"If construction goes ahead as planned, the majority of the foundations for the island off Denmark's capital should be in place by 2035, with an aim to fully complete the project by 2070."
I can't recall ever seeing the year 2070 or later in print, in the context of some definite project or plan. Are there other examples?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasvlakte (Dutch wiki has much more info: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasvlakte )
Another comparable project is the new Strandeiland in Amsterdam
https://www.amsterdam.nl/projecten/ijburg/deelprojecten-ijbu...
1.5km2, started this year, fully complete in 2040. But it's built in shallow, tide-less Ijsemeer not in the sea so it's a lot easier
EDIT; the Dutch out of necessity have plans for up to 2200: https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/keep-our-feet-dry-new-n... “One day with a sigh of relief we will give up this country to the waves.”
Oh and of course in this country cycling paths are built before any houses.
https://southfront.org/chinas-artificial-islands-south-china...
It can be done faster if enough resources are allocated... Denmark doesn't seem to be in a hurry.
Minor nitpick, it is 'IJsselmeer'. Double 's' and 'IJ' is both in capital letters when its part of a name. Otherwise great links, thanks!
So you could consider it part of the long term planning
"At around 2116, care and maintenance will end and any remaining buildings will be removed and the site returned as close as possible to its original state."[0]
Also, depending on what you mean by "some definite plan", and how young you are, your pension plan may include an estimated retirement date later than 2070.
[0] https://www.anglesey-today.com/decommissioning-wylfa.html
100 Years is an upcoming experimental science fiction film written by John Malkovich and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Advertised in 2015 with the tagline "The Movie You Will Never See", it is due to be released on November 18, 2115. The 100-year span matches the time it takes for a bottle of Louis XIII Cognac to be properly aged before its release to consumers.
Pending release, the film is being kept in a high-tech safe behind bulletproof glass that will open automatically on November 18, 2115, the day of the film's premiere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Meier
>As a conceptual artist, he has been keeping himself busy with many art exhibitions. He began his career as a performance artist in the late 1960s. In 1972 as part of Documenta 5, Meier installed a commemorative plaque at the railway station in Kassel (Germany) which read: "On 23 March 1994, from 3 to 4 pm, Dieter Meier will stand on this plaque". He honored the promise 22 years later.
Nobody is going to come and complain you didn't do the work you were paid for...
Even though (AFAIK) the timeline was not exactly laid out, it was clear from the outset that this project would take many decades.
The scale of the Zuiderzee works is really insane. Even building of the dyke that encloses the inlet was projected to cost a year of the national budget.
> The longest music piece in the world is being performed in the city of Halberstadt in Germany: John Cage's composition for organ ORGAN2/ASLSP - As SLow aS Possible - is resounding here in an extreme interpretation of 639 years, that means until the year 2640! Halberstadt is a town (43,800 inhabitants in 2015) in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and the capital of the district of Harz.
https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-ha...
Lots of things have 50 (or longer) year plans, contracts, payoffs, repayment schedules, and so on.
Here's Austria's recent 100 year bond (paying a comical 0.88%):
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-24/austri...
The deal on Hong Kong was supposed to be 50 years, with it operating as a SAR.
Modern US aircraft carriers are usually given a ~50 year service life. CVN-79, USS John F. Kennedy, would be planned to operate until roughly 2070. (the prior John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier, CV-67, made it about 40 years, 1967-2007)
Good engineering and craftsmanship.
(In case anyone wants to read more, there isn't much info yet but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri#Future_explorat... )
In the past (building cathedrals for example) humanity had advanced project timelines of many hundreds of years. I wish we were able to replicate the long-term thinking strategies of the past.
https://www.archi-ninja.com/the-10-longest-construction-proj...
Which for the longest has a duration of 2,000 years for the great wall of China.
Japan have a host of "long term big engineering projects" they're always working on.
It didn't feel like being on an island at all, since it's entirely developed. But once you hop on a train you shoot out across the ocean and it's quite spectacular.
I recommend going up to the viewing tower if you have time before your flight, it's an inimitable view.
According to Wikipedia they're expecting it to take more than 5 years more, with a completion date of "post 2026"
Y2038 issue for those that don't know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Once the island is finally build and complete, some politician will find some species of frog on it that’s suddenly vitally important to conserve even though it’s also verywhere else in Denmark, and construction of housing will become prohibited.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
(Also as a side note, a 0.3m rise doesn't sound like much, but that is an enormous mass of water. IIRC a rise of that level would destroy more than a quarter of the land of most American coastal cities)
But Denmark is not affected by this.
I think it's interesting that they intend to build residential property to accommodate 35,000. The area around that island is very...heavy industry related. It's also very very windy over there, but then again so is Denmark in general.
I guess it is just good money after bad and the fact that despite the amount of sense it makes to build elsewhere, lots of companies cannot find good employees and think they need to be in the big city to get those.
But otherwise it steals value from the city and it increases the coastline.
Increasing the coastline is truly adding to society, humans value water access, but I suspect the stolen value by shifting the centre of mass of Copenhagen obfuscates it's true added worth.
It's quite different to building up or down or abstract improvements like tunnels which increase density and more clearly add more than they take.
https://discovery.cathaypacific.com/hong-kongs-land-reclamat...
Back in 2016, the Norwegians had an idea to gift Finland a new highest peak by shifting the border between Finland and Norway just a bit as Finland was due to celebrate its 100th year of independence. However, it never actually went anywhere since it'd be unconstitutional for Norway to start splitting off its country.
That's not a giant island.
Sure it’s not the size of Japan or something, but it’s not tiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder
It is still a very nice project nonetheless!
As island go, "giant" is far from a correct description.
Calling it a "giant project" would be fine.
I’m always a little surprised that the most wild and natural parts of world (the flyover country) is populated by anti environmentalists (or rather, libertarians typically), and the most densely populated cities devoid of most green things tend to have clusters of environmentalists.
Don’t they know they can come out to the country, buy 50 acres of woods and streams and meadows and wildlife, and not worry about how many cars are on the streets of Copenhagen?
They’d love it in these areas. People ride horses and graze animals. They hunt and go bird watching and identify all of the local trees.
In Denmark? Hardly. If you buy 50 acres here, you'll get fields or pastures, and the legal obligation to keep it as such. Actually, as far as I remember anything over 30 hectares will come with requirements that you have some sort of certification as a farmer.
0,5% of Denmark's 40,000 square kilometers is wild. The largest forests are all state-owned. 60% is farmed land - 80% of which, ie., 50% of the country, is used just to grow pig feed.
Put simply, despite planning and projecting the entire project, the environmental impact is done piece by piece. This vastly understated the environmental impact in the harbor and Øresund. This approach is what is being challenged, since it obviously disregards big picture thinking.
They complained about new highrises near my local train station. I pointed out to them that those highrises would take up ~2,000 m^2 but provide housing for as many as one of the nearest local roads, that with the sidewalks, houses and gardens, many of which are paved over or mostly decking, takes up ~40,000 m^2.
As such, if they wanted more green spaces the better stance would be to argue for replacement rather than denying planning: E.g. make developers commit to buying up more low density housing and demolish a proportion of it and replace it with parkland or rewild it. The overall societal effect of not increasing housing supply as much would be a negative (and so there may well be needs for government incentives), but increased green spaces would be a positive. And if it reduced overall resistance to more high density construction to explicitly link density to replacement, I think it'd be worth it. E.g. award construction proposals with "points" in favour for whatever amount of existing construction they replace with parkland or nature that causes planning rules to strongly favour projects that increase density.
But said "environmentalists" seemed dead set on seeing bigger buildings as inherently bad without engaging with the point that absent getting rid of people, creating more space for nature means making people take up less space, and that means higher density.
To me arguing for high density is an essential part of environmentalism.
I get the impression that the least environmentalist people are also generally in small towns, but I can't say I've ended up associating with them as much. My impression is that they're generally this way because they're the people that environmental laws impact the most.
City people seem to typically fall into a middle ground, not rabid in either direction.
(Europe may be different, I'm Canadian, but broad generalities about environmentalists seem likely to carry over?)
10/10
You can see from goog maps how there are a couple outline online islands under "construction" and once those are filled they'll outline more.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Sch%C3%B6nscheidt,_J._H....
It's a stupid prestige project, primarily designed to attract rich investors, who will let their investment object apartments sit empty, creating another dead neighborhood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China:
The Great Wall of China (traditional Chinese: 萬里長城; simplified Chinese: 万里长城; pinyin: Wànlǐ Chángchéng) is a series of fortifications that were built across the historical northern borders of ancient Chinese states and Imperial China as protection against various nomadic groups from the Eurasian Steppe
Which even today looks like it would take many years to produce as is.
100 Years is apparently a short film, Rodriguez having stated in a 2019 interview with French YouTuber InThePanda: "I was making several short films for them, and I finished that one first, we shot that one first, I thought that was gonna be a commercial or something. And then I showed them the movie and they said 'Yeah, that's great, that's great. That's the one we lock away.' And I said 'What? That's the one you lock away? What about the other one with the future--' 'No, that's the commercial.' [...] The one that I was most attached to was the one they locked away."
And before that, of course, there's the price. 50 acres way out in the sticks in America might be quite affordable. Arable land in Denmark, less so. There's no easy escape here like the post I reacted made it sound.
The levy has been fine for the last four centuries, but local engineers were thinking of raising it. For that, they might need someone to help them translate the original blueprint. I once joked about deciphering it when talking to another Dutch friend on mine. She’s close to the Royal family and I was curious possibly needing asking Historian for help. She didn’t seem surprised at all. Apparently a lot of Dutch diplomacy, to this day, is sharing that expertise and that unique, century-long, perspective. The King is a hydrological engineer (and a commercial pilot) and has lead international projects.
The techniques and examples are pretty much ideas tested centuries ago, with the occasional minor adjustment like: windmills with Archimedes screw can be marginally improved if you use wind power and electric pumps. I’m sure someone on one of those projects has had to joke “Grand-grand-papa wasn’t a big believer in ballast. It was a new idea then. But we can try this time.”
In English, the word you are trying to use is levee. As a French, you might recognize where that came from ;)
Actually though, at least in the US we call those things the Dutch built “dikes”, which is, not surprisingly, just the anglicized version of what the Dutch call them.
Comparison to the Palm and World islands in Dubai strikes me though.
I think the plan here is different and will not be done by building up dykes and draining the area inside.
Crazy looking back to think that Star Trek originally aired before the moon landing.
For humanity to avoid achieving those things, there would have to be some significant barriers to progress that we don't know about yet, or a fairly disastrous collapse, which would limit the possible stories that could be told.
I suppose that setting a story thousands of years into the future allows there to have been multiple collapses and renaissances, but I'm not convinced that such a path is as likely as a permanent collapse or reaching some sort of uninterruptible paradise state.
> In the 1790s, when the French Revolutionary Army drew close to Cologne, the Cathedral treasures were removed for safekeeping. These included the plans and drawings for the west front, which were transported with other items to Amorbach and eventually lost and forgotten. In Amorbach, the large “F-Plan” was used by a family for some time to dry beans, and later wrapped around their son’s new suitcase to protect it as he traveled to the university in Darmstadt. It was in Darmstadt, in the attic of the inn where the son arrived that the Plan was rediscovered and recognised by G. Moller as the missing drawing of the west front.
Source https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/younghistorians/2012/oral...
There will be hundreds of trucks driving through Copenhagen every single day for decades, to dump the necessary dirt to construct the island. That is going to cause massive noise and disturbance problems for people living in the city, all for a prestige project that has been hastily jammed through, including a runaround on environmental regulations.
The end result will be even more unaffordable luxury apartments, which will be bought by rich investors, creating yet another dead area devoid of local culture and life, just like Ørestad and Nordhavn, where a huge number of expensive apartments sit completely empty, bought only as investment objects.
A much better alternative would be to construct a simpler storm break, and then expand Copenhagen westwards, increasing density in the suburbs and outlying areas, by predominantly building affordable apartments and ensuring good public transit coverage, to combat the current situation of students and working class people being pushed out of the city by ever-increasing housing prices.
P.S. - I was doing data entry for local real estate companies and simple BASIC 'cash register' setups for local businesses.
In the US, just need to keep healthcare costs under control.
Retirees don't work, which means nevermind the absolute amount of demand (no kids, etc., make less per household sure) the ratio of supply to demand offsets the productivity / industrial capacity gains. Coupled with more retires, that could restore the balance and get the "Keynsian feedback loop" going again.
(We could still go into a massive worldwide recession, but that would be a political result of the powers that be not wanting the profit share of national income to decrease. That is plenty possible but not some unavoidable "demographic destiny".)
