way to adapt to the effects of sea level rise caused by climate change. This thesis focuses on exploring the challenges that the OCEANIX project would face and proposes, comparing and analyzing, on a theoretical basis, technical and planning elements of the world first floating city design. Through this approach, this work aims to provide enough tools to allow the reader to formulate an opinion about the real sustainability and feasibility of this innovative floating city scheme.