Research

Reading Lists

We curated a comprehensive list of Aquatecture - floating architecture and innovative zone governance research publications by key authors in the fields. For Aquatecture, we put together papers on the main aspects of the field: climate and sustainability; engineering; architecture and design; transportation and infrastructure; case studies; technology; industry and urban planning. For Maritime Governance and Special Economic Zones, we curated a list of research publications focused on the governance and legal aspects of floating projects, urban planning, and case studies of floating living spaces and special economic zones.

Aquatecture

Climate and Sustainability

⦁ Sustainable characteristics of Floating Architecture. Changho Moon.

⦁ Floating building opportunities for future sustainable development and energy efficiency gains. Shahryar Habibi.

⦁ Floating Cities and equitable grafting onto marine ecosystems. Ioana Corina Giurgiu.

⦁ Development of Self-sufficient Floating Cities with renewable resources. Ondrej Krejcar, Ayca Kirimtat.

⦁ Floating clean multi-energy systems towards driving blue economic growth. Srikanth Narasimalu.

⦁ Towards a sustainability assessment framework for floating photovoltaic systems in cities. Giacomo G.L. Testori.

⦁ Floating Architecture: a design on hydrophilic floating house for fluctuating water level. A. Ambica, K. Venkatraman.

⦁ Floating Architecture in the landscape: climate change adaptation ideas, opportunities, and challenges. Edmund Penning-Rowsell.

Adaptation to climate change in the pacific islands: theory, dreams, practice, and reality. Jenny Bryant Tokalau.

Sea Change: island communities and climate change. HeatherLazrus.

Engineering

⦁ Floating infrastructure large-scale public spaces on Water. Gerard Ronzatti, Petar Lovric.

⦁ A study on stability of Floating Architecture and its design methodology. Toshio Nakajima, Yuka Saito, Motohiko Umeyama.

⦁ BEQS: marine pumped-storage concepts for floating city extensions. Robert Klar.

⦁ A review of Very Large Floating Structures (VLFS) for coastal and offshore uses. Miguel Lamas-Pardo, Gregorio Iglesias, Luis Carral.

⦁ Parametric Model for generation and analysis of modular, freeform floating island networks, constructed using flexibly formed Buoycrete®. Diederik Veenendaal, Marco Bovio, Oscar Sainz Avila, Guido Visch.

Architecture & Design

⦁ Form and functional features of modular floating structures. Svetlana Kizilova.

⦁ Design and functions of floating architecture – a review. Yuan-Ho Lin, Yung Chih Lin, Han-Shih Tan.

⦁ Floating Architecture and conversion of offshore structures: a chronicle of Knud E. Hansen designs. Carmelo Cascino, Francesca Arini.

⦁ Expanding coastal cities – proof of feasibility for Modular Floating Structures (MFS). Gil Wang, Yiska Goldfeld, Nitai Drimer.

⦁ An investigation into Environment- Floating Buildings in relation to sustainability indicators for planning and design process. Kuei-Feng Wang.

⦁ Fish Trap – A floating proto-assembly for Responsive Cities: towards citizen-driven customized Water Urban Spaces. Peter Buš, Ayça Tartar, ShiYen Wu, Gerhard Schmitt.

Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: giving depth to volume through Oceanic Thinking. Philip Steinberg, Kimberley Peters.

Transport

⦁ Floating Solutions: the new meaning of Mobility. Milica Simovic, Sonja Krasic, Marko Nikolic.

⦁ Transportation systems for passenger transportation in floating cities. B. Vreugdenhil.

Case Studies

Floating Public Space for Birds: design, research, and prototype fabrication in Haliç. Kutay Karabağ, Zeynep Şahbaz.

Performance evaluation of seawater heat exchanger installed in the submerged bottom structure of Floating Architecture. Young-HoonSim, Kwang-Il Hwang.

Numerical simulation of the movement behavior of floating structures. Schmidt Wolfgang, Strangfeld Peter, Volker Eduard, Sliavin Yaraslau.

Floating, Flexible Polymeric Dye-Sensitized Solar-Cell Architecture: the way of near-future Photovoltaics. Federico Bella, Andrea Lamberti, Stefano Bianco, Elena Tresso, Claudio Gerbaldi, Candido Fabrizio.

Drivers for and Barriers to the take-up of Floating Offshore Wind Technology: a comparison of Scotland and South Africa. Kubiat Umoh, Mark Lemon.

Floating solar power plant for sustainable development: a techno-economic analysis. Anik Goswami, Paromita Sadhu, Utpal Goswami, Pradip Kumar Sadhu.

Architectural design guideline for sustainable floating houses and floating settlements in Vietnam. Thi Thu Trang Nguyen.

Opportunities for cross-fertilization between the shipbuilding industry and the emergent offshore wind energy sector in Colombia: an overview of
floating platform technologies. Gabriela Guadalupe Salas Berrocal, Óscar Alejandro Sanabria Vargas, Mónica Ruíz Pianeta.

⦁ Utilization of Historical City for sustainable tourism: a case study of Floating Market in Thailand. Chaweewan Denpaiboon.

⦁ A study on present condition and spatial organization of Domestic Marina Club to design leisure Floating Architecture. Sung-Sine Pak.

⦁ Lightweight prefabricated floating buildings for shallow inland waters. Design and construction of the Floating Hotel Apartment in Poland. Karolina Ostrowska- Wawryniuk, Łukasz Piątek.

⦁ Sustainable floating architecture prototype as Energy Efficiency Methods Implementation in Indonesia. Rani Yuni Wulandari, Stephanus Wirawan Dharmatanna, Sitti Awalia Dewi Permatasari, Diandra Aprilia Judiono, Ismail Salam.

⦁ Circling Research with Design: NLÉ's African Water Cities Project and Prototype Floating School for Makoko. Kunlé Adeyemi.

All at sea: an auto-ethnography of a slowed community, on a container ship. Colin Symes.

Complex Governance and SeaZones: the Floating Island Project. Nathalie Mezza-Garcia.

Floating City

⦁ Mega Floating City “Green Float”: concept and technology Innovations. Masaki Takeuchi, Ikuo Yoshida.

⦁ Floating cities from concept to creation: a discussion of the challenges that are pending the floating city through literature review. Ali Adnan.

Industry Trends

⦁ An analysis of market situation and industry trend in Floating Architecture. Han-Seok Lee; Chang-Ho Mun, Young-Hun Kang.

Maritime Planning

⦁ Towards a Floating Urbanism: adapting to water as a new ground. Chris Autera.

⦁ Applicability of Pop-up Approach to Floating Urbanism: democratization of aquatoriums in the city of Belgrade. Milica Simovic, Petar Mitkovic.

⦁ Feeding our growing population and diminish land-usage by building on the idea of Floating Farms. Jain Siddhant.

⦁ Floating Modular Housing to address demand and affordability. Jagmeet Khangura, Jason Haney.

⦁ A multi-objective optimization model for urban planning: the case of a Very Large Floating Structure. Shlomo Bekho, Yedidya Levi, Yehiel Rosenfeld.

⦁ Great ideas float to the top. C. M. Wang, B. T. Wang.

⦁ Potential of floating production for delta and coastal cities. B.Dal Bo Zanon, B.Roeffen, K.M.Czapiewskaa, R.E.de Graaf-Van Dinther, P.R.Mooijd.

Maritime & Floating Governance - Special Zones

Governance of Floating Structures

⦁ Developing Floating Communities: a comparative research to examine flood resilience in cities, considered from an institutional capacity approach. M.L. Leijstra.

⦁ A legal regime for the exploration and exploitation of offshore renewable energy. Francesca Galea.

Governance of Complex Systems

⦁ Reconfiguring environmental governance: towards a politics of scales and networks. Harriet Bulkeley.

⦁ The comparative politics of Transnational Climate Governance. Thomas Hale.

⦁ Global governance in the context of climate change: the challenges of increasingly complex risk parameters. Carolyn Deere Birkbeck.

⦁ Finding the coast: Environmental governance and the characterization of land and sea. Catherine Leyshon.

Legal Classification of Floating structures

⦁ Floating Homes - vessels or real property. Janis Viesturs.

⦁ Artificial islands in the Law of the Sea. Francesca Galea.

⦁ Legal issues for Artificial Floating Islands. Maarten Flikkema, Fen-Yu (Vicky) Lin, Pernille P. J. van der Plank, Jos Koning, Olaf Waals.

Blockchain and Decentralization

⦁ Economics of Blockchain. Sinclair Davidson.

⦁ Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Governance: is the State Still Necessary?. Marcella Atzori.

Special Zones and New Jurisdictions

⦁ Modernity and the urban imagination in Economic Zones. Jonathan Bach.

⦁ Special Economic Zones and WTO Compliance: evidence from the Dominican Republic. Fabrice Defever.

⦁ Planning for Special Economic Zone: a regional perspective. V. Devadas.

⦁ Special Economic Zones in Africa: comparing performance and learning from global experience. Thomas C. Farole.

⦁ Port cities in Asia and Europe. Arndt Graf.

⦁ Emergence of a new Hanseatic League: how Special Economic Zones will reshape Global Governance. Mark Frazier.

⦁ Founding Startup Societies: A Step by Step Guide. Joseph MacKinney, Mark Frazier.

⦁ Smart Cities, transparency, civic technology, and reinventing government. Nina David, John G. McNuttJonathan B. Justice.

⦁ The New Science of Cities. Michael Batty.

⦁ Special International Zones in practice and theory. Tom W. Bell.

Seasteading

⦁ Seasteading: how floating nations will restore the environment, enrich the poor, cure the sick, and liberate humanity from politicians. Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman.

⦁ The true obstacle to the autonomy of Seasteads: american law enforcement jurisdiction over Homesteads on the high seas. O. Shane Balloun, Charles Roger, Liliana Andonova.

⦁ Law, Governance, and International Relations of Seasteads. Tom W. Bell.

⦁ Atlas Swam: freedom, capital, and floating sovereignties in the Seasteading vision. Elizabeth Nyman, Philip E. Steinberg; Mauro J. Caraccioli.

⦁ Dynamic Geography: a blueprint for efficient government. Patri Friedman.

Case Studies

⦁ Complex Governance and SeaZones: the Floating Island Project. Nathalie Mezza-Garcia.

⦁ Legal framework for sustainable floating city development: a case study of the Netherlands. Fen-Yu Lin, Otto Spijkers, Pernille van der Plank.

⦁ Self-organized collective action in the Floating Island Project. Nathalie Mezza-Garcia.

⦁ Changes in public commons as a consequence of urbanization: the Agara Lake in Bangalore, India. R D'Souza.

⦁ Le régime juridique des îles flottantes, entre fantasme et réalité en Polynésie française. Hervé Raimana Lallemant-Moe.

⦁ Fluid geographies: marine territorialization and the scaling up of local aquatic epistemologies on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Paula Satizábal.

⦁ The conservation “myths” we live by: reimagining human–nature relationships within the Scottish marine policy context. Ruth E. Brennan.

Maritime Planning

⦁ Floating architecture for a dynamic society: water as a media to explore flexibility. Layming Chang De Leon, Fort Mir, Josep Maria.

⦁ A review of design principles for community-based Natural Resource Management. Michael Cox, Gwen Arnold, Sergio Villamayor Tomás.

⦁ The shifting sea: from soft space to lively space. Stephen Jay.

Legal Research

⦁ Water Capitalism. The case for privatizing oceans, rivers, lakes, and aquifers. Walter Block.

⦁ From Stratton to USCOP: environmental law floundering at sea. Donna R. Christie.

⦁ Mining for humanity in the deep sea and outer space: the role of small states and international law in the extraterritorial expansion of extraction. Isabel Feichtner.

⦁ Floating cities navigating environmental compliance in the cruise industry. Daniel E. IIISmith, Denita L. Jones.

Philosophical

⦁ Amphibious worlds: environments, infrastructures, ontologies. Casper Bruun Jensen.

⦁ Floating islands, frontiers, and other boundary objects on the Edge of Oceania’s Futurity. Alexander Mawyer.

One of our partners/clients is the Startup Societies Foundation with its Institute for Competitive Governance. Seaphia leads the publication of the Startup Society's Journal of Special Jurisdictions. This is the only active academic journal focused on special jurisdictions.

Every issue of the journal focuses on innovative jurisdictions from across the world.

By participating in the Journal of Special Jurisdictions, Seaphia pushes the boundaries of knowledge in the governance and decentralized governance space.

Access to publications

Governance and Regulations Research

Journal publications

Paving the Waves Conference

Paving the Waves was the largest conference specialized in floating. It brought together leading international experts from the industry, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and researchers from across the world to share knowledge on floating solutions.

The conference took place digitally in 2020, and Seaphia organized and hosted the online part of the event.

Enter the Space!

Floating Cities and Floating Architecture