This story is built through a framework called Sim Eternal City—a future city storytelling system for designing human continuity in the age of climate crisis, longevity, and technological transition.

But what follows is not “Sim Eternal City” in the abstract.

This is Sim Eternal New York: a future city storytelling project told through one place—Red Hook—as a way to see the city’s next century more clearly.

We often say that climate change threatens cities. But if we are honest, what is being shaken first is not urban form or infrastructure—it is the conditions that allow a human life to remain anchored: to stay, to age, to be cared for, to belong, and to reach the end with dignity.

Sea-level rise, storms, flooding, and displacement are not merely environmental problems. They are civilizational signals. When a city begins to fail, people do not simply lose property; they lose the entire living system that made life possible—community, routines, care networks, memory, and the invisible structures that hold a human life together.

At the front line of this collapse stand the elderly.

Humanity is living longer than any generation in history, yet elderly citizens are often the first to be displaced when the city’s housing system, care system, and infrastructure collide with climate instability. Longevity, climate crisis, and technological transition are no longer separate forces. They overlap into a single question:

Where—and how—can a human life continue all the way to the end?

Sim Eternal New York begins from this question.

It imagines a floating extension at the coastal edge of the city—designed for elderly people who have lost their right to housing due to climate-driven urban collapse. But this is not a proposal for emergency shelters. It is a technology–human symbiosis prototype: an attempt to design a place that safeguards dignity worthy of longer lives, honors the forms of labor that keep humans human, and enables people to continue contributing to the world until the very last moment of life.

We are not simply building houses.
We are creating an eternal place for human life—on time and on the sea.

IWBFD Studio will begin this work in Red Hook, Brooklyn—and this choice is not accidental.

Red Hook is a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides. Historically shaped by port labor, shipping, and industrial work, it has always been a neighborhood where the city meets the sea—not as scenery, but as exposure, infrastructure, and risk. It is both physically and symbolically an edge: close to Manhattan, yet separated from the city’s usual rhythms of attention and investment.

It is also a place that has repeatedly learned what it means to be vulnerable first.

When Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012, Red Hook was among the hardest-hit neighborhoods. Floodwaters entered homes and businesses. Electricity failed. Transit was disrupted. Public housing towers lost power, elevators, and heat. Elderly residents in Red hook house were trapped in darkness above the flood line—unable to walk down stairs, unable to access medicine, unable to reach supplies. The crisis revealed something deeper than coastal fragility: it revealed how quickly social continuity collapses when a city’s systems fail.

But Red Hook is not only a story of damage. It is also a story of endurance.

Long before Sandy, Red Hook had already been shaped by cycles of growth and neglect, by working-class resilience, immigrant communities, and an ecosystem of mutual support that emerged in the absence of stable institutional care. In that sense, Red Hook is not an exception—it is a preview. It shows what many coastal urban areas will increasingly experience: the convergence of climate risk, aging populations, infrastructure fragility, and inequality.

Red Hook is a diagnostic place. It is where the future becomes visible earlier—sharper, more honest, and harder to ignore.

And there is another reason.

Red Hook is not the symbolic center of New York City. It is not where the skyline announces power. It is a threshold. To begin a project about human continuity at the threshold of the city is a deliberate decision. It is to declare that the future of New York will not be decided only in its centers of prestige—but at its most exposed boundaries, where land, sea, aging bodies, and technological systems meet.

The first citizens envisioned by Sim Eternal New York are elderly people displaced by climate-driven urban collapse. The second citizens—those who will build coexistence with them—are defined as humanoid robots, not merely as tools but as coexisting civic actors.

On the premise of coexistence, the city redefines connection, memory, care, labor, and preservation as core infrastructure, not secondary services. Sim Eternal New York does not treat aging and dying as administrative problems to hide, outsource, or postpone. It treats them as central design conditions—because a city that cannot hold human life to its final chapter is not a complete city.

This is not a vision of escape.
It is not a new ark drifting away from a failing world.
It is a parallel layer—a floating extension that remains in constant relationship with the land city.

Red Hook is the beginning, not the boundary.

Our first storytelling starts here because this is where the question is most concentrated. But the story is meant to spread—across the entire city, borough by borough, shoreline by shoreline, community by community.

From Red Hook, the narrative expands toward Manhattan, where power and capital will be forced to confront the ethics of continuity, not only growth. It expands into Queens, where immigrant life and multi-generational households reveal how care actually functions in the real city. It reaches Staten Island, where coastal exposure and suburban patterns collide with rising seas. It extends into the Bronx, where infrastructure inequality and health vulnerability make the climate question inseparable from the dignity question.

Each borough is a different lens. Each shoreline is a different vulnerability. Each community holds a different memory of what the city has been—and a different demand for what the city must become.

Sim Eternal New York is designed as a moving storyline: a framework that can be translated into multiple sites while remaining one coherent narrative about human continuity.

By 2080, this story does not remain only a story.

It becomes urban reality.

If New York is to remain New York—if it is to remain a city that can hold human life rather than expel it—then the coastline cannot remain merely a line of defense. It must become a line of transformation.

By 2080, we imagine that floating city layers will begin to emerge as a new civic geography: not as private luxury islands, not as escape pods for the privileged, but as a public extension of the city’s responsibility—built to hold the lives that the land city can no longer hold alone.

In that future, the floating cities are not “outside” New York. They are New York.

They become what can be called the city’s sixth borough: a network of floating extensions that live in constant exchange with the five boroughs—connected by mobility, care systems, civic economy, family visits, education flows, and shared public infrastructure.

This sixth borough is not a fantasy of replacement. It is a model of coexistence:
Land City + Floating City, bound together by a single promise—

that the city will not abandon human life at the moment it becomes fragile, slow, or inconvenient.

The name Sim Eternal City holds the philosophy at its core.

Sim (心) is the shared East Asian character for “heart” and “mind.” It is where biological life and human meaning meet—where rhythm and intention overlap. Across cultures, the heart remains the most universal symbol of what makes us human.

Eternal does not mean static. It is not about denying change or death. It is the promise of Stella in Motion—everlasting hope that keeps moving forward. It is the belief that even in an age defined by acceleration and collapse, dignity, memory, and contribution do not have to expire.

Sim Eternal New York is not a finished answer.
It is a storytelling framework—an opening chapter.

It begins in Red Hook because Red Hook is honest about exposure, inequality, and the limits of the city’s existing systems. But the purpose is not to stay at the edge. The purpose is to make the whole city visible again—through a new storyline that insists:

Even at the limits of land, time, and life, New York can still become a place for human dignity.

And from that beginning, the story moves—toward the entire city, and toward the sixth borough still to come.