Development of the Legal Definition of the Floating City: Judicial Interpretation of Structural Characteristics of Floating Homes and Developments

As floating city developments attract further global attention as potential solutions to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals and to address coastal land pressures, increased flooding and rising sea levels, the complexities associated with permitting frameworks and the legal consequences for deployment of floating city projects are intensifying. However, these floating city proposals are not a new phenomenon. Instead, they are part of the resurgence of various floating city developments that held fascination for the international community during the 1950s to the 1970s. Despite this long fascination with floating cities, the volume of floating city proposals has not yielded law reform or sustained judicial consideration of the concept of the floating city despite some schemes reaching a level of sophistication to even be granted patents. This paper is aimed at designers and engineers and seeks to identify broad legal issues that emerge from the structural characteristics of floating structures. The design choices made in the selection of structural elements have implications on the legal status of the overall structure, such as whether a floating structure is treated as real property (land) or personal property (chattel). By extension, the impact on the legal status of these floating structures then has a flow-on effect on the legal status of floating city developments that take shape from a wide spectrum of arrangements of these floating structures, such as fixed platforms, floating pontoons to assemblages of barges. This paper examines the legal complexities emerging in various national jurisdictions by undertaking a global survey of cases involving judicial interpretation of floating structures and the more definitionally challenging, ‘floating city’, based on their structural characteristics. It examines case law to articulate how courts have considered various types of floating structures and floating cities, and how judicial interpretation of what is a floating structure and a floating city can have legal consequences at the national level, such as impacts on the duty of care of personnel and occupants, property law, and taxation. Further, the legal concept of a floating city has consequences when deployed offshore in marine areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ, or the high seas) under the evolving international law around artificial islands and floating structures. The paper concludes by highlighting the crucial role designers and engineers play when making design choices on the structural characteristics of their floating project as these choices have high impact on the legal status of these projects.