Venice isn’t a Seastead, but perhaps it was the medieval European equivalent and a prototype we can compare and contrast with. Venice wasn’t built to test governance philosophies, it was created from the urgent need to survive. Urgency is something that the residents of that early city-state, when it was more like a refugee camp, had in spades.
What started out as a series of small, mosquito-infested, low-lying islands filled with tents for refugees fleeing from cities sacked by Germanic tribes and invading hordes of nomads from Central Asia at the tail end of the Roman Empire adapted, evolved, and eventually filled an important niche. Taking advantage of its position for trade, it adopted favorable governance philosophies and innovated in the technical, administrative and economic spheres. (1).
At its core, Venice was built by desperate refugees trying to survive from one day to the next. From this nascent state, with perhaps a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, the Venetians begat a new society tuned to solving problems unique to their city in order to make their domiciles more liveable and doing business there more feasible. I seriously doubt the first settlers on those swampy islands, smacking mosquitos and in desperate need of a reliable source of freshwater, could have guessed where things would end up centuries later when the city they helped create grew to become amongst the richest in the world. (2).
Venice didn’t happen overnight, and I think that’s worth keeping in mind in our modern context. Seasteaders are impatient when it comes to getting the conception in our heads (particularly the ones we really like) out into the wild. A billionaire might one day see the light and invest many hundreds of millions of dollars to build the first Venice-like floating city-state, but we’ve already waited too long for that. There’s an unspoken goal of skipping over all the ugly developmental stages, potentially many decades worth, to get to the “good stuff.”
Refugee Crisis
According to UN statistics, there are currently 120 million forcibly displaced people worldwide as of May 2024. (3). The need is clear, and for some portion of this number, an aquatic, mobile, floating solution could be a boon to the crisis intervention toolset in many parts of the world. Year over year, the number of refugees is increasing while the number of countries with the highest number of displaced people remains roughly the same. A decade ago, one in 125 people were displaced. That ratio has nearly doubled with one in 69 people, approximately 1.5 percent of world population. The frequency, extent, duration and intensity of conflicts are closely correlated with the number of people forced to flee within their own countries as well as to other countries. If the intensity of recent conflicts continues to grow, so too will the number of people forced to flee their homes each year. The average timeframe that a displaced person remains in exile is ten years, though that number is skewed by several hundred thousand that remain displaced for as long as forty years. (4).
Since TSI doesn’t actually build floaty-things on its own, how then could TSI focus attention on the likely populations who, like the Venetians a thousand years ago, be the most likely group of people to permanently populate these newly fledged aquatic municipalities? As a land-based, forward thinking community, we’re strongly focused on what amounts to real-estate speculation tailored to the middle and upper middle class, with most of us individuals from richer nations who can afford a second or third home, rent it out if we so desire, or simply let it sit vacant on the premise that its value will eventually climb. Many of these kinds of investments will never see a human resident for any length of time and any meaningful contribution to the local ocean-borne community is lost. (5),(6),(7),(8).
Seasonal vs. Permanent Residents
For example, a doctor from Massachusetts purchases a Seastead as an investment property, but never moves into the Seasteading community where the unit is located. Because they don’t physically live there, it’s unlikely they’re going to open an office and hang their shingle to advertise their medical services to the community, nor are they regularly interfacing with local residents to grow the local economy and expand its services and amenities. Conversely, a doctor displaced from their homeland by war, economic collapse, or natural disaster will ply their trade given the opportunity to do so, needing only a physical space and a few pieces of basic equipment to get started. For many refugees, returning to their place of origin isn’t realistic in the near-term and might be many years if not a generation before they can. For the displaced, many if not most will never return to their place of origin, and the longer they’re displaced, the more likely they plant roots in their adopted homeland, get married, have children, bonding with neighbors and fellow survivors to become part of an extended family and community.
People who need a safe place where they can survive in the aftermath of a recent armed conflict or natural disaster may be the best starting point from which to build a successful, thriving metropolis on the sea. What does one actually need to survive on the ocean, and how different might that set of needs and requirements be compared to the luxurious wants and desires that current Seastead builders are focused on building in order to satisfy middle-class, 1st world tastes?
In other words, we might be focusing our collective attention on the wrong demographic and are at risk of doing so to the exclusion of those whom history would seem to show are more likely to move onto the sea en masse and do so meaningfully with the intent to stay. Necessity is the mother of invention as the saying goes. Whenever there is a great need felt by the community as a whole, solutions will be promptly proposed and rapidly implemented. With skin in the game and potentially no place to return to, how different might that society be than one consisting of floating bits of real-estate left empty for much of the year with Seasteads treated like vacation homes or short term rentals?
Will a part-time resident have the same drive and motivation to solve the scope and scale of problems that the Venetians had to confront to make their city more livable, and as a by-product, ascend in geopolitical prominence? A seasonal or short-term resident population with their primary homes somewhere else will very probably not have the same needs, concerns or sense of urgency as a permanent resident would have. A selection of schools and medical clinics will be a critical component for permanent inhabitants with children and elderly relatives, but might be completely irrelevant to someone who only plans to spend a few days in the community in any given year. Furthermore, a buyer who never lives in the community where they purchase a Seastead contributes only the proceeds of the purchase price to its manufacturer or sales agent. For Seastead communities to be successful in the long term, they need to be occupied primarily by full-time residents who contribute meaningfully to their new community, just like the Venetians of old did.
A Place to Start
Another Venice is bound to happen, and this time minus tiny marshy islands and timbers from Croatia. The future Venice will very probably not be all that attractive a place for tourists to visit in its earliest form. It may not even be a particularly comfortable place for the residents that live there at first, with many services expected to be either limited or even completely absent until investment fills the void. The nexus of technology, advantageous location and grass-roots enthusiasm could prove a potent accelerant to development, doing in decades what took centuries in Venice.
There’s an important role to play for aid organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to think more broadly about creative solutions for any number of refugee crises around the world in any given year. Most of the world’s population centers are near an ocean and those that aren’t are often located on the waterways of the world’s largest rivers. It’s often difficult to find a location to house and support a sizable number of displaced peoples, and to both feed and support their changing needs over time. Logistical considerations for supporting these populations by land or air can be complicated or even dangerous due to a lack of road infrastructure after a major disaster, the absence of suitable airfields, or the presence of armed groups on or near major roadways.
The very first facility built on floating encampments will very probably be a port facility to aid in the re-supply of the populace by sea. In so doing, it will also provide the encampment with one of mankind’s most enduring and most cost-effective means of moving goods from one part of the world to another.
A coastal complex of floating habitats for displaced peoples, whether we term them Seasteads or not, might one day become the next Venice. Evolving from humble, even hardscrabble beginnings, its residents will have a golden opportunity to rise from their dire situations to fill new niches, taking advantage of geographic location to offer unique services and do so at lower cost and/or at higher value to potential customers.
The great-great-great grandparents of the Venetians didn’t live long enough to see their refugee camps become the marvelous city it became. We might have an opportunity right now in these modern times to see a generation of displaced people become successful entrepreneurs in their own lifetimes, watch the floating encampments they inhabit become thriving cities, progressing from camps for the displaced to centers of global trade and innovation much as it was for the Venetians centuries ago.
There are bound to be disappointments along the way, and from those, important lessons to be learned and applied. Any experiment of scale takes time, but even a single generation will show what a water-borne society, one whose social bonds were forged by dire circumstances and shared struggle can achieve. Fueled by the pressing need to improve their own domicile’s basic services, first generation inhabitants might well make it a place where adventurers, inventors and investors from far and wide are attracted to the possibilities and take up residence to join in the enterprise of creating a new Venice for themselves and the generations that will follow.
About the author
A technical writer, network engineer and specifications developer for the prior 24 years with several patents to his name, Kirk Erichsen is a consultant for hire in the cable and telco space. An amateur fiction writer, Kirk is currently developing a series exploring the various paths to wide-scale human settlement of the oceans.
Citations:
- Stefano Campostrini e Fausto, The governance of innovation in Venice: past, present, future. Public Management, Vol 4, 2021. https://www.rivistaitalianadipublicmanagement.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/01_La-governance.pdf
- A Brief History of Venice: The Rise and Fall of the Venetian Republic, Compass and Pine https://compassandpine.com/europe/italy/venice/history-of-venice/
- UN displaced people statistics for May, 2024 https://www.unrefugees.org/news/five-takeaways-from-the-2023-unhcr-global-trends-report/ https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/
- Xavier Devictor, 2019 update: How long do refugees stay in exile? To find out, beware of averages. December 09, 2019 https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/dev4peace/2019-update-how-long-do-refugees-stay-exile-find-out-beware-averages
- Foreign Investors Leaving London Homes Empty, CNN report https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU1Wk0V31n4
- Why are so many big-city condos sitting empty? | About That, CBC News report https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGfFBP7U7pQ
- How Empty Offices Are Ruining American Cities, CNBC News report https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdB79PKftm8
- San Francisco suffering ‘Doom Loop’ amid large vacancy rates, NBC News Report https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUUjVtq0uTY
