A long question has found its period.
For years, I have kept five candidate sites open, asking where to picture the New York chapter of Sim Eternal City — a new economic and social body to be built by climate-displaced elders and their humanoid cohabitants (共居民); a floating city whose citizens stand not as objects of protection, but as subjects of a new productive life.
Site 01 · Governors Island South Channel
Site 02 · Flushing Bay Inner Basin
Site 03 · Eastchester Bay, The Bronx
Site 04 · Kill Van Kull West Channel, Staten Island
Site 05 · Red Hook Basin Outer Anchorage, Brooklyn
Today, April 18, 2026.
I name the fifth site — Site 05: Red Hook Basin Outer Anchorage, on the waters off Red Hook, Brooklyn — as the storytelling location for Sim Eternal City New York.
This is not a site of construction. It is a site of imagination. The city we are about to live in — a city where old age and departure are received with hospitality, a city that invents new ways of living in the age of the rising sea — finds its ground here, for the first time.
Why Red Hook
One. Where Life and Death Dwell Together
The Sim Eternal City framework completed itself the day it took in the No Stone Tombstone project. Memorial without a gravestone; the cohabitation of the departed and those who remain — as this question entered the framework, Sim Eternal City was redefined: not merely as a home for old age, but as a city where life and death dwell together.
At the heart of that coexistence is the Life Tree Nexus — the place where the daily life of the living and the memory of those who have gone meet, beneath a single tree.
Red Hook is ground on which that story can grow. Old piers, the traces of vanished industries, and the breath of a living community — all layered on a single peninsula. Many strata of time, breathing in one place.
Two. The Neighbors We Must Remember Are Just Behind Us
October 29, 2012. Hurricane Sandy came up through The Narrows and struck the southwestern face of the Red Hook peninsula.
Among the hardest hit was Red Hook Houses — NYCHA's 2,878 units, home to more than 6,000 residents. A great many of them elders. That day, basement boilers and electrical rooms drowned. Elevators stopped. Heat went out. On the upper floors, old neighbors spent weeks trapped between dark stairwells, cold water, and silence.
The story of Sim Eternal City is drawn upon this memory.
The first condition for a new economic and social body choosing its place is this: to stand where it can see its neighbors. The citizens of Sim Eternal City do not arrive as wards to be protected; they arrive as new subjects of production — in peacetime, working and living alongside; in flood, standing before them to break the waves. They come to enter a covenant with their neighbors.
One city, two lives. One life for peacetime. One life for the flood.
Three. The 18-Minute City, the 3-Minute Radius — Infrastructure Already Working
Red Hook is a narrow and densely packed peninsula. Within walking distance of the waters where Sim Eternal City sits — within the innermost circle of the 18-minute city, the 3-minute radius — everything needed to sustain the daily life of this new body is already present.
NYC Ferry · Pier 12 — Atlantic Basin, South Brooklyn lines
Brooklyn Cruise Terminal — Clinton Wharf, international cruise routes
Red Hook Container Terminal — Piers 7–10, a still-working port of New York
Water taxis and private ferry services
Full-service hospital access via Cobble Hill
I do not draw these infrastructures into the picture — they are already there. Cruise routes, container routes, ferry lines — all remain living, and this city takes its place beside them. Beside a port that is still at work, the productive lives of old age and new cohabitation begin, quietly.
Complementary, Not Obstructive. — The design principle of the Second Edition.
Governors Island — Partner & Context
And across the water, Governors Island is not Chapter One's co-site.
It stands with us as the counterpoint from which this story is best read — as Partner and Context. The forthcoming New York Climate Exchange on the island is the proof.
If Red Hook is the view from land, Governors Island is the view from the sea. Sim Eternal City is pictured in the waters where these two gazes cross.
And It Does Not End Here
Sim Eternal City is A Framework for Coastal Cities.
The Chapter One pictured here in Red Hook will be the first page from which coastal cities around the world begin to tell the stories of their own futures. In Seoul, in Amman, in Medellín, and on coasts not yet named — each will bring its own "five candidates" and its own "Chapter One," following this telling.
New York is the first. But not the last.
The waters off Red Hook. Site 05.
Here, New York Story begins to be told.
Paul J. J. Kang
Storyteller, IWBFD Storytelling Studios
City Storyteller, bcd-W Magazine
April 18, 2026