Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi designed this floating building seen in the lower left corner of this photo. "Half-building, half-boat, the floating structure provides teaching facilities for the slum district of Makoko, a former fishing village in Lagos where over...
Jakarta’s only floating village
This romantic image is actually a disaster area: Kampung Apung Teko, one of Jakarta's many villages, has become more and more flooded until it gained a new reputation as Jakarta's only floating village. A more than questionable feat. Until the 1990s, the three-hectare...
The Great Pacific Plastic Patch
When I read about this assembly of plastic garbage, I was inevitably reminded of stories out of the saga "Erik the Red" or the Irish Legend of Saint Brendan. In other words, it has everything for being a modern myth, a contemporary fairy tale: A gigantic new island...
Serempak of the Bajau People
This is the traditional festive head gear worn by Bajau women. The Bajau, a formerly nomadic people now mostly home to Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, live by and from the sea and have recently gained recognition for a genetic trait that allows them to dive...
Sea Peoples
The Orang Laut, who mainly settle in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, the Moken in Thailand, and the Sama-Bajau who mainly live in East-Malaysia and the Philippines are ethnic groups that have a seaborne or amphibian lifestyle and culture. The Malayan name Orang...
Rear View
An image from the movie "The Wave" from 2015. In "Being Ecological" Tim Morton wonders about the prevalent mode of climate writing, which he calls "information dump", "dumping massive platefuls of facts on to us" over and over again. Morton wonders, why we do that and...
The Loen Rock Slides in Norway in 1905 and 1936
Just 31 years lie between two disasters of the same nature along the shores of a lake in Western Norway destroying twice the two lakeside villages. Lake Lovatnet is considered one of the most beautiful lakes in Norway. In the first decade of the 1900s and again in the...
Sunken City Deep Dive Dubai
"Take the plunge and explore an abandoned and flooded city, an incredible 60 meters underwater. Experience Deep Dive Dubai – a world of exciting and unique scuba and freediving opportunities," reads the website of Deep Dive Dubai, a newly opened diving resort. The...
‘Extremes will become normal’
Quote by Lam Chiu-ying, former director of the Hong Kong Observatory, the central weather forecast agency of the government of Hong Kong, from an article in the Hong Kong Free Press about the Black Rainstorm and massive deluge of the week of September 4. 2023. Here is...
Are floating cities a remedy for over-crowded coastal cities, land subsidence and rising sea level?
As this documentary from German TV from 2022 clearly shows, designing floating cities is one thing, wanting to live there is quite another. I guess instinctively we all prefer "stability over floating flexibility", as director Kristin Siebert says, land over sea,...