Mediterranean Metropolis

Mediterranean reclamation system
Mediterranean sea

Some of the most demanded coastal cities are running out of space, something that emphasizes with the commonly mountainous topography that surrounds them. Around the Mediterranean Sea, cities such as Monaco, Barcelona, or Athens are representative of this problem, and on some occasions, the current condition of the available land makes impossible the vertical or horizontal expansion. In the metropolitan area of Barcelona, protected natural reservoirs accentuate the issue of space, making necessary to think on alternative built environment to host the always increasing population. If the conditions of the Plan Cerdá wants to be preserved, what options left do we have for the city to grow? In this sense, there is an opportunity to envision a built environment over the blank space left in the sea.  If most of the Mediterranean cities present a similar condition than Barcelona, can we propose a built environment that is capable of absorbing the rural migration to the coastal cities of the Mediterranean Sea? Is the current model for land reclamation appropriate for the Mediterranean bathymetry and its culture? 

The challenges of (re)claiming land to the sea bring multiple engineering challenges, being it is most important to be able to build a solid base to construct settlements at its top. The examples of land reclamation seen in other cities, such as Dubai, Bahrain, Osaka or Tokyo, makes of land filling the easiest strategy to use in these type of geographies. This is due to the shallow waters where they are constructed. However, the Mediterranean Sea presents other characteristics. While in some places such as the Tunisia Coast or the Adriatic Sea show shallow waters, the rest of the coast has a steep geography where nearby the coast, the seabed, is too deep to use land filling as a technique.

The following project will introduce an alternative technique to land filling that –using over 40 times less material volume– enables the possibility of constructing (re)claimed land in more places around the globe. This is thanks to technological advances used in the offshore oil industry. The case of Barcelona represents an excellent example of how is possible to construct on the Mediterranean Sea while preserving the lifestyle that we understand in the mainland. The possibilities that a partly-floating structure presents to us are infinite, being one of its most significant value the water column left beneath for the appliance of aquaculture techniques, converting the available volume of water in an infrastructure for resource extraction.