From floating cities to fresh laundry: five innovators reshaping the world’s water future

Did you know that billions of people still wash their clothes by hand? That whole cities are being designed to float? And that a machine in Amsterdam makes water out of thin air? These are the people making it happen.

Water problems can feel abstract – until a dam breaks, a tap runs dry, or women spend three hours of their day doing laundry by hand. The people working on water solutions know this better than anyone. They are engineers, diplomats, hydrologists and development bankers, and what unites them is a refusal to accept the status quo.

This article is based on the ‘Wet Breakthroughs!’ episode of Waterproof, a podcast by Partners for Water.

Building where others wouldn’t dare

Rutger de Graaf has spent two decades designing buildings that float. As co-founder of Blue21, he sees floating cities not as a distant vision but as a practical obligation; a response to rising seas and rapid urbanisation in delta regions where hundreds of millions already live. He is now working on a floating social housing complex made up of 45 apartments in Zwolle, bringing the technology to lower-income groups. The obstacles, he argues, are rarely technical. “The biggest crisis is our lack of imagination.”

But imagination alone does not build cities. The systems around an innovation need to be just as ready as the innovation itself.

The unglamorous work that makes everything else possible

Mary Matthews, Global Water Lead ad interim at UNDP, works in that space. Her focus is governance: getting ministries, regulators and investors aligned. Without it, even the most promising solutions stall. One example she highlights is the Women in Water Diplomacy Network – a programme that trains women mediators to resolve water disputes at community and transboundary level. It builds on the insight that inclusive dialogue produces more durable solutions. “When governance works, the money follows.”

Governance creates the conditions. What happens next depends on the quality of the decisions made within them, and that requires seeing the full picture.

Seeing the whole city at once

Seeing the full picture is exactly what Florian Witsenburg’s company Tygron makes possible. Their digital twins – virtual models of cities and landscapes – let planners and emergency responders test scenarios before they unfold in reality. In Nijmegen, one such model revealed the cumulative impact of 90 simultaneous housing developments, breaking a city-wide building freeze. When the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine was destroyed in 2023, Tigron modelled the resulting flood within half an hour, guiding aid organisations into an active war zone.

Digital twins can map a crisis in real time. However, in some parts of the world, the most urgent problem does not show up on any map. There simply is no water.

Making water from nothing

In places where there is no water, Amsterdam-based Solaq pulls water directly from the air using a wet desiccant process. Co-founder Reuben Moore explains that each unit produces 2,000 litres per day, fits in a shipping container and runs on solar energy or waste heat. The first pilots are running in Mexico, Spain and Brazil, including communities where over 1.5 million people depend on water trucks for water that is not even safe to drink. “We are first focusing on creating a source of water security for places where there simply is no other alternative.”

Having water is one thing. The daily reality it enables – or doesn’t enable – is quite another.

The overlooked burden

For Tanja Huizer, Senior Water Resilience Specialist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), that daily reality is laundry. Huizer has spent years drawing attention to this seemingly simple household task. She shares that between four and five billion people still wash clothes by hand. Women spend roughly 20% of their active time – around three hours daily – on this work alone. The ADB’s Laundry Movement addresses this. It tackles environmental pollution, builds public-private partnerships and focuses on social innovation. The goal is better conditions, with dignity intact. “We have had washing machines for over a hundred years. So let’s allow everybody to benefit from them now.”

The scale of water challenges can feel paralysing. But as these five innovators show, the responses come in every shape and size – from city-wide floating infrastructure to a machine in a shipping container to the simple act of doing laundry with dignity. What they share is the conviction that no one needs to solve everything. Each piece matters. Together, they add up to a waterproof future.