With sea levels expected to rise at least 26 inches by the end of the century, due to human-driven climate change, to say that we have a problem is an understatement. By the middle of the next century, many of the world’s major cities will be flooded, and in some cases, entire island nations will be underwater. The people who live there will have to relocate. But to where?

On Wednesday, the United Nations Human Settlements Program, or UN Habitat, convened its first roundtable to discuss the possibility of floating cities as a solution to this problem. Held at its headquarters in New York City, on the banks of the East River, the location was fitting given that the room itself might be underwater within a century. The specific proposal that dozens of scientists, engineers, artists, and investors came to discuss was Oceanix City, which aspires to create a scalable platform for the seafaring civilizations of tomorrow.

OCEANIX/BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Borrowing its name from the company that created it, Oceanix City is the latest seasteading venture of Marc Collins, French Polynesia’s former minister of tourism and something of a floating-cities veteran. In 2017 he also cofounded Blue Frontiers, which aims to build floating homes, offices, and hotels off the coast of his home country. Unlike Blue Frontiers, however, Collins says that Oceanix City was created with a more egalitarian spirit in mind. “No one is out to build a luxury product for the rich, ” Collins says. “That isn’t on the table.” Instead, it’s about trying to create floating cities that meet the needs of the people whose coastlines are at risk of getting swallowed up.

Oceanix City was designed by the renowned Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, along with dozens of experts from institutions like the UN and MIT. According to Ingels, who lives on a houseboat himself, residents of the floating city will use 100 percent renewable energy, eat only plant-based food, produce zero waste, and provide housing affordable to all, not just the rich. Although most cities struggle to hit even a handful of these goals, Ingels and Collins were confident that they could be accomplished in the challenging oceanic environment.

At the core of Oceanix City is a 4.5-acre hexagonal floating platform that is meant to host up to 300 people. These platforms are modular, meaning they can be linked to form larger communities as they tessellate across the surface of the ocean. Each platform will be anchored to the ocean floor using biorock, a material that is harder than concrete and can be grown using minerals found in the ocean, which could make the anchor more secure over time. These anchors might also serve as the seeds of artificial reefs to rejuvenate aquatic ecosystems around the floating city.

OCEANIX/BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

The exact design of each platform will be determined by the community’s needs and the city’s location, said Ingels. Some, for example, could act as barriers to limit the impact of waves, while others could be dedicated to agriculture. But every platform will play a role in keeping the floating city sustainable: by hosting aeroponic grow houses, submerged gardens for growing scallops and other seafood, or desalination equipment that would run on renewable energy. Although all the platforms are designed to withstand a category 5 storm, Collins says they will initially be placed in locations that are generally sheltered from extreme weather events.

Many of the technologies needed to bring this vision from paper to reality are still in their infancy, such as passive desalination and high-efficiency wave power generators. So Collins and Ingels are also casting the floating city as a kind of incubator for the sustainable technologies of tomorrow. Any technologies developed along the way could also be used by communities on land, just in case this whole floating-cities thing doesn’t take off.