BUILDING UNDERWATER CITIES

Building underwater cities

Building underwater cities

Introduction

I've always felt I never belonged to the earth. My real place is somewhere else. Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to quit Earth for space in search of other worlds. I'm yearning for something that's here, something I could find, if only I knew what it was. I want to find myself another way to live, something more oceanic than my present existence.

One day I discovered my true calling. I am in love with an impossible idea. I want to dwell in a city in the sea.

I've always loved water. I am a holistic swimmer. I'll take the plunge anywhere. Once, in the Ord River up north, I swam in a place where crocodiles lurk. I just couldn't help it. In the cool of the evening, as the moon shone on the dark water, and the bats flew overhead, I shone my torch round the rock slabs edging the pool, and saw reflected the glinting red eyes of the watching crocodiles. I slid into the pool of dark water, silently, and watched and listened, cocooned in warmth, enveloped by moonlight, sensing the power of the place, the edge of the abyss. Those crocodiles, I told myself, are fresh-water crocs, not salties, at least that's what I figured, and I'm still here to tell the tale. It gave me a buzz at the time. Now, I look back on it, I think I must have been off my head. For the most part, I'm respectful of what lies below.

When I slide into water, I am changed. Something from the depths wells up within me, and I merge with the oceanic for the duration. It doesn't last long, this feeling. I need to breathe. I have to come back to the everyday world. I am an addict, though. I keep returning to my watery fix.

Conceiving an Underwater City

Underwater, when you think of it, it's not been long in the time of human life on earth that people have gone underwater, for pleasure, to explore sea places with their own eyes. Submarines and scuba tanks are now familiar tools of exploration, but think of the change there's been, in just a year of human time. Imagine the Great Barrier Reef in 1770 and James Cook wrecked on a coral reef, and aghast at it. Two hundred years later, tourists arrive in their millions to admire the beauty of underwater landscape.

Another successful proposal, by Associate Professor Chu Jian, Director of the Centre for Infrastructure Systems, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, aims to develop specially prefabricated super-scale cylindrical structures to build underwater infrastructures or an underwater city.

On his winning the grant, Associate Professor Chu Jian says, “We are honoured to receive this grant from NRF. It is a recognition that our proposal to develop NEw Underwater Space or NEUSpace is viable and will contribute to the sustainable development of land-scarce Singapore. The proposed construction method, which at the same time creates land above the underwater city, ...