Connection to Nature

Consider alternative concepts such as multispecies cohabitation, human-wildlife-plant coexistence, living within naturecultures, etc.

Look up integrative concepts such as coevolution, symbiosis, mutualism, niche co-construction, etc.

Nature, ecological systems, connective to nature are all problematic concepts that underplay the relationality and co-dependence of life.

Perhaps reading something on environmental history might be useful.

Scenarios

The idea of a radically more wet city could be an interesting one to explore. Melbourne in particular used to have lots of wetlands and water bodies that have been drained and built over. What would it be like to reintroduce water into the city, and what would the implications be for human and non-human life?

Examples

What would it mean to have the "connection to nature" that is on the water, in the water, rather than convenient decorative plants? Can you look up precedents of people living in watery places?

What would it take to think economies, labour, lifestyles, hygiene, safety, education, aesthetics beyond common current tropes?

Cf. sponge cities, water-sensitive urban design, blue-green infrastructure.

You could consider making a visual taxonomy of possibilities.

Historical and Long-Duration Examples

Uros reed islands, Lake Titicaca, Peru and Bolivia. Artificial floating islands made of totora reeds, among the clearest examples of dwelling on a fabricated freshwater platform.
Alpine pile dwellings, around lakes in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and Slovenia. Prehistoric stilt settlements in shallow lake margins and wetlands, radical because they externalised ground into a constructed timber system.
Crannogs, Scotland and Ireland. Artificial or modified lake islets used for dwelling and refuge, often combining defensibility with wetland inhabitation.
Tenochtitlan and the chinampa world, Lake Texcoco, Mexico. Not simple floating houses, but a dense lacustrine urbanism of causeways, canals, islands, and amphibious agriculture.
Nan Madol, Micronesia. Ceremonial and residential stone islets in a lagoon, radical as an engineered archipelago rather than a single land-bound settlement.
Marsh Arab settlements, Mesopotamian marshes, Iraq. Reed architecture and water-based mobility in one of the world’s major wetland civilizations.
Kampong Ayer, Brunei. A long-lived stilt city over tidal water, often described as one of the largest historical water villages still inhabited.
Palafitos traditions, Chiloé and other parts of South America and Southeast Asia. Timber stilt houses over tidal flats and estuaries, with domestic life tuned to tidal change.
Sama-Bajau and related sea nomad traditions, maritime Southeast Asia. Houseboats and pile dwellings in reefs, straits, and sheltered coasts, pushing dwelling toward continuous marine mobility.

Current and Recent Examples

Ganvié, Lake Nokoué, Benin. A large stilt settlement in a shallow lake, still one of the strongest current examples of a full urban life on water.
Tonlé Sap floating villages, Cambodia. Seasonal freshwater floating settlements that rise and move with major hydrological variation.
Dal Lake houseboats, Srinagar, India. A domesticated lake-dwelling typology shaped by tourism, colonial history, and wetland urbanism.
Floating villages in Hạ Long Bay and Cát Bà, Vietnam. Marine and brackish settlements integrated with fishing and karst seascapes.
Kampung houses and water villages in Sabah and elsewhere in Borneo. Estuarine and coastal stilt settlements mixing land and tidal water.
IJburg, Amsterdam, Netherlands. A planned neighbourhood on artificial islands, not fully floating but part of a contemporary return to water urbanism.
Maasbommel amphibious houses, Netherlands. Houses that sit on land in dry periods and float upward during floods, radical because they normalize periodic loss of dry ground.
Schoonschip, Amsterdam. A contemporary floating neighbourhood with decentralized energy and wastewater systems, one of the clearest prototypes for networked floating urbanism.
Maldives Floating City, near Malé. Under construction, with modular floating districts in a reef-lagoon context, significant as climate adaptation and real-estate experiment at once.
Makoko Floating School, Lagos. The original prototype failed physically, but it remains influential as a radical image of lagoon urbanism and low-cost floating public architecture.

Multi-Aspect Examples

Chinampas, Xochimilco. More an amphibious productive landscape than “housing”, but extremely useful because they show dwelling, cultivation, and water management as one system.
The Netherlands’ Room for the River and wet urbanism experiments. Not dwelling in water exactly, but a shift from defending dry land to designing for periodic inundation.
Venice Lagoon. More than an overused precedent, it remains a model of lagoon urbanism where foundations, tides, logistics, and ecology are inseparable.
Delta urbanisms such as the Niger, Mekong, Ganges-Brahmaputra, and Mississippi deltas. These often produce hybrid forms of levee living, boat living, stilt housing, and seasonal retreat rather than one stable type.

References

Hamilton, Rebecca, Josephine Gillespie, Dan Penny, Shane Ingrey, and Scott Mooney. “Re-Imagining Sydney’s Freshwater Wetlands through Historical Ecology.” Landscape Research 49, no. 2 (2024): 268–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2023.2271421.

Huq, Efadul, and Andrew Hughes. “Weaving Pluriversal Entanglements for Urban Wetland Regeneration.” Environment and Planning F, 2026, 26349825261423647. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825261423647.

Roggema, Rob, ed. Nature Driven Urbanism. Contemporary Urban Design Thinking. Cham: Springer, 2020.

Sultan, Sonia E. Organism and Environment: Ecological Development, Niche Construction, and Adaption. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.