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Japan Aims for World's First Offshore City in 3,000-Foot Pyramid
by Teresa Herrmann - May 9th, 2008
Japan thinks of population relief three dimensionally.
To relive the burgeoning stress of Tokyo -- one of the world's most overstuffed cities -- Japan is looking to build the planet's first offshore city in a 3,000-foot pyramid right in the middle of Tokyo Bay.
Check out the video above.
If built, the Shimuzu Mega-City Pyramid would be the biggest structure on Earth, twelve times the size of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
It would stand two-thirds of a mile tall and provide housing for up to 750,000 people.
Big, big idea.
But is building a self-sufficient city that climbs into the sky and sprawls across water, not land, a practical solution to Japan's urban growth woes?
Could be. But wait, massive flooding, earthquakes and climate change-induced tsunamis could wipe out the floating, vertical city, no?
And lest we forget, how exactly will this great feat of engineering be powered?
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Good idea, actually. But...
Large buildings are intrinsically more energy-efficient that small buildings, due to basic scaling laws (the usable volume increases faster than are of the shell, through which most energy loss occurs). Cleverly-designed large buildings can be more energy-efficient still, as they can take advantage of large-scale passive thermal effects that small buildings cannot, heating and cooling themselves naturally.
In a megastructure as compact as this, the energy for transportation would be far, far less than in a conventional city, simply because people wouldn't need to travel such long distances. Between both architectural and transport efficiencies, you could expect people living in a city like this to have carbon footprints 50%-70% smaller than they otherwise would.
And actually, structures like this are considerably *more* disaster-resistant than conventional urban agglomerations -- look up the work of the Japanese Hyper-Building Consortium to see how they handle seismic forces, fire suppression, et cetera. (By the way -- climate change can't cause tsunamis. It can raise the sea level, letting tsunamis that would happen otherwise reach *higher*, but climate change certainly can't cause tsunamis all by itself. It's important to be scrupulously non-sensationalist about these things.)
That said, it's never going to happen. Shimizu has been kicking this idea around for nearly two decades, and during that time, the until recently property values in Tokyo have fallen continuously (I believe that last year was the first small rise, in real terms, since 1991). With a rapidly shrinking population and declining property values, there's simply no convincing economic argument for a structure like this. Perhaps in China or the Gulf, but not in Japan.
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