Floating Urban Village: Modular Platforms for a Climate-Resilient Community on Water

What if architecture stopped defending fixed ground against the ocean and instead learned to sit on top of it? Floating Urban Village takes that question literally, proposing an entire Indonesian neighborhood built on interconnected floating platforms: homes, farms, schools, rainwater systems and circulation routes, all designed to rise and fall with the water rather than resist it. The project treats the sea not as a threat to be walled off but as a new foundation for community life.

Designed by Magda Teresiak, the project was shortlisted in Afloat, a competition challenging designers to envision habitable architecture on water. Teresiak's entry responds to overlapping pressures specific to low-lying Indonesian settlements: rising sea levels, overpopulation, vulnerable fishing communities and the inadequacy of conventional land reclamation as a long-term strategy. Rather than proposing a single monumental floating structure, the scheme develops a modular network of platforms, houses, agricultural areas and community facilities that can expand and reorganize incrementally.

A Waterfront Promenade Between Diagonal-Braced Modules

The aerial perspective reveals the settlement's spatial character: modular residential volumes with exposed diagonal bracing line a promenade planted with palm trees, creating a streetscape that feels simultaneously domestic and infrastructural. The braced panels give each module structural legibility while allowing for variation in color and configuration. Below, a sectional view cuts through a courtyard passage between units, showing how the walkways thread between homes at a pedestrian scale. Overhead planting softens the hard geometry and provides shade, while the narrow passage creates the kind of intimate, shaded alley found in traditional Indonesian kampungs.

What matters here is the social ambition embedded in the spatial arrangement. Residential modules are not isolated houseboats drifting apart. They cluster around shared outdoor rooms, circulation routes and landscaped platforms that produce multiple scales of interaction: a private dwelling, a neighborhood courtyard, a larger communal promenade. The hierarchy gives the floating settlement the spatial diversity of a conventional village without fixing its layout permanently.

Incremental Growth From Platform to Settlement

Modularity is the engine of the entire scheme, and the composite drawing makes the assembly logic explicit. Isometric development diagrams show a staged construction sequence: main platforms are positioned first, bridging platforms connect them, residential platforms expand around this primary infrastructure, and the floating settlement finally reconnects with the existing coastline. Beneath these diagrams, sections and plans of the floating residential platforms reveal how individual building modules can be combined to form homes of different sizes, all sitting on a shared buoyant base.

The accompanying diagram zooms into the relationship between a single module and its flood risk context. Axonometric views show how residential unit configurations stack and cluster, while the section identifies the critical zone where water level fluctuation meets inhabitable space. By designing the module to accommodate that fluctuation rather than fight it, Teresiak builds resilience into the smallest repeatable component. Every platform, every bridge, every house is an instance of the same adaptable system, which means the settlement can grow in response to population pressure or shrink if conditions change.

Aquaponics, Rainwater Storage and a Self-Sufficient Programme

A labeled axonometric drawing maps the full programme across the settlement, and the inventory is ambitious: rainwater storage, an education building, aquaponics facilities and agricultural zones are distributed alongside housing. The drawing makes clear that Floating Urban Village is not simply a residential project with some greenery attached. Food production, water management, education and energy are embedded in the network of platforms as co-equal elements of the urban system. Aquaponics, in particular, ties the settlement's food supply directly to its aquatic environment, closing a loop between habitat and livelihood that mirrors the fishing economies the project aims to sustain.

Four Unit Types Scaled to Different Household Needs

The floor plans present four distinct residential unit types, each with different bedroom configurations. Ranging from compact single-occupancy modules to larger multi-bedroom arrangements, the typologies acknowledge that a functioning community requires housing diversity, not one repeated cell. Below the plans, an exterior perspective rendering shows the modules assembled and inhabited, their colorful facades and planted terraces facing the water. The rendering confirms that the technical modularity does not produce monotony; variation in unit size, orientation and surface treatment creates visual richness across the settlement edge.

The decision to design at the unit scale before scaling up to the neighborhood is critical. It means the system can serve a family of five or a single fisherman with equal spatial quality, and it means new units can be added to the network without redesigning the whole. Each home plugs into the shared infrastructure of platforms, walkways and services while maintaining its own threshold between public and private life.

Why This Project Matters

Floating Urban Village succeeds because it refuses to treat water as a problem to be solved with a single heroic gesture. Instead, Teresiak proposes a fine-grained, repeatable system where architecture, agriculture, water management and social infrastructure are designed together from the smallest module up. The result is a settlement that can grow incrementally, adapt to changing sea levels and maintain the communal life of a traditional Indonesian village, all without depending on permanent land reclamation or massive defensive infrastructure.

For designers working on climate adaptation, the project offers a useful lesson in scale. Grand visions of floating cities often collapse under their own ambition, but a modular kit of parts that can be deployed platform by platform, house by house, keeps the proposal grounded in practical reality. Teresiak's shortlisted entry for Afloat demonstrates that resilient architecture does not need to be monumental; it needs to be systemic, social and, above all, expandable.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Magda Teresiak

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Project credits: Floating Urban Village by Magda Teresiak Afloat (uni.xyz).