Sim Eternal City Is Not the Floating City Itself
When people hear “Sim Eternal City,” most picture a city on the water built from retired cruise ships. But that is not the project’s identity — it was one answer offered to a single city, New York.
The floating-city storytelling we developed this year in Red Hook, New York, was a hypothetical case valid for coastal cities being erased by rising seas. The cruise ships, the 18-minute city, Diamond Dynamics — all of these are concrete solutions to that specific condition.
So the starting point for this redefinition is simple. The floating city is the first case of Sim Eternal City, not its essence.
So What Is the Sim Eternal City Project?
The Sim Eternal City Project reads and designs the future cities where the longevity generation will live — city by city, through “future storytelling.”
The method is to tell each city’s future one at a time (city-by-city storytelling). We begin from each city’s own history and people, and first draw the shape of the future it will meet.
The first city was New York. From here, the work expands one city at a time — not only coastal cities, but mountain, inland, and continental ones.
But this work does not stop at solving individual cases one by one. Beneath those cases there is clearly an order moving toward a new direction; for now, we are simply in a state of uncertainty, not yet having fully discovered that order.
Not “the Elderly” but Us — the Longevity Generation
The protagonists of this city are not a distant class of care recipients, but ourselves, now living longer.
The word “elderly” we use today is only a label inherited from an older view, from before lifespans lengthened; what it actually points to is our own generation. That is why this project’s “preparedness” is not preparation for someone else, but for me and for us.
The shared lens comes down to this: through the lens of aging (longer lifespans) and climate, we read the future of each city we will live in. This is what sets the work apart from other future-city work.
Why Pursue a Project People Are Indifferent To? — Preparedness and Design
This project has two aims: preparedness, and design.
Preparedness. With aging and climate change, more and more cities will see their ground vanish or transform drastically. Letting the people who live in those cities meet and prepare for sudden change in advance is the first aim.
Design. Building the new economic structure of such future cities is the second aim. The core here is clear — the longevity generation is not a class to be cared for, but a class that does economic work. The more important question is how a growing population does meaningful economic work.
And that economic activity is designed on top of a cooperative structure in which humans and robot citizens live together as citizens.
We Thought It Was the Framework, but It Was a Case to Begin With — New York Is the First Answer
What we have called the “framework” was in fact a framework for New York. Admitting this is the biggest correction in this redefinition.
Diamond Dynamics, the city on the water, the 18-minute city — these are answers to New York’s particular condition: that a coastal city is being erased by the sea. All of them drop down to the case layer.
The real framework must be a more fundamental method, not bound to geography. It has to evolve so it can design the futures of not only coastal cities but mountain, inland, and continental ones.
So what is that foundation? This project sees it as four pillars — taken up in the next section.
The Four Pillars — The Lens for Seeing a Future City
What makes up this foundational framework is four pillars — the lens and the conditions the Sim Eternal City Project applies in common when reading the future of any city.
Pillar | What changes |
|---|---|
1. Climate change | The physical conditions a city sits in change — sea level, wildfire, drought, extreme heat. |
2. AI & robotics | The economic structure changes — labor and production, and the division of roles between humans and robot citizens. |
3. Longer life expectancy | Population makeup and the life cycle change — the longevity generation becomes the center of economic activity. |
4. A shift in governance systems | The unit of governance changes — from large nation-state systems to city-state systems. |
The four pillars become the base axes of a “table for designing a future city.” With these four forces as the foundation, we design the concrete elements inside the city — education systems, leisure, work, recreation, mobility, and so on — one by one.
This is the heart of this revision. Not an individual case (the floating city), but a design table woven from the four pillars × the elements inside the city becomes the project’s actual working frame.
Where Is It Headed? — The Final Destination and Next Steps
The ultimate destination is to build an actual city where life and death coexist: Sim Eternal City. Each city’s future storytelling is the method for the long journey toward it.
The immediate next step is the city storytelling project. Starting next year, we will propose to cities in advance — telling each city’s future before change arrives. And perhaps, within that process, that storytelling will be made together with the documentary, video, and visualization partners who want to show the future city to the eye.