CNN Online

The South Korean city of Busan has green-lit plans for an ambitious new ocean settlement, with work on the first neighborhood set to begin next year.

Comprising a series of interconnected platforms, the proposed “floating city” could eventually accommodate 10,000 people, according to its designers, offering coastal areas a drastic solution to the threat posed by rising sea levels.

The Oceanix project, a collaboration between designers, architects and engineers, unveiled plans for a “flood-proof” city in 2019 -- and organizers have since been looking for somewhere to build prototypes.

Last month, the group signed an agreement with Busan and UN-Habitat, the United Nations’ urban development agency, to host the first of its floating neighborhoods off South Korea’s coast.

Prefabricated in factories and then towed into position, the proposed platforms will rise and fall with the sea. Each of the five-acre neighborhoods has been designed to house 300 people in buildings up to seven stories high.

Ultimately, these communities could be arranged into larger networks, connected via walkways and bicycle paths. According to Bjarke Ingels Group, the Danish architecture firm leading the design, the neighborhoods could be clustered around a central harbor to form larger 1,650-person villages.

These villages could then, in theory, join to form a wider 10,000-person metropolis -- dubbed Oceanix City -- complete with everything from restaurants and co-working spaces to urban farms and leisure facilities.

The proposed settlement has been envisaged as “self-sustaining,” with residents able produce their own food and energy in “zero waste closed-loop systems.”