BUILD MORE FLOATING HOMES

....they are getting prettier

We love living by water, but not on it. If we can overcome our primeval desire to live on dry land, then we could partly solve two big problems – the housing shortage in cities and the affects of flooding.

Most cities are built by bays or rivers – these are a rich, mostly untapped source of residential “land”, ample space for floating homes. Unfortunately, few people are attracted to the idea of living like“sea gypsies”. The image of a floating home is bad – depending on what part of the world you come from, it might be a narrow boat too small to pirouette in, a trailer-trash home on a metal tray, a converted fishing boat or another piece of cramped, cough-and-cold-inducing residential flotsam or jetsam.

But times are changing– architects are designing warm, dry, spacious and exciting homes that float. Architects in the Netherlands are leading the way. Studios, like Aquatecture, have designed attractive floating homes, pictured here, for Dutch canal dwellers. And outside the country's ring of dikes, 46 floating homes were created at Maasbommel by the DuraVermeer Group in 2005 – securely attached to moorings they go up and down with rising and receding flood waters – they survived a nationwide flood in 2011.

British studio, Baca Architects, has designed Britain's first amphibious home next to the river Thames, which will be built by the end of 2012, and the country's first floating community at a Glasgow marina, scheduled for completion in 2020.

Over the coming decades, floods will become more frequent, because of rising sea levels and fiercer storms resulting from climate change. Meanwhile, housing will become increasingly sought-after and expensive in cities, because the production of new homes can't keep up with the reproduction of humans, and there is a finite amount of land available. Yes, we can keep building upwards, build on green fields or reclaim more land from the sea, but creating floating homes is quicker, less expensive and less environmentally damaging. They can also be fun to live in.