Liquid Urbanity: Re-engineering the City in a Post-Terrestrial World

Abstract

Perhaps no material distinction is as fundamental to modern society as that between land and water. Land is perceived as solid, boundable, controllable – the space of civilization and development. Water, by contrast, is understood as an element that either threatens or is used by land-based civilizations, but that is fundamentally external to society. The salience of this binary opposition is tacitly acknowledged by cultural theorists who use the meeting point of land and water as a metaphor for exploring new conceptions of culture and by those who see counter-hegemonic potential in water-based social formations. In this paper, these theoretical provocations are explored further through an examination of the social and spatial ramifications of three recent engineering advances that enable social life to span the land-water divide: Maasbommel, a community of floating houses in The Netherlands; The World, a permanent residency condominium cruise ship; and SeaCode, a proposed floating laboratory for computer engineers.