度假天堂马尔代夫面临着海平面上升吞噬陆地的威胁，而新西兰的一位硕士在他的毕业论文中将钻井平台作为解决这个问题的良方，他提议将马尔代夫安置在半潜式钻井平台上！此举或能保存马尔代夫独特的文化和历史，但也有着不得不令人慎重考虑的弊端。
在新西兰奥克兰Unitec建筑学院，硕士毕业生Mayank Thammalla在他的毕业论文中写到，“如果你想看看未来城市的变化，那就去马尔代夫吧。”连最为保守的政府间气候变化专业委员会（IPCC）都认为，处于低洼之地的马尔代夫共和国将会随着海平面的上升而不适宜人类居住。
仅仅10年之后，马尔代夫政府可能不得不面临这样一个棘手的境况——超过40万的难民将被迫背井离乡，离开他们的家园。与在别处重建马尔代夫或施行一系列措施对抗海平面上升不同，Thammalla极具难度的研究主题是在马尔代夫现有地理位置拯救这个城市，他的解决方案就是半潜式钻井平台。
马尔代夫政府非常了解现在面临的威胁，作为国际上改善气候最努力的倡导者之一，他们已经打算在像印度或澳大利亚这种国家购买土地重新建立一个流亡政府了。但是这种做法对于一个国家来说，过往的一切也就不复存在了。如果马尔代夫要采用这种方法的话，他们就需要国际社会给予充足的支持，否则他们根本负担不起。即使上述方法能够取得成功，但其拥有的200余年历史和独特的文化又该如何守护？
Thammalla的题为“漂浮或沉没”的提议认为，马尔代夫人如果能够住在钻井平台上，那么这不仅仅解决了人口居住问题，也能使马尔代夫的文化延续下去。经过严格评估马尔代夫的社会文化结构和半潜式平台的适用性，Thammalla尝试着将这两个概念融合在一个计划中以创造出现有首都马累（Male）的特性，使用相似的封闭与开放空间比例来为居民提供熟悉的空间感。这个计划甚至想的更远——整合马尔代夫的历史，即用曾经非常流行的传统材料椰子木来建造住房单元以连接历史与现代，而这是当下马累（Male）所没有做到的。
迁移整个国家到一座钻井平台上的想法实际上没有听起来那么古怪。马尔代夫尤其是首都马累，人口已经非常稠密了，估计每平方公里有1102.5个人。该计划的早期雏形因为忽视了人口密度问题而宣告失败，但却为重建马累这一宏大计划提供了早期蓝本，这一切都是为了将平台住房与周边海洋环境整合一体化以确保遭遇海平面提升或海啸时能够安全度过。海平面上升和海啸可以称为马尔代夫经济发展的头号敌人，这两者可以在一夜之间带走马尔代夫62%的GDP，还不算逝去的近100条生命。正如Thammalla自己所说的，项目本身是为了“阐释生命是无价的”。
但是这个项目也面临着最巨大的挑战：尽管提出的平台方法似乎相对更便宜又能灵活的将人口安置于恶劣环境中，但仅仅提供住房并不能维持一个国家的运转。马尔代夫几乎30%的经济来源来自于旅游业，也就是依靠它的白沙滩和热带度假胜地，但是改装钻井平台有没有这个吸引力可就是未知数了。这意味着在大众更希望将马尔代夫安置在像澳大利亚这种国家政治环境下，Thammalla的提议还需要慎重考虑，但他的办法确实能够将马尔代夫以独立文化体保存下来的唯一方法。当一个国家面临着如此激进又彻底的威胁时，或许最好的办法就是以同样激进的办法解决它。
作者/Dario Goodwin 译者/滕云天 编辑/Wang Lin
If you want to see the future of urban adaptation, head to the Maldives. That’s the message and warning behind Mayank Thammalla’s master’s thesis from the Unitec School of Architecture in Auckland, New Zealand. Under even the most conservative IPCC forecasts, the low-lying Republic of Maldives will become almost uninhabitable as sea levels rise, while any further rise could leave many of the 200 inhabited islands underwater. It’s an existential threat like no other – in as little as ten year’s time, the Maldivian government could be faced with the impossible situation of deciding how to deal with over 400,000 refugees leaving the area where their country used to be. Instead of attempting to rebuild the Maldives elsewhere or mount a series of defences against the oncoming sea, Thammalla’s research project has the difficult goal of realistically preserving Maldivian life in the same geographical location as it is now. His solution? Semi-submersible oil rigs.
The Maldivian government, well aware of the threat posed and one of the leading voices in the international effort to ameliorate climate change, has proposed plans to buy land in countries like India or Australia in order to form a republic-in-exile. It’s an acceptance of defeat, but little else remains to the Republic – if the kind of coastal defenses the Maldives need are even possible, they’d likely be unaffordable without the somewhat unlikely prospect of major international backing. But the Maldive culture and identity, more than 2000 years old and a unique combination of influences, is more than worth defending.
Thammalla’s proposal, entitled “Swim or Sink”, argues that not only could the entire population of the Maldives be realistically housed on a series or more or less generic oil rig templates, but that these rigs could also be adapted to support the existing Maldivian culture. Starting with a rigorous assessment of both the socio-cultural structure of the Maldives and the semi-submersible oil rig template, Thammalla has attempted to reconcile the two concepts into a unifying plan that recreates the qualities of the current capital of Malé, using similar enclosure-to-open-space ratios to provide familiar feeling spaces for the inhabitants. The plan goes even further to integrate Maldivian history, proposing the use of once-common traditional materials of coconut timber for the housing units in order to try and provide a link with the past that even modern Malé fails to do.
The idea of relocating an entire country to an oil rig is less outlandish than it may sound. The Maldives, and Malé in particular, are already incredibly densely populated, with an estimated 1,102.5 people per square kilometre. Initial attempts to create a more open plan on the rigs failed due to a lack of density; it was re-creating Malé that created a successful prototype, and all this would be housed a rig that could integrate meaningfully with the surround marine environment while also being safe from rising seas or tsunamis that have in the past wiped out up to 62% of the country’s GDP overnight, not to mention killing nearly 100. As Thammalla himself says, the project “positions itself that one cannot put value on life.”
But it’s value that also provides the biggest challenge to this project: although the proposed rigs seem a relatively cheap and flexible way to house a population in a hostile environment, providing housing alone isn’t enough to sustain a country. As much as 30% of the Maldivian economy comes from tourism drawn by white sand beaches and tropical resorts; it’s unclear whether a converted oil rig would have the same draw. That said, in a political climate where resettling a country to somewhere like Australia would prove tricky at best, Thammalla’s proposal arguably represents the only way to preserve the the Maldives as a distinct cultural entity. When a country faces a threat so total and so radical, maybe the best solution is one that’s equally radical?
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