Floating Climatopias: Futuristic Designs for Flood-Resilient Settlements
Across the globe, about 1 billion people live along coastlines. As climate change accelerates, these communities face challenges such as erosion, flooding, and sea-level rise. Consequently, some governments have partnered with architects and urban planners to build floating cities and settlements, also known as climatopias. These projects are viewed as novel developments that combine climate adaptation, mitigation, and resilience strategies. Planners also see them as tools to reduce pressure on land, increase the available housing stock, enhance energy efficiency, lessen flood impacts, and promote eco-friendly transportation and recreational areas. However, since these projects cost billions of dollars and are typically built on the ocean, researchers and communities have raised questions about their environmental impacts, social implications, and ability to withstand major storms. Led by Dr. Jola Ajibade, the Floating Climatopias exhibit showcases an artistic, virtual and 3-D representation of floating imaginaries from various regions worldwide, inviting guests to participate in a public dialogue regarding the feasibility, environmental impacts, and equity implications of these innovative solutions.
About the Team
Dr. Jola Ajibade is an associate professor and a scholar-activist in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University. She explores how cities are adapting and transforming as a result of climatic impacts and extreme events by embracing mitigation and adaptation strategies such as managed retreat programs, constructions of climatopias, tree-planting, city revitalization programs, renewable energy projects, and blue-green infrastructure. She seeks to understand how such transformations are perceived by local communities and how socio-ecological justice can be advanced, while reducing environmental injustices, eco-gentrification, and uneven development. Dr. Ajibade’s scholarship advances cutting-edge ideas on equitable adaptations through embracing feminist, decolonial, and antiracist approaches along with care ethics that can lead to more just, livable, resilient, and sustainable urban futures. Dr Ajibade’s work has been featured in many academic journals and media outlets including Science Friday, Nature, NPR, Yale Environment 360, Science, New Internationalist, and Vice.
Isobel Li: is a second-year student at Emory studying Applied Math/Statistics and Environmental Science. She is involved with undergraduate research in Environmental Sciences and is a member of Emory’s IDEAS Fellowship. Through her research, she studies the interdisciplinary applications of policy, science, and outreach for pollution mitigation and community well-being. Isobel’s work emphasizes care in the context of environmental and social injustices. Beyond academics, she is interested in wielding the arts to engage communities in the face of polarization and apathy.
Jake Stohr: is in the class of 2025 from Washington, DC majoring in Environmental Sciences and History. He is deeply passionate about the relationship between sustainability, resilience, and the built urban environment. He is a member of the ClimTransform Lab in Environmental Sciences at Emory. His work focuses on land use problems and their connection to United States History.
Jake Weissman: is in the class of 2024 from Cleveland, Ohio majoring in Environmental Science and Political Science at Emory University. He is a member of the ClimTransform Lab in Environmental Sciences at Emory. He is impassioned by the association between ecosystems and urban environments, as well as resilience planning, transportation planning, and sustainability. His work focuses on ecosystem services in cities across social and political issues.