The floating city that wants to drown 80,000 people in the ocean

Cruise ships have spent the last two decades getting bigger. Freedom Ship wants to make them look smaller.

symbol of royal caribbean Off the Seas can carry approximately 7,600 passengers and has enough restaurants, pools and attractions to make some vacation resorts seem incomplete. Yet even that floating giant looks surprisingly small when you put it next to the latest plans for the Freedom Ship.

And that’s because the Freedom Ship isn’t really trying to be a cruise ship at all. It wants to become a city.

The proposed ship is nearly a mile long, has 30 decks above the water and will carry 80,000 people. It is roughly the population of a regional Australian city, except that it will spend its life slowly circling the world.

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This vision has existed since the 1990s, but the project has reemerged with new support, new leadership, and new confidence that the world’s most ambitious floating community can finally move beyond glossy presentations and impossible-seeming promises.

more city than ship

On paper, the numbers are staggering.

freedom ship It will house 50,000 permanent residents, accommodate another 10,000 tourists and visitors, and require about 20,000 crew members to keep everything running. It will have schools, colleges, banks, retail complexes, hotels, a research hospital, museums, a convention centre, a symphony hall, a casino and a two-storey food hall that will make your local shopping center food court unique.

There is also a proposed 15,000-seat sports stadium, water park and an aquarium where residents can go diving without leaving the ship.

Arriving visitors will move around via an internal tram system connecting different districts, while ferries and helipads will provide access to the outside world. The ship itself will remain offshore in international waters, which are too large to dock at traditional ports.

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The hard part has never been the design

This all sounds impressive. This also raises obvious questions. If the concept is so compelling, why hasn’t someone created it already?

The answer is the same reason many floating city projects have struggled for decades. Wealth.

The estimated construction cost of the Freedom Ship is approximately $16 billion (~$22 billion AUD). Financing something bigger than any passenger liner ever built isn’t really a job for a few enthusiastic investors and PowerPoint presentations.

That challenge has defeated countless floating city concepts before it. From seaside communities in French Polynesia to futuristic marine developments in South Korea and the Maldives, many projects have generated headlines, architectural renderings and bold promises before walking straight into the realities of funding, regulation and construction.

That’s why the most interesting thing about the Freedom Ship isn’t the water park, the stadium or even the idea of ​​it living permanently in the ocean. That is that people are still trying.

Thirty years after the concept first came up, someone still looks at a mile-long floating city carrying 80,000 people around the planet and thinks it could be achieved.

This makes him a visionary or an optimist, depending on who you ask. But if it ever leaves the drawing board, every cruise ship currently plying the oceans will suddenly look much, much smaller.