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A Floating Future Rooted in the Past: How Venice Is Inspiring Japan’s Visionary Sea City
From Waterlogged Timber to Smart Cities at Sea, the Ancient Logic of Venice Lives On in Japan’s Dogen City—and in New York’s Sim Eternal City, Where Even Death Finds a Place.
Joseph K.
May 01, 2025
More than 1,600 years ago, a band of refugees fleeing war and chaos did the unthinkable: they built a city not on rock, but on water. In the brackish marshlands of the Venetian Lagoon, they drove thousands of wooden piles into the seabed, erecting what would become one of the world’s most improbable urban marvels — Venice.
Now, on the opposite side of the world, a new generation of visionaries in Japan is reviving that ancient playbook — not as an act of desperation, but as a deliberate step into the future.
Welcome to Dogen City, a radical experiment in sustainable, ocean-based living. Developed by the Japanese startup N-ARK, the project envisions a circular, floating metropolis off the coast of Hamamatsu, designed to house up to 40,000 people. But beneath its futuristic shell lies a deep historical echo — not just of engineering ingenuity, but of humanity’s perennial need to adapt.
“It’s not that the floating city is a brand new concept,” Paul Joseph, an urban Creator at Sim Eternal Studio. “It’s a solution rooted in necessity — something we saw with Venice. The difference is that today, we are choosing this path for resilience, sustainability, and survival.”
Venice: The Original Floating City
Founded in 421 A.D., Venice was born out of crisis. Fleeing the barbarian invasions that engulfed the Italian mainland, settlers found refuge in the mudflats of the Adriatic. Lacking solid ground, they built upward — not on stone, but on millions of timber piles driven into the soft seabed.
Many of these were made from alder, a water-resistant wood that, when submerged in clay and saltwater, undergoes a kind of petrification. Over centuries, the wood hardens, preserving the foundation. St. Mark’s Campanile alone rests on 100,000 such piles; the Basilica della Salute required over a million.
Blueprint of Venice
Venice’s stability, paradoxically, came not from conquering the water, but from adapting to it — allowing silt, sediment, and salt to do what concrete could not.
From Petrified Wood to Smart Infrastructure
Where Venice relied on timber and clay, Dogen City draws on high-tech composites, renewable energy systems, and an undersea data center that powers healthcare diagnostics and urban analytics. The city is designed to be climate-resilient, self-sufficient, and disaster-proof — capable of withstanding tsunamis and severe storms.
Its donut-shaped design spans 1.58 kilometers in diameter, with a four-kilometer perimeter. The inner circle will house 10,000 permanent residents, with facilities for 30,000 visitors. Central to its mission is healthcare: telemedicine, drug discovery simulations, and longevity research will be woven into the city’s core infrastructure.
Still, like Venice, the foundation is the key.
Dogen City, N-Ark Project
While Dogen City will not rest on wooden piles, its floating platforms must contend with the same forces Venice did — shifting tides, corrosion, and the daily dance between land and sea. “We’re not escaping nature,” said Fujimura. “We’re designing with it.”
The Urgency of Adaptation
Climate change has accelerated the need for alternative models of urban development. With sea levels projected to rise by up to a meter by 2100, coastal megacities from Jakarta to Miami face existential threats. Floating cities — once the domain of science fiction — are entering strategic conversations in architecture, policy, and finance.
Yet the concept is not without critics.
Skeptics warn that such projects risk becoming luxury enclaves for the wealthy or techno-utopian distractions from the pressing need to decarbonize existing cities. Others question the ecological impact of building large-scale marine infrastructure in sensitive coastal zones.
But to Dogen City’s creators, the project is not about escapism — it’s about evolution.
“Venice wasn’t built to impress. It was built to survive,” said Paul Joseph, an urban Creator at Sim Eternal Studio. “Dogen City is the same impulse, translated through time — to live on water not because we want to, but because we must.”
A Model, Not a Miracle
If successful, Dogen City may serve as a prototype — a kind of 21st-century Venice that offers not just a blueprint for coastal resilience, but a redefinition of where and how humanity can live. From rising waters to demographic shifts, the pressures shaping our cities today are not so different from those that shaped Venice centuries ago.
But the conversation around floating cities is evolving beyond survival and sustainability. In Brooklyn, New York, a parallel vision is emerging with Sim Eternal City — a proposed “18-minute city” that reimagines not only how we live, but how we die. At its core is the integration of urban deathcare infrastructure, including virtual cemeteries, mobile funeral services, and memory-preserving technologies. Where Venice built a foundation to flee death, Sim Eternal City embraces it as a civic and cultural function — bringing mortality back into the design of modern life.
As the tides rise, the question is no longer if we can build cities on water — but how we can build them to hold not just our bodies, but our legacies.
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