Towards the urbanisation of the Med sea: MSP challenges and opportunities for floating cities between utopia and reality

Anthropogenic climate change effects push us to reimagine human life on the planet confronting extreme living conditions. Droughts, risk of submersion and flooding, saline intrusion, and land scarcity lead to more inhospitable life conditions on land. These demanding risks have led governments to envisage the displacement from the coasts of some cities at significant risk or to think of new settlements for human life, such as floating cities. Floating offshore settlements, reminiscent of the XXth-century architectural utopias, are gaining more and more popularity in contemporary debate and are, in fact, emerging realities in other parts of the globe due to advanced technology. Floating settlements imply more impactful urbanization of the maritime space, in which human presence is already pervasive. If, on the one hand, contemporary advanced technology allows humans to prosper in extreme conditions, this does not seem to lead to more just and sustainable conditions and could provoke the marginalization of fragile communities; on the other hand, the idea of living on the water carries both fascination and worries for its implications on social, political, geopolitical and environmental ecosystems. Since this kind of settlement represents an emerging and—in a way, experimental—situation, floating cities are not (yet) taken into account by the Maritime Spatial Planning discipline. The contribution aims to underline the fundamental role of Maritime Spatial Planning in order for the Mediterranean region to look pro-actively at emerging sustainable floating urban settlements. This work could offer opportunities to reflect on the role of Maritime Spatial Planning and focus on some issues of future human life on the planet that could be further explored in future research.