Current Today is bcdW Magazine's daily newsletter — one story, one city, read through the eyes of the world.

Weekdays, bcdW Current Today takes one story from a real city today — and reads it through the eyes of other cities. On Saturdays, the direction reverses. Sim Eternal City is a city that doesn't exist yet. Today, its story is read through the eyes of the cities living that question right now.

On March 19, a White Paper landed quietly on the internet.

It didn't come from a government. It didn't come from a UN agency or a venture capital firm. It came from a project called Sim Eternal City — and it proposed something none of the other floating city projects in the world have proposed: a city designed not around climate survival or real estate yield, but around the people who have lived the longest on land that is disappearing.

The document outlines a floating platform built from four decommissioned cruise ships, connected in diamond formation, designed as an 18-minute city. Its first citizens are elderly people displaced by the climate crisis. Its second citizens are humanoid robots. Neither group is defined by dependency or utility. Both are co-citizens — active participants in the design, economy, and daily life of a city built on purpose, and built together.

New York is Chapter One. Five waterfront candidate sites are under consideration. On April 18, the first site will be announced.

The timing is not accidental. New York's waterfront has been rethinking itself since Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The question of what to do with vulnerable coastal land — how to build on it, protect it, or reimagine it entirely — has never been fully answered. Sim Eternal City is arriving with one answer. Not a seawall. Not a rezoning. A new city, moored to the edge of the old one.

There are at least a dozen floating city projects active in the world right now. They share a diagnosis — rising seas, coastal displacement, land scarcity — and they share an engineering ambition. What they do not share is this: a city whose founding premise is that the oldest generation in human history is not a problem to be managed, but the point around which the city is designed. And that the story of that city matters as much as its infrastructure.

That is the difference. And it begins in New York.

(Source: Sim Eternal City White Paper Prelude — March 19, 2026 · simeternal.city)

Busan — Oceanix Busan is the most technically advanced floating city prototype in the world right now — a 6.3-hectare modular platform developed in collaboration with UN Habitat, with local food production, renewable energy, and a hybrid public-private governance system already in the construction phase. But Oceanix Busan is designed as an extension of an existing city — a neighborhood that happens to float. Sim Eternal City is designed as a city that happens to be new. The difference matters: Busan is solving a land problem. Sim Eternal is solving a belonging problem. Both cities need each other's answer.

Tokyo — Tokyo is the only city that has already connected floating urbanism to aging population design. Tokyo-based design studios have proposed semi-submersible modular platforms — floating archipelagos combining aquaculture, renewable energy, healthcare, post-retirement settlement, and medical tourism — specifically as a response to the city's demographic crisis. But Tokyo's proposals are technical frameworks: platforms, modules, healthcare delivery systems. Sim Eternal City's addition is the one Tokyo's proposals don't have: a narrative. A city people want to live in is a city with a story. Tokyo has the engineering. New York is building the story first.

Malé — Malé is not building a floating city by choice — it is building one because more than 80% of the Maldives sits less than one meter above sea level. The floating city being constructed off Malé's coast — modular eco-housing for 20,000 residents modeled on coral reef formations — is targeting its first residents in 2026. Those residents will be climate-displaced locals with nowhere else to go. Sim Eternal City's first citizens are defined the same way. The difference is that Sim Eternal chose this population as a design premise before the crisis forced it. Malé is living the emergency version of the same story.

NEOM — NEOM is the world's most capitalized future city project — state-funded, top-down, built for economic diversification and global talent attraction. Its proposals include The Line, a 170-kilometer linear city, and Oxagon, a floating industrial port city on the Red Sea. Its population model is the mirror image of Sim Eternal's: young, mobile, high-earning. What NEOM has not designed for is what happens to that population in forty years. Sim Eternal City is starting where NEOM ends.

Rotterdam — Rotterdam has the deepest technical knowledge of any city on earth about building on water — centuries of it. The city's interdisciplinary Floating Future research consortium is actively exploring how large-scale floating urban development can be achieved responsibly, combining engineering precision with climate adaptation strategy. What Rotterdam exports is that expertise. What it hasn't exported is a model for who lives in these cities and why. Sim Eternal City is the story Rotterdam's engineering needs. Whether a partnership between the world's best floating infrastructure knowledge and a New York-anchored narrative framework is already obvious to the people in both places is the open question.

Seoul — Seoul funded Oceanix Busan and is watching the floating city space closely. But Seoul's deeper stake in Sim Eternal City is demographic: Seoul is aging faster than almost any other major city in the world, and its urban design has not caught up with that reality. A city designed from the ground up around elderly co-citizenship — with robotics infrastructure built in, not retrofitted — is the design brief Seoul's planners need but haven't written yet. New York is writing it first. Seoul should be reading it carefully.

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Where Will the Olds Live When Everything Changes? We're All Getting There.

New City For The Olds

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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