Cities Beyond the Rising Seas: The Blueprint for Surviving and Thriving Above the Waves

Edward Rodabaugh is a civil engineer and urban designer whose work sits at the intersection of coastal resilience, marine infrastructure, and the future of the city. Over the past two decades, he has contributed to waterfront planning and flood-adaptation programs on three continents, with a focus on the engineering systems that allow dense urban populations to live safely at the water's edge — and, increasingly, on the water itself. He advises municipal governments on climate adaptation, and he has spoken on floating urbanism at engineering congresses, planning academies, and university lecture series from Delft to Singapore.

Rodabaugh began his career in structural engineering on offshore energy platforms, where he learned the disciplines of extreme loading, corrosion control, and mooring design that the floating-city movement now draws upon. That experience shaped his conviction that the skills required to build beyond the rising seas are not speculative: they are the accumulated competence of the offshore and shipbuilding industries, waiting to be pointed at a new purpose. He has since worked with architects, ecologists, and development banks to translate those skills into district-scale proposals for floating neighborhoods, and he brings that cross-disciplinary perspective to every project he touches.

*Cities Beyond the Rising Seas* is his first book. He writes for