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In Sim Eternal City, the Life Tree is not a metaphor. It is infrastructure.

Citizens connect to it for three minutes a day — the city’s designated “Value Production Time” — to record memories, deposit wisdom, and share accumulated experience with the mainland. The skills of a retired engineer. The recipes of a 90-year-old cook. The institutional memory of a woman who ran a school district for thirty years. All of it flows into the Life Tree, gets processed into masterclasses and digital archives, and is sold to schools, corporations, and governments on land. The revenue comes back to the city’s residents as a Knowledge Dividend.

The Life Tree is Sim Eternal City’s central landmark. And it earns.

But here is the question the Life Tree raises for every city that already exists on land: what is your landmark doing?

Every city has a structure that functions as its public memory — a place where the city tells itself and the world what it values, what it has survived, what it hopes to become. Sometimes it is deliberate: a national archive, a war memorial, a library. Sometimes it is accidental: a derelict factory that became a cultural center, a market that outlasted every redevelopment plan, a bridge that everyone agreed was too beautiful to tear down.

The Life Tree asks a harder question than most landmarks are designed to answer: not just “what do we remember?” but “what do we do with what we remember?”

Sim Eternal City turns memory into a circular economy. The knowledge of its oldest residents becomes the city’s primary export. The landmark is not decorative. It is productive. It earns the city its income, secures its residents’ retirement, and preserves human civilization in the event of a mainland disaster.

Most city landmarks don’t do any of that. They hold space. They mark history. They attract tourists. Very few of them ask their oldest residents to produce anything, or treat accumulated human experience as an economic asset.

That is the question Sim Eternal City is posing to every city that has a landmark and an aging population:

What if the most valuable thing in your city wasn’t a building?

What if it was a person who’s been here for seventy years?

And what if your landmark was designed to connect those two things?

(Source: Sim Eternal City · simeternal.city · IWBFD Studios, 2026)

New York — New York’s landmark is, depending on who you ask, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, or Central Park. None of them produce anything for the city’s oldest residents. The New York Public Library comes closest to the Life Tree model — it stores knowledge, makes it accessible, and serves as a civic commons. But it doesn’t harvest the living knowledge of New York’s eight million residents, 1.3 million of whom are over 65. The city’s actual Life Tree equivalent — if it were built — would not be a library. It would be a system that pays retired teachers, nurses, and craftspeople to deposit what they know before it disappears with them. New York has never built that system. Sim Eternal City already has.

Seoul — Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square was rebuilt in 2022 as a civic space intended to reconnect the city to its history — the Admiral Yi Sun-sin statue, the King Sejong statue, the underground museum, the fountains. It is a landmark that explicitly attempts to hold memory and make it accessible. But it is a one-directional system: the city deposits its official history into the square, and residents receive it. Sim Eternal City’s Life Tree is bidirectional: residents deposit their personal histories into the tree, and the city processes and distributes them. Gwanghwamun is Seoul’s memory of itself. The Life Tree would be Seoul’s memory of its people. The distinction matters enormously.

London — The British Museum contains the memory of the entire world — or at least the parts of the world that Britain collected during its imperial period. It is the most ambitious landmark-as-archive in human history, and its model is almost the opposite of the Life Tree: objects extracted from communities and stored for others to study, rather than knowledge produced by living residents and returned to sustain them. London’s challenge is not that it lacks memory. It is that most of the memory it holds belongs to people who are no longer alive and communities that no longer benefit from its preservation. The Life Tree would ask London a question the British Museum cannot: whose living knowledge are we storing, and who benefits?

Tokyo — Tokyo’s relationship with memory is encoded in its architecture. The city is rebuilt constantly — roughly every 30 years, on average, due to a combination of earthquake damage, fire, economic development, and cultural preference for the new. Tokyo’s landmarks are often not old buildings but repeated forms: the Senso-ji temple rebuilt, the Tokyo Tower superseded by the Sky Tree, the station districts redesigned around new commercial logics. What Tokyo has never done is build a landmark specifically designed to hold and transmit the knowledge of its aging population. Japan has the world’s highest proportion of elderly residents. Their accumulated knowledge is the country’s most underutilized economic asset. The Life Tree would be, for Tokyo, not a cultural project. It would be an economic necessity.

Bogotá — Bogotá’s transformation in the early 2000s was built around a simple idea: public space as civic memory. The library parks — the Parque Biblioteca España, the Parque Biblioteca El Tintal — were built in neighborhoods that had been written out of the city’s official story, and their purpose was to write those neighborhoods back in. They were landmarks designed to say: your history counts. Your knowledge matters. You are part of what this city knows about itself. That is closer to the Life Tree model than almost anything in a wealthier city. Bogotá understood that memory infrastructure is equity infrastructure. Sim Eternal City makes the same argument from a floating platform in the middle of the ocean.

Amsterdam — Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is one of the world’s great memory institutions — a landmark that holds the Dutch Golden Age in extraordinary detail. But the Netherlands is also the country that pioneered the concept of “tijdbank” — time banking — where citizens deposit hours of service and withdraw equivalent hours of support. Some Dutch municipalities have applied time banking specifically to elderly residents: your accumulated experience is a form of currency. That is perhaps the closest any present-day city has come to the Life Tree logic. Amsterdam is not just a city with a memory landmark. It is a city that has, in some neighborhoods, begun to treat human time and experience as a form of civic capital. Sim Eternal City went further. It made it the whole economy.

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We are getting older. All of us. Faster than we planned, longer than we expected, in cities that were never designed for this. Climate is changing everything — heat, water, food, safety. And at the same time, the oldest generation in human history is growing larger, living longer, and asking a question no city has fully answered yet: where do we belong in all of this? Sim Eternal is the project building that story — not as a warning, not as a policy paper, but as a living narrative about the future city told by the people who will live in it the longest. The olds are not the problem. They are the point. And this city is theirs.

→ Visit Sim Eternal City Project

Current runs on one city, one story, every day. But the map is still being drawn.

We are looking for contributors who live and work inside the cities they write about — one story from your city, told the way only a local can tell it. We are also looking for readers who want to add their voice to other cities' stories — benchmarking, similar cases, collaboration ideas, a connection worth making. If a story from Medellín reminds you of something happening in your city, tell us. That response is the whole point.

Right now we are building across the Americas and Asia. But the dream is longer than that — from America to Afro-Eurasia, local to local, city to city, one real connection at a time.

More stories. More cities. More continents.

If you have one, send it.

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