Afloat: A Floating Indonesian City That Uses Shared Housing to Ease Ethnic Tension

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This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "Afloat: A Floating Indonesian City That Uses Shared Housing to Ease Ethnic Tension" about?

This article covers topics related to Residential Building, Urban Design. Timber gables, fishing grids and planted islets form a water district where a common way of living becomes the ground on which neighbors meet.

Timber gables, fishing grids and planted islets form a water district where a common way of living becomes the ground on which neighbors meet.

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UNI Editorial published Results under Residential Building, Urban Design on Oct 21, 2026

Most floating city proposals begin with a technical question: how do we stay above rising water? This one begins with a social one. It treats the water as a neutral field where people who might otherwise be divided by habit and belief can start over on equal footing, in houses that look alike, along canals that belong to no one group.

Afloat, designed by 嵩琪苑 for a site in Indonesia, was Shortlisted at Afloat. The project's stated aim is direct: build a city of water integration with a similar type of residence and life mode, so as to alleviate the ethnic conflicts caused by differences in living habits and religious beliefs among different nationalities. Housing here is the instrument of that aim, not just its container.

A Shared Roofline as Common Ground

The aerial renderings make the argument visually before any diagram does. Steep timber gables and long flat-roofed bars repeat across the water in a limited family of forms, with white volumes punched out of the timber shells to mark windows and terraces. No house claims a distinct identity through ornament or style; difference comes only from how units cluster and turn against each other. That restraint is the point. A neighborhood with a common vocabulary removes one of the most visible markers of who belongs where.

Between the houses, the canals do the work of streets. Small wooden boats sit moored at doorsteps, and round planters with flowering trees float like traffic islands. In the misty version of the view, tree-covered islets and moored rowboats pull the eye toward the horizon, suggesting a district that continues well beyond the frame and keeps the same rhythm as it goes.

Aerial rendering of timber-clad gabled houses and flat-roofed blocks floating on green water, with small wooden boats moored between them. Image: 嵩琪苑

Misty aerial rendering of floating timber houses and tree-covered islets, with rowboats tied up in the foreground water. Image: 嵩琪苑

Timber Gables That Gather Sun and Shed Water

Seen from a lower angle, the pitched roofs reveal a second role: their dark faces carry solar panels, turning the most recognizable element of the housing into its energy source. The steep slope reads as both a climatic and a cultural gesture, a roof that throws off tropical rain while giving the district a profile anyone can identify with. Behind it, a distant shoreline skyline sits under soft clouds, placing the floating district in clear relation to the city it grows from rather than as an isolated utopia.

Rendering of pitched timber roofs with dark solar panels on the water, with a distant shoreline skyline under soft clouds. Image: 嵩琪苑

An Orthogonal Grid Softened by Green Edges

The master plan crop shows a disciplined street grid of water channels, each block filled with small timber units grouped into L, bar and courtyard-like clusters. The grid ensures that no block is privileged over another, which matters in a project concerned with fairness between communities. Yet the edges refuse to stay rigid. A curving green belt sweeps along one side, wedges of lawn slice into the corners, and lines of trees trace the block perimeters, so the geometry relaxes wherever it meets landscape.

Three Kinds of Park, One Public Realm

Zooming into the green plots, the plan details reveal three distinct landscape characters: a lens of planting crossed by curved paths, a circular park with radiating lawn strips, and a looser plot where tree canopies drift beside the housing. Each offers a different way to occupy shared space, from the formal gathering ring to the casual edge. Crucially, these parks belong to the grid rather than to any single cluster of homes, giving residents of every background a reason to cross paths.

Three plan drawing details of planted park plots, with curved paths, radiating lawn strips and round tree canopies. Image: 嵩琪苑

Fishing Grids and Floating Walkways as Daily Work

The axonometric shifts from where people live to how they make a living. Large fishing grids, divided into regular cells, float at the district's edge; the drawing's annotation notes that these areas supply marine products and community jobs. Next to them, a planted island is threaded by a wooden floating walkway that lets residents enter the landscape on foot, while urban green spaces are planted with tall flood-control trees. Commercial blocks sit close to this greenery, sharing its views.

This is where the social thesis gains substance. Shared housing alone does not make a community; shared labor and shared leisure do. By placing work, recreation and commerce within walking or rowing distance of every home, the plan gives neighbors daily, practical reasons to depend on one another.

Axonometric drawing of a floating district showing fishing grids, a planted island with a walkway, and outlined commercial blocks, with annotations. Image: 嵩琪苑

Why This Project Matters

Afloat reframes the floating city from a climate fix into a tool for coexistence. Its bet is that sameness in dwelling, paired with generous common ground, can lower the friction that differences in custom and faith sometimes produce. One can question whether uniform housing truly dissolves conflict, but the proposal deserves credit for asking architecture to carry a social burden openly, rather than treating it as an afterthought.

The most transferable lesson lies in the balance it strikes: a repetitive, egalitarian grid of homes held in tension with varied parks, productive water and walkable islands. That pairing of a common base with diverse shared places is a model worth testing well beyond Indonesia's waters, wherever new settlements must welcome people who did not choose to live side by side.