Climate change
The ground is shrinking and shifting. Sea level, floods, wildfire, drought and extreme heat are redrawing where a city can exist.
This website uses cookies
Read our Privacy policy and Terms of use for more information.
Sim Eternal City is city storyteller Paul J. J. Kang's long-term project to read and design — city by city — the future cities where the longevity generation, us, as we live longer, will live.
What we protect is irreplaceable humanity: the memory, care and community of each person — what a machine can imitate, but never replace. And beyond that, we redesign how people and communities work and create value, reshaping economic and social community itself.
First, Stella in Motion (SiM) — a moving star. Stars have long shown the way to those who are lost. In an age when everyone is searching through uncertainty, Sim Eternal City means to be not a star that stays above one city, but one that moves from city to city — carrying a future found in one city to the next, and letting it shine again in that city's sky.
Second, in East Asia, sim (心) means heart. Before technology or buildings, it is the human heart that changes a city. That is why we tell the story first: to build the future city in people's hearts before we build it on the ground.
What must never disappear. As the ground shifts and lives grow longer, our memory, our dignity and our community must carry on.
Where all of it lives together — the city we live in, every day.
Sim Eternal City: a star of hope that begins in the heart, moves from city to city, and keeps what must never disappear.
In the decades ahead, every city in the world will feel all four at once, whatever its geography.
The ground is shrinking and shifting. Sea level, floods, wildfire, drought and extreme heat are redrawing where a city can exist.
Work is changing. As machines take on labor, people must ask again how they create value — and share the city with robot citizens.
Lives are growing longer. Cities designed for 70 or 80 years must now hold lives of 100 and more — and no city is built for that yet.
The center of decision is moving. Facing fast, local crises, the city — beyond the nation-state — becomes the unit that decides, and allies with other cities.
One questionThese four forces do not arrive alone. They amplify one another, and converge on one question: how do we keep living fully human lives — to the very end?
We connect each force to the systems a city is made of — water, air and plants; housing and energy; mobility and transport; education, work and leisure; care, death and memory. Each cell is a question: how does this force reshape this part of the city?
Water, air, plants, land
Housing, energy, food, data
Mobility, transport, logistics
Education, work, leisure, health & care
Death care, memorials, memory, legacy
Economy, citizenship, decisions, public space, city alliances
This is the Sim Eternal City System Map. It is not a map drawn once and finished, but a living map — redrawn and updated with every city we meet.
Because no one imagines this future on their own. If we wait to see it before we imagine it, it is already too late. When the ground beneath our cities disappears, or our way of life collapses, our lives, our memories — our very existence — are shaken with it.
We help people think ahead and imagine concretely, so they can meet the change before it arrives. This is not preparation for someone else — it is for us, who will live longer.
We design new economic structures in which the longevity generation keeps doing meaningful economic work — and new ways for people and robots to live side by side as fellow citizens.
We build what we have imagined and designed — starting small with cities and partners, making one project real, then adding the next. At the end of that road, we mean to build the real Sim Eternal City: a city where life and death coexist.
In an age of uncertainty, when everyone is caught in chaos, we discover the future that has already arrived in the present. We replicate what one city finds so other cities can rebuild it in their own way — and give everyone hope to live again.
Preparedness calls for design. Design leads to build-up. And build-up spreads as hope for all.
"Elderly" is a label inherited from before lifespans stretched. What it really points to is our own generation — the longevity generation. That is why this project's preparedness is not for someone else. It is for us.
A longer life is not a burden. It is time to create new value.
We design memory, records and connection with the same care as roads and buildings.
We don't abandon existing cities; we add a new layer to them — where people and robots, life and death, past and future live together.
We reuse and reconnect the resources and technologies already here.
Coastal, mountain and inland cities each hold a different future — as different as their land, their history and their way of life.
We write each city as a chapter — reading it through the Four Forces and the System Map, then telling its future through stories, maps and scenarios, beginning from its own history and people. Every step is shared openly through writing, visuals, video and interactive media.
New York's floating city was the first case — one answer to a single coast being erased by the sea. The project is the method behind that answer, not the answer itself.
New York Storytelling →Coastal, mountain, inland or continental — one city at a time. In every city the question is the same. Every answer is different.
From 2027, future city storytelling projects with cities are scheduled and in planning. If your city is ready to imagine what comes next, let's write your chapter together.
Sim Eternal City begins.
The story of future cities takes shape through writing, workshops, video, projects and talks:
The Sim Eternal City Project Content Hub opens.
Sim Eternal City: A Framework for Future City Storytelling is published by IWBFD Books — showing how the framework works through the New York chapter.
Recognized at the first TECHTAINMENT Forum & Awards in Seoul.
The Sim Eternal City Project is fully reimagined — from one floating city to a framework for the future of every city.
Future city storytelling projects with cities around the world — scheduled and in planning.
City Storyteller · Founder, IWBFD Studios
That city is Sim Eternal City itself. But New York was only the first stop. Every coast, every mountain town, every inland city carries a future that is already arriving — and most of them have not yet been told. We want to tell those futures, before the change does the telling for us.
We can't do this alone. We're looking for partners of every kind who believe the cities we'll grow old in are worth designing now. If you believe in cities that heal, educate and remember, you are already one of our citizens.