1. Preface: Reimagining the City at the Critical Juncture of Our Time
We stand at a critical threshold where the paradigm of urban civilization must be fundamentally reconstructed. Climate catastrophe, rising sea levels, the advent of super-aged societies, the proliferation of atomized individuals, and the dissolution of communal bonds—all these realities eloquently demand that cities evolve beyond mere functional aggregates to become holistic living organisms that simultaneously embrace survival, memory, relationships, identity, and narrative.
Yet existing urban planning models still confine themselves to the realm of 'life.' Death, memory, and the transmission of existence remain exiled to the periphery of cities, alienated from our everyday spatial design. This manifesto marks the beginning of an urban revolution aimed at filling this fundamental void.
2. The Sim Eternal City Project: Collaborative Urban Creation Through the Recombination of Legacy
Sim Eternal City is not an arrogant attempt to create something from nothing. Rather, it is a city that creatively recombines existing urban heritage and discarded infrastructure, connects them, and imbues them with new meaning.
We connect four decommissioned cruise ships to form a square urban framework, placing at its center The Tabletop—the central plaza that will serve as the city's heart. This plaza is the city's pulse where memory and communion, mourning and community organically interweave, while the four vessels each assume specialized functions of housing, healthcare, culture, and technology.
Sim Eternal City constructs its physical hardware through the philosophy of reuse, recombination, and reinterpretation, implementing software that fuses digital technology with narrative-centered design principles. Centered on modular approaches and global collaborative governance, we discover and combine innovative technologies and solutions from various domains to experiment with new possibilities for collaborative urban construction methodology.
3. The Legacy of the 15-Minute City: Respect and Inheritance
We deeply respect and inherit the philosophy and practice of the 15-minute city model.
A city where all points provide access within 15 minutes via walking, cycling, or public transport to jobs, education, healthcare, leisure and other essential services. This model, which dismantles car dependency, revitalizes local communities, and simultaneously enhances sustainability and quality of life, has become an indispensable standard for modern cities.
The 15-minute city is an excellent urban model that enriches the daily lives of the living.
4. Restoration of the Lost 3 Minutes: Narrative Repositioning of Existence
However, invisible, intangible dimensions were missing from this model. Within the city, life's end, death, and memory remained in the blind spots of design, while history was isolated in museums or cemeteries, disconnected from the city's present.
We add 3 minutes here. Upon the solid foundation of the 15-minute city, we reposition the 3 minutes of memory, connection, and history to design a city where the living and the dead, past and future, individual and collective intersect and merge.
Time of Memory (1 minute): Moments when individual and collective memories naturally manifest within the city's everyday rhythms
Time of Connection (1 minute): Boundaryless spaces where the living and the dead, city and nature, material and virtual interpenetrate
Time of History (1 minute): Collective mechanisms for reflecting on the continuity of existence and the meaning of transmission, passing them to the next generation
These 3 minutes represent not function but 'architecture of meaning,' not space but 'spatialization of narrative.'
5. The City's Physical and Spiritual Composition: Integration of Hardware and Software
Sim Eternal City is built upon a physical platform of four connected cruise ships. At its center, The Tabletop—the Plaza of Memory—serves as the city's soul, a multidimensional complex space where life and death, past and future, play and ritual coexist.
Virtual Tree of Life: An XR-based collective memory archive where citizens' lives and deaths are recorded and shared as digital narratives.
Living Trees: Transcending simple landscaping to perform climate adaptation and environmental purification functions, while fostering community ecosystems of rest, play, and dialogue beneath their shade.
Narrative Mobility: A ritual transportation system that moves along the deceased's life pathways, enabling holographic memory recreation and collective mourning.
Ocean Memorial Complex: Designed as a symbolic sanctuary that accommodates memory and reverence within infinite oceanic space.
Above all, this plaza functions as a stage for life's joy and celebration. Integrating death into urban design should not create a somber space. Sim Eternal City is a city that blesses 'existence' daily in the following ways:
Fluid Structures and Modular Spatial Design: The plaza flexibly transforms through mobile structures to accommodate diverse living programs—festivals, markets, exhibitions, outdoor restaurants, and popup events.
Modular Stadium and Performance Systems: With freely assemblable and dismantleable design, large-scale cultural activities unfold smoothly—soccer matches, citizen parades, traditional games, music festivals, and concerts. This space is both an everyday plaza and sometimes one grand stage.
Citizen-Led Experience and Play Content: Interactive art, AR-based urban exploration, intergenerational communication programs—new forms of play culture that citizens directly plan and participate in fill this space.
This plaza is not merely a place of commemoration but a 'living, breathing plaza' where life's energy and narratives flow, accumulate, and are constantly reinterpreted. Sim Eternal City is a city centered on 15 minutes of life while imagining eternity through the final 3 minutes. Addressing death means illuminating life more brilliantly, and this plaza serves as the core stage realizing that balance and harmony.
6. Urban Philosophy and Methodology: Experiments in the Future Beginning in the Present
Sim Eternal City is simultaneously a conceptual city for the future and an urban planning experiment realizable in the cities we currently inhabit.
The 18-minute city is not merely a temporal concept but a narrative-centered urban design methodology.
Even before Sim Eternal City's completion, we can practice these 3 minutes in existing cities.
Places of memory, public mourning devices, and narrative mobility are possibilities that can already exist in current cities.
Sim Eternal City is not a finished product but a living, evolving prototype and open platform. It can be experimented with, verified, and shared right now, in the cities where we reside.
7. Declaration and Action: Urban Revolution Designing Both the Visible and Invisible
10-minute cities designed survival, 15-minute cities designed life's leisure, and the 18-minute city, Sim Eternal City, designs 'meaning beyond life.'
Now we declare:
Cities are no longer the exclusive domain of the living.
Death must return not as termination but as an essential dimension of urban design.
Memory must regain its vitality not at the city's periphery but at its center.
The Sim Eternal City project does not stop at this declaration. We realize this vision through the following concrete practices:
Continuously experiment with applying the 18-minute city model to real cities and communities.
Systematically itemize urban infrastructure, spaces, services, and technologies centered on death and memory.
Discover existing or developing solutions, technologies, culture, and memory devices to build a global partnership ecosystem that can connect modularly with Sim Eternal City.
Through all these processes, evolve into an open platform for constructing future urban ecosystems.
To realize Sim Eternal City's hardware vision of connecting four cruise ships to form a unified urban framework, we actively seek global partners who can co-design and implement this vision, funding entities, and experimental and simulation methodologies that can validate our initial concepts.
Sim Eternal City — The Genesis of a Narrative City Where Life and Death Coexist.
Now, here, and together with all.
This manifesto serves as the foundational starting point for the Sim Eternal City Project, establishing the philosophical, practical, and collaborative framework for creating a new paradigm of urban living that integrates the full spectrum of human experience—from birth to death, from memory to future, from individual existence to collective legacy.