Aerial view of Aurelia: a radial garden city glowing at golden hour

A FEASIBILITY STUDY IN WONDER

AURELIA

A prototype city of 250,000 — assembled entirely from systems that already work somewhere on Earth. Infinite budget. Zero science fiction.

Unroll the Plan Read the Receipts
0residents at buildout
0%of streets car-free
0 gCO₂ per kWh
0 minto everything, from anywhere

“It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where people actually live a life they can't find anywhere else in the world.”

— Walt Disney, introducing E.P.C.O.T., October 1966

Walt never got to build his city. The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was drawn as a radial wheel — a climate-sheltered core, a green belt, neighborhoods fanning outward, cars banished below ground, monorails and PeopleMovers doing the work of streets. He died two months after filming the pitch, and the drawing became a theme park.

Aurelia picks the drawing back up — with one discipline Walt never imposed on himself. Nothing in this city is invented. Every system below is running today, at scale, somewhere on Earth: the waste pipes in Singapore, the gondolas in La Paz, the car-free streets in Pontevedra, the water loop in Singapore, the timber towers in Norway, the digital government in Estonia, the flood parks in Copenhagen. Aurelia is not a prediction. It is a compilation — the best verse from every city's song, sung once, together.

LAW 01

It must already exist

Every system requires a working, cited precedent. If no city on Earth runs it today, Aurelia doesn't either.

LAW 02

Physics is the only budget

Money is assumed infinite. Thermodynamics, land, and human nature are not — they are the real constraints, and they are respected.

LAW 03

Measure the flourishing

The city publishes every number it lives by — air, noise, wait times, rents, health — and is judged by them, in public, forever.

01 · THE MASTER PLAN

A wheel, five rings,
six wedges of home

Walt's radial diagram, kept — because it was right. Density glows at the center and relaxes to wilderness at the rim, so every resident lives on a gradient between plaza and forest. Touch the plan to explore it.

02 · MOVEMENT

The three-level city,
exactly as drawn in 1966

Walt's cleverest idea was vertical: give each speed its own plane. Aurelia builds it with proven parts — Magic Kingdom's own utility corridors below, Pontevedra's car-free surface at grade, and La Paz's cable-car network overhead.

Gondola cabins gliding above a leafy boulevard toward the city core
LEVEL +1 · THE AIR

Six gondola lines, two tram rings

Cabins arrive every 12 seconds and never stop coming — there is no timetable because there is no waiting. La Paz's Mi Teleférico already runs ten lines and 160,000 riders a day as the backbone of a real city; Aurelia's six radials converge on the Transit Lobby, crossing the city rim-to-core in eleven minutes. Grass-track trams trace the two ring parks.

  • ≤ 300 m to a station from every door
  • 12 s headway
  • zero emissions, 45 dB
Aurelia's central plaza full of pedestrians, cyclists, fountains and a passing tram
LEVEL 0 · THE GROUND

Every street belongs to feet

One hundred percent of surface streets are car-free — not traffic-calmed, car-free. Pontevedra, Spain did this to its center in 1999 and cut CO₂ by 70% while gaining 12,000 residents; in Freiburg's Vauban district, cars handle as little as 5% of trips. Children walk to school alone. The loudest thing on an Aurelian street is the fountain.

  • 2,000+ km of paths & arcades
  • kids walk to school unescorted
  • 42 dB at night
Inside an underground utilidor tunnel with delivery pods and color-coded utilities
LEVEL −1 · THE UTILIDORS

The city you never see

Beneath every street runs a walkable service tunnel — freight pods, pneumatic waste mains, water, heat, power and fiber, all reachable without ever digging up a road. Walt's team actually built this in 1971: the Magic Kingdom sits on 9 acres of utilidors that still work flawlessly. Every delivery in Aurelia arrives underground and ascends the last thirty meters by lift.

  • 38 km of walkable tunnels
  • no delivery trucks, ever
  • streets never excavated

How Aurelians move — share of daily trips, design target vs. the precedents that prove it

PRECEDENTS · VAUBAN (FREIBURG) WALK+CYCLE 38–73% · PONTEVEDRA CENTER ~90% CAR-FREE TRIPS · LA PAZ GONDOLA 160K PAX/DAY

03 · POWER & HEAT

A grid that hums
at eleven grams

Two small modular reactors anchor the grid the way France's fleet anchors hers — steady, dense, and carbon-free — while their waste heat warms every home through the district loop. Hybrid SMR-renewable studies show 90%+ lifecycle CO₂ cuts; Aurelia was designed from that math.

The energy portfolio — share of annual generation

2 × 300MWesmall modular reactors at the lakeshore energy campus — the same class breaking ground at Darlington, Ontario
96 °Cdeep geothermal district-heating loop — Paris has heated homes from the Dogger aquifer since the 1970s
−30%cooling energy via the district cooling network, as measured at Singapore's Punggol Digital District
0combustion appliances anywhere in the city — no gas, no diesel, no smoke, no carbon monoxide deaths
04 · WATER

Every drop is
a permanent resident

Singapore closed its water loop a generation ago: used water becomes NEWater, endlessly, at a fifth of desalination's energy. Aurelia adopts the loop wholesale — then adds Copenhagen's answer to the storm.

Energy to make a cubic meter of drinking water — kWh/m³

SOURCE FIGURES · PUB SINGAPORE — NEWATER ~0.7 kWh/m³, SEAWATER RO ~3.5–4 kWh/m³

The sponge that drinks the storm

When a cloudburst hits — 15 mm in half an hour, the kind that drowned Copenhagen in 2011 — Aurelia's ring parks reveal their second job. Amphitheaters flood into ponds. Terraced rain gardens swallow the runoff. A cloudburst tunnel, twin to the one Copenhagen opens in 2026, carries the overflow to the lake. The morning after, kids sail paper boats on the new ponds, and the reserve drains itself for the next one.

A terraced sponge park holding stormwater after rain, children playing at its edge
RING PARK Nº3, DOUBLING AS A 100-YEAR-STORM RESERVOIR
05 · METABOLISM

A city with no trucks
and no landfill

Garbage travels at 70 km/h in Aurelia — through pipes. Envac's pneumatic mains have run beneath Roosevelt Island since 1975 and now serve whole districts of Singapore by law. No bins on streets, no collection trucks, no 5 a.m. clatter.

01

Three chutes in every kitchen

Organics, recyclables, residuals — sucked through 38 km of underground mains to the recovery works in the Farm Belt. Organics feed anaerobic digesters; the biogas fires the peaker turbines. Diversion target: 92%.

02

Buildings that bank carbon

Aurelia is a mass-timber city — cross-laminated spruce, up to 18 stories, under the fire codes rewritten after Norway's 85-meter Mjøstårnet proved the material. Every building is a vault of stored carbon that smells faintly of forest.

03

Deconstruction, not demolition

Every structure carries a material passport. When a building's life ends, it is unbolted, not smashed — beams, panels and facades return to the component exchange for the next one.

Warm mass-timber residential atrium with cascading plants and golden skylight
A LARKSPUR DISTRICT ATRIUM · CLT SPRUCE, 14 STOREYS
06 · FOOD

Honest calories from
a glass horizon

Here is where feasibility bites hardest, so Aurelia tells the truth. The Netherlands — a country smaller than West Virginia — is the world's second-largest food exporter on the strength of its greenhouses. Aurelia borrows that machine, and refuses the vertical-farm fantasy.

Aurelia's greenhouse farm belt glowing at dusk with the city skyline behind
THE FARM BELT AT DUSK · 650 ha OF DUTCH-STYLE GLASS

100% of the city's fresh produce grows inside the ring road: 650 hectares of climate-controlled glass yielding at twenty times field rates, orchards and food forests threading the ring parks, and recirculating fish farms by the lake.

Vertical farms exist — where they make sense. The industry's 2025 shakeout proved the niche: high-value crops, cheap power. Aurelia's tower farms grow strawberries, herbs and greens on 3¢ off-peak nuclear kilowatt-hours, and nothing else. Nobody grows wheat under LEDs.

Staple grains arrive by rail from partner farm regions, milled in the Commons. Feeding 250,000 people bread takes roughly 500 km² of grainland — no honest 4-kilometer city pretends otherwise. Aurelia's target is 35% of total calories inside the ring, and it says so on a public dashboard.

Grown inside the ring road — share of the city's consumption

07 · LIFE & HEALTH

Longevity as
a zoning decision

The Blue Zones taught us that people live to 100 where the environment makes the healthy choice the lazy one. Aurelia is the first city zoned to that specification: movement by default, plants within reach, and nobody eating alone who doesn't want to.

A quiet tram on a grass track between flowering gardens and timber mid-rises

The 400-meter promise

From any front door: a park, a bakery, a café, a childcare room and a tram or gondola stop within 400 meters. Walking 8,000 steps a day in Aurelia requires no decision at all — it's simply what living here does to you.

A clinic in every village

Eighteen neighborhood clinics — nurse-led, walk-in, free — handle 80% of care within ten minutes of home, feeding one teaching hospital in the Commons. Every resident's record follows them, Estonian-style, with a ledger showing who looked.

Palaces for the people

Every village square keeps the full set of third places: a library, a bathhouse, a maker hall, and a supper club with long tables. Loneliness is a public-health metric here, tracked as seriously as PM2.5.

Air you could bottle

No combustion means PM2.5 hovers around 4 µg/m³ — under the WHO guideline, on a par with mountain resorts. Streets at night sit near 42 dB: quiet enough to hear the gondola cables sing.

08 · GOVERNANCE

The city is
a service

Estonia runs 99% of government online; taxes take three minutes; no agency may ask you for a fact any agency already knows. Aurelia runs on the same open-source spine — plus two old ideas about power that predate computers entirely.

Aurelia OS

An X-Road-style data exchange with a digital ID. The once-only principle is law: government asks for any fact exactly once, forever. Every access of your data is logged where you can see it — watching the watchers is a citizen's default view.

The Assembly of 99

Beside the elected council sits a citizens' assembly drawn by lot — 99 residents, rotating yearly, with subpoena power and the right to force referenda. Sortition kept Athens honest; it audits Aurelia.

Land that pays the rent

The city owns all land and grants 99-year leases, Singapore-style — so the ground rent that cities usually gift to speculators funds the gondolas and the clinics instead. Five percent of the capital budget is allocated directly by residents, Porto Alegre-style.

Homes in thirds

A third city-built co-ops, a third rent-capped, a third market — interleaved in the same buildings, Vienna's recipe, where 60% of residents live in public or subsidized homes and no one can tell which is which from the street. No Aurelian pays more than 30% of income for home.

09 · THE RECEIPTS

Nothing here
is fiction but the sum

Law 01, audited. Every load-bearing claim in this city, and the place on Earth already carrying the load.

Aurelia's skyline at night across the lake, gondola lines traced in light
10 · TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

A day in
Aurelia

  1. 05:50

    The gondola cables begin to sing. First cabins drift toward the Farm Belt carrying growers; the utilidors below are already at freight rush.

  2. 07:40

    School streets bloom — 30,000 children walking and cycling unescorted through the ring parks, the way Pontevedra's kids have since 1999.

  3. 12:15

    Plaza lunch under the plane trees. Today's menu at the supper clubs is whatever 38 tonnes of morning harvest turned out to be.

  4. 15:02

    Cloudburst. Fifteen millimeters in twenty minutes. Ring Park Nº3 becomes a lake, exactly as designed, and nobody's basement notices.

  5. 19:30

    Night market in the Grand Bazaar. The Assembly of 99 adjourns; tonight's session — where to put the second observatory — is already on the public ledger.

  6. 23:40

    The city dims to dark-sky code. From the Meridian Spire you can see the Milky Way over 250,000 sleeping people, and hear precisely nothing.

11 · WHEN THE PROTOTYPE GROWS UP

One wheel was the proof.
Five wheels are the point.

A radial city's capacity scales with the circumference of its core — so Aurelia doesn't stretch to a million. She becomes the first bead of Argenta: five garden-city wheels on an industrial rail spine, with real freight, real workshops, and a permit app for the Saturday crane. Feasibility first; big projects encouraged.

Enter Argenta — the working city of one million