From sustainability to "sustain-aqua-lity"

Floating developments can be Scarless developments, leaving no carbon footprint during lifetime and no physical footprint after lifespan. Working with natural resources on water provides new possibilities to make more efficient sustainable developments.

Dutch Docklands has embraced this theme and provided Koen Olthuis, the companies Chief Creative Officer and one of the founders together with Paul van de Camp, with the needed resources to study, innovate and enhance the companies Green Intellectual Property (IP).

Koen Olthuis studied architecture and industrial design at the Delft University of Technology, and invented Dutch Docklands’ patent on the methodology for producing a "floating base." In 2007, Koen was listed as one of "the 200 most influential people in the world" by TIME magazine due to the worldwide interest in our water developments. The French magazine Terra Eco chose him as one of the "100 green persons that will change the world" in 2011.

In Koen’s vision, today’s designers are an essential part of the climate change generation and should start to enhance their perspective on urban components to become dynamic instead of static. His solution, called City Apps, are floating urban components that add a certain function to the existing static grid of a city. Using existing urban water as building ground offers space for new density, offering amazing opportunities for many Cities worldwide to respond in a flexible way to climate change and urbanization.

Dutch Docklands efforts to make floating developments as scarless as possible, opened up the 'big window of opportunities' in many different areas and therefore also in one of the largest global marine protected environments which is the Maldives.