Water city as solution to escalating sea level rise in lower-lying land areas

Strenuous efforts have been continuing to reverse the trend in global environmental deterioration and create a sustainable society. Despite the wide-ranging movement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, substantial progress is yet to be seen. In this paper, a new concept for establishing urban community bases to be built on floating foundations in an artificial reservoir, enabling realization of a sustainable city environment toward a prosperous future is presented. This paper introduces our idea as applied to Koto Ward in the Metropolis of Tokyo. Although a portion of this plan has been offered in the latest papers of MTS/IEEE/Oceans´11 and Oceans´12, we have since then expanded the area covered by some 2 km from north to south and between 0.5 and 1 km east to west, with a total land area of approximately 1.25 km². The area encompasses a variety of city functions such as office buildings, commercial areas and recreational sites. We also present herein the construction scheme and engineering studies for high-rise structure stability on floating foundations, in addition to flood prevention measure in the excavated water area and/or artificial reservoir.