World's first 'floating city' could be open for business by 2020

The Seasteading Institute plans to have about a dozen floating structures up and running by the end of the decade

Plans for the world's first man-made "floating city" in the Pacific Ocean are beginning to take shape, with the non-profit organisation behind the project claiming a prototype could be ready by 2020.

The San Francisco-based Seasteading Institute has spent about a decade trying to work out how to build "permanent, innovative communities floating at sea".

Earlier this year, it signed an agreement with the government of French Polynesia to begin constructing the first of these self-sustaining nation states in 2019.

Now Joe Quirk, president of the Seasteading Institute, has outlined his plan to build a community consisting of about a dozen structures - including homes, hotels, offices and restaurants - by 2020.

If all goes to plan, these structures will feature living roofs, use local wood, bamboo and coconut fibre, and recycled metal and plastic, according to an interview with Quirk in the New York Times .

The main aim of the project is to "liberate humanity from politicians" and "rewrite the rules that govern society".

"Governments just don’t get better," said Quirk. "They're stuck in previous centuries. That's because land incentives a violent monopoly to control it."

Quirk said that building a utopian offshore community free from the tyranny of established political orders will cost about $60 million (£45 million).

The Seasteading Institute has already received seed funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who was also one of the early investors in Facebook.

However, for the next stage of the project, it plans to hold an "initial coin offering" - a type of crowdfunding campaign whereby money is raised by creating and selling virtual currency.

Once the first floating community has been established, Quirk envisions many more following in quick succession.

"I want to see floating cities by 2050, thousands of them hopefully, each of them offering different ways of governance,” said Quirk.

"The more people moving among them, the more choices we’ll have and the more likely it is we can have peace prosperity and innovation."

While it may sound far-fetched, the term of "seasteading" has been around since at least 1981, when Ken Neumeyer wrote a book called Sailing the Farm , that discussed living sustainably aboard a sailing boat.

Quirk first encountered the idea at the Burning Man festival in 2011, where he was inspired by the idea that a floating city in international waters might give people a chance to redesign society and government.

The French Polynesian government is now creating a special economic zone so the floating nation can operate under its own trade laws, and has granted the Seasteading Institute 100 acres of beach front to operate from.