Square Floating City

Team:
Karina Czapiewska (CEO)
Arnoud Molenaar (Global Director Resilience and Partnerships)
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Background

Square Floating City is designed to confront rising sea levels and land scarcity. It features a world-first modular, floating urban grid capable of supporting thousands of residents. The design incorporates renewable energy, circular water systems, and climate-resilient infrastructure, resulting in a self-sufficient, off-grid environment. Square Floating City is part of the Blue21 group that combines research, architecture, marine engineering, and environmental science to enable scalable and resilient development in vulnerable coastal regions, creating adaptive and attractive living environments for urban communities. Square Floating City serves as a bold prototype for future urbanisation, demonstrating how innovation and design can transform climate threats into opportunities.

Isometric view of a waterfront urban plan featuring multiple square-shaped floating building blocks with green rooftops and scattered trees, connected by roads to a dense cityscape in the background.

Construction site with crane lifting large wooden panels to the upper floors of a building under construction with scaffolding around.

Process

By utilising water as a development platform, dubbed the ‘floating square city’ proposition. Public buildings, and community spaces can be prefabricated off-site and installed with minimal disturbance. This enables rapid, flexible, and scalable urban expansion, while significantly reducing environmental impact.

Architecture

Floating infrastructure frees flood-prone or underutilised land, making room for nature-based solutions. These spaces can be transformed into green corridors, wetlands, and urban cooling zones, restoring ecological function and enhancing the quality of life for city dwellers.

This integrated approach creates resilient and symbiotic urban systems, where floating neighbourhoods and land-based infrastructure work in tandem to enhance the social, environmental, and economic value of cities, introducing a new form of urban planning: responsive, regenerative, and future-fit.

Waterfront view of a classical style building with palm trees and boats docked at a wooden pier in a city setting.