Floathub Project Takes Aim at Sweden’s Housing Crisis


Floathub. Image Courtesy of Daniela Lamartine

Floathub. Image Courtesy of Daniela Lamartine

Architect Daniela Lamartine has designed a floating community to address Sweden’s national housing crisis. Called Floathub, the project creates a new mobile lifestyle to achieve long-term economic and residential security. Floathub would be created with a co-operative trust where residents become developers and owners through collective action. The trust would manage and build the floating typologies using CNC technology to enable a self-sufficient mobile lifestyle on water.


Floathub. Image Courtesy of Daniela Lamartine

Floathub. Image Courtesy of Daniela Lamartine

The housing market in Sweden has created an economic inequality between generations and as a result home-ownership has become unreachable for many. Floathub’s main idea is to maintain the flexibility of a mobile lifestyle on water through a catalog of typologies that benefit the floating community. Each typology generates values to the community and acts as a generator that enables affordability and possibilities as they create a network of reliance between FloatHubs. Resources from the communities are tied to an economy where any surplus generated is recycled back. This allows long-term affordability on behalf of the mobile community. Vital activities are: production, recycling and vending. As a result, the users can live without municipal systems, and developers are not needed as they can deal with issues on their own.


Floathub. Image Courtesy of Daniela Lamartine

Floathub. Image Courtesy of Daniela Lamartine

Floathub. Image Courtesy of Daniela Lamartine

Floathub. Image Courtesy of Daniela Lamartine

The community would connect to a pier, its main relation to land. This also enables a relationship between those living on land and water. All furniture would be built on site with the use of a Floating Factory, while all building typologies are made to be mobile. The floating community would include workshops on existing boating communities to connect existing boat communities, boat associations and future boat dwellers.