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

We launch today in test flight. Each edition takes a single real story from one of our cities and asks: what does this mean for someone living somewhere else entirely? What ideas travel? What collaborations become possible?
Let’s get into it →

In the United States alone, 16 million people aged 65 and older live alone. That number comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. It is not a projection. It is today.

Many of them live in coastal cities — in the neighborhoods most vulnerable to flooding, storm surge, and sea level rise. They moved there decades ago because it was affordable. They stayed because it became home. When the flood comes, they are the last to evacuate and the first to be forgotten in the recovery. FEMA’s emergency housing system is designed for families. Climate resiliency funding flows to neighborhoods and infrastructure. Assisted living facilities are priced for the wealthy. The elderly person who lives alone — no children nearby, no savings to relocate, no institution waiting to take them in — is the gap in every urban climate plan in America. And in every coastal city on earth.

No city is building infrastructure specifically for them. That is the problem Sim Eternal City was designed to solve.

The question is not whether cities will need to respond. The question is what the response looks like.

Sim Eternal City proposes a specific answer: a floating city built on four decommissioned cruise ships, designed as an 18-minute city for elderly climate-displaced people and humanoid robots. The model is not a luxury resort. It is not a billionaire seasteading experiment. It is an infrastructure solution — designed around the three converging crises that no land city can solve simultaneously: climate displacement, urban spatial scarcity, and demographic aging.

The four-ship platform functions as a distributed neighborhood system. Each ship becomes a district. The gaps between them become public waterways. The whole structure can relocate — away from hurricanes, toward warmer waters in winter, alongside the coastal cities that need its services without being able to build them on land.

What makes the Sim Eternal City model distinctive is not the ships. It is the population it serves. Sim Eternal City envisions a fully self-sustaining marine community with key design goals of water autonomy, off-grid resilience, and climate adaptation. The elderly climate-displaced — people forced from their homes by floods, fires, and storms but too old to start over in a new city — have no home in the current global housing conversation. Sim Eternal City is designed specifically for them.

The technology exists. A January 2026 paper in Communications Earth & Environment confirmed the feasibility of floating cities built around three pillars: resilience, sustainability, and urban welfare. The great challenge, as the paper notes, is not engineering. It is legal frameworks, financing, and social inclusion.

Sim Eternal City is building the social inclusion case first. The legal and financing frameworks will follow the proof of concept.

(Sources: Sim Eternal City · simeternal.city · Communications Earth & Environment, January 2026 · C40 Cities Network)

Busan 🇰🇷 — Busan is the most advanced real-world test case for the floating city concept. OCEANIX Busan, a collaboration between UN-Habitat, Busan Metropolitan City, and OCEANIX, was unveiled at UN headquarters in New York — three interconnected platforms totalling 15.5 acres, designed to provide homes for 12,000 people and potentially scaling to 100,000. Busan is not experimenting with floating cities as a futuristic concept. It is building one as a practical response to land scarcity and sea level rise. What Busan’s OCEANIX project lacks — and what Sim Eternal City provides — is the social infrastructure layer: the aging population framework, the memory systems, the death care infrastructure, the humanoid robot economy that turns a floating platform into a functioning city rather than a floating apartment complex.

Amsterdam 🇳🇱 — The Dutch have been building on water for centuries, and Amsterdam’s relationship with floating architecture is longer and deeper than any other major city on earth. In September 2021, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands officially opened the carbon-neutral Floating Office Rotterdam in the Dutch port, able to move as water levels rise. The Netherlands doesn’t treat floating buildings as extraordinary — it treats them as the logical response to geography. What Amsterdam offers Sim Eternal City is not inspiration but methodology: the Dutch water management system, the legal frameworks for floating structures, and decades of engineering knowledge about how to make water-based living not just survivable but desirable. The Sim Eternal City team should be in Amsterdam.

Maldives 🇲🇻 — The Maldives has no choice. With average natural ground levels of only 1.5 meters above sea level, the Maldives Floating City project places 5,000 homes along a flexible grid across a 200-hectare lagoon, just ten minutes by boat from Malé, with property prices expected to stay below $250,000 to attract local residents rather than just tourists. The Maldives model is the most important proof of concept for Sim Eternal City’s social inclusion thesis: a floating city designed for the people who actually live there, not for the wealthy who want a climate-secure luxury asset. If the Maldives can build it for $250,000 per unit, the cost argument against floating cities collapses. Sim Eternal City is watching Malé very closely.

New York 🇺🇸 — Floating City by Luca Curci Architects was designed specifically to address cities vulnerable to sea level rise — including New York, Jakarta, and Shanghai — with 25 acres of interconnected floating platforms supporting buildings for 50,000 people, expandable to 200,000. New York’s relationship with sea level rise is not abstract. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 flooded 51 square miles of the city. Climate projections show large parts of Lower Manhattan, Red Hook, and the Rockaways at permanent risk by 2100. New York has invested billions in coastal resiliency — seawalls, berms, elevated infrastructure — but not one dollar in floating urban infrastructure. Sim Eternal City’s four-ship model, positioned in New York Harbor, could serve the elderly residents displaced from coastal neighborhoods while remaining connected to the city they built their lives in. The technology is ready. The political imagination is not.

Tokyo 🇯🇵 — Japan’s Shimizu Corporation designed Ocean Spiral — an underwater city with a 15-kilometer spiral anchor linking a floating surface structure to the sea floor, powered by ocean thermal energy conversion, with a research team from Tokyo developing the concept at an estimated cost of 20 billion euros. Tokyo’s approach to floating urban infrastructure is characteristically ambitious and characteristically long-horizon. Ocean Spiral is decades away. What Tokyo is doing right now — this week, with four major station-district openings — is practicing the same underlying logic as Sim Eternal City: designing infrastructure that turns an underused asset into a destination. The decommissioned cruise ship and the underused transit hub are the same idea at different scales. Tokyo understands this instinctively.

Singapore 🇸🇬 — Singapore faces a version of every problem Sim Eternal City is designed to solve: acute land scarcity, an aging population, climate vulnerability, and the need to house a growing population without expanding its physical footprint. Singapore has been reclaiming land from the sea for decades — nearly a quarter of the island’s current territory is reclaimed land. But reclamation has limits: it is expensive, it is slow, and it destroys marine ecosystems. Floating infrastructure is the next logical step, and Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority has been quietly studying it for years. Sim Eternal City’s model — modular, relocatable, purpose-built for aging populations — maps directly onto Singapore’s demographic and spatial challenges. The city that invented the “garden city” concept could become the first to deploy the “floating city” concept at scale.

Your Next Opportunity Is Already Happening — Just Not Where You're Looking

The deal, the partner, the market, the project — it's out there. bcdW connects people who are ready to move with the places, people, and ideas that are ready to receive them. Business opportunities, revenue, partnerships, projects worth joining. Read the magazine that finds the connection before you do.

→ Read bcdW Magazine

Where Will the Olds Live When Everything Changes? We're All Getting There. Today's Old Is Tomorrow's Ours.

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.

📩 [email protected]