The Vision

The Living City

Design language for the Trust Collective

Imagine a stone dropped into still water. The ripples radiating outward, concentric and alive. Now imagine those ripples frozen in earth and green, rising gently from the landscape, covered in vegetation and cascading water, with windows glinting through the leaves in low afternoon light. From a distance, you would see a forest with pools. Up close, you would see home.

The Principles

Every settlement the Trust Collective builds must satisfy the same constraints, regardless of where it stands or what form it takes. These are non-negotiable. Everything else is.

Thousand-year durability. Every structure is built to last a millennium. Stone, earth, thermal mass, basalt fiber, carbon-cured concrete. Materials that do not rot, do not burn, and do not require replacement within a human lifetime. The cheapest building is the one you never have to build again.

Climate resilience. The built environment must survive the storms, fires, extreme heat, and severe weather of the coming centuries. At two degrees of warming above pre-industrial, this means fortress-grade protection: sealed thermal envelopes, fire-resistant shutters, pressure-managed entries. At one degree, the requirements lighten. At pre-industrial temperatures, the architecture can breathe more freely. Every settlement is designed for the worst conditions its latitude and terrain will face during the restoration centuries, and those protections can relax as the climate heals.

Energy self-sufficiency. Geothermal primary, solar supplemental, no fossil fuels. Radiant heating and cooling through thermal mass. The city generates more energy than it consumes.

Food integration. Underground controlled-environment agriculture produces the majority of calories. Surface agriculture occupies the buffer zones. The city feeds itself.

Universal access. Every home, every ramp, every corridor built for every kind of human body. Accessibility is not an accommodation. It is the design.

Cultural inclusivity. Multiple home types, orientations, and interior configurations honoring the full range of human ways of living. The institution will commission global studies to identify what people need and design configurations that honor those needs.

Beauty. A civilization that asks people to choose it freely must offer something worth choosing. The built environment should feel like a landscape, not a machine. Stone, water, vegetation, light.

The dark sky. All exterior lighting uses downward-directed, shielded fixtures. Interior underground spaces emit no light to the surface. The night sky that humanity lost to light pollution is returned, because a civilization that builds underground and shields its light gives the darkness back to the stars. You can sit on your front terrace in the largest city on Earth and see the Milky Way.

Total land footprint within 10 percent. All human settlement, agriculture, infrastructure, and buffer zones fit within 10 percent of habitable land. The remaining 80 to 90 percent is restored ecosystem. This is the ceiling. It is not a target.

As long as a design meets these principles, it qualifies. The grammar holds. The vocabulary is limitless.

What follows is one example of what that vocabulary produces: a ring city designed for the open plains of interior North America, where land is flat, space is abundant, and the restored prairie beyond the wall runs to the horizon in every direction. Other landscapes will produce other forms. The principles remain.

The Form

The ring city is a ripple. Concentric rings radiating outward from an organic central core, each ring a living hill with homes terraced into its slopes, green spaces cascading between them, water flowing downhill through the whole structure like a natural watershed. From the air, it looks like a series of green rings set in parkland with spiraling towers rising from the center. From ground level between the rings, you see green hills on either side with windows glinting through vegetation, and you hear water moving.

The design language draws on Buckminster Fuller's structural efficiency, Frank Lloyd Wright's synthesis of architecture and nature, and the immersive biome environments of places like the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha — where a child can stand in freezing weather outside and moments later be sweating under full-size tropical trees beneath a glass dome fifty feet overhead. That feeling of being inside a built structure and yet fully immersed in a living ecosystem is the foundational experience of the ring city. Not sealed under glass, but sheltered by design — earth, stone, vegetation, and water working together so that the built world and the living world are the same thing. You do not live in a dome. You live in a landscape that happens to be engineered.

The ring city uses three concentric rings surrounding a central core as its reference template. The template scales — a single ring with distributed nodes is a village, five rings with tall spires is a metropolis — but the grammar is the same everywhere. Each ring is triangular in cross-section, asymmetric. The sun-facing slope is gentle, roughly ten to twelve degrees, creating the feel of a natural hillside. The back slope is steeper, fifteen to twenty degrees in places, creating room for waterfalls, park terrain, offices with terraces overlooking the gap, and visual depth. Homes are terraced into the sun-facing slopes, each set back from the one below, so that every home has an unobstructed view outward and no home looks directly into its neighbor's living space. The geometry provides privacy through topography rather than walls.

The rings step down from center to edge. The innermost ring is the tallest. The outermost ring is the lowest, so that inner-ring residents at upper levels can see past the outer rings to the landscape beyond. In temperate climates in the northern hemisphere, homes face south on the outer arc of each ring. In hot arid climates, the orientation may reverse: homes face away from direct sun to keep interiors cool. The depth of the roof overhang is matched to the latitude so that in temperate zones, winter sun enters when its warmth is welcome and summer sun is blocked when it is not. The structural grammar is the same everywhere. The orientation and shading respond to the site.

Slopes that do not receive optimal light for housing are used for parks, amphitheaters, and gathering spaces. On the steeper back slopes, offices and studios occupy terraces with windows looking out across the parkland between rings — a view of green hillsides, cascading water, and open sky.

Every resident has a view. No one looks at a wall. Upper-level homes see over the rings ahead of them to the landscape beyond — the agricultural buffer, the distant wall, open sky. Lower-level homes look out across the mile-wide parkland between rings to the green hillside of the next ring, which reads as a forested slope, not a structure. Both are beautiful. They are different kinds of beautiful.

There are reasons to prefer high or low. Upper levels offer wider views, more sun, and more breeze — welcome in warm climates, less so in cold or coastal ones where wind exposure is relentless. Lower levels are more sheltered, more intimate, closer to the ground-level paths and water features between rings. Where conditions make a particular zone less desirable for housing, that space becomes something else. Parks, gathering areas, greenhouses, workshops. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is forced.

Rising from the center, the core is the densest area — apartments, cultural spaces, and public gathering areas organized in organic spiraling towers that evoke seashells more than skyscrapers. The towers taper to thin spires at the top so they do not block the skyline or the sense that the space breathes. The exteriors are covered in cascading vegetation, and water flows down their surfaces. Where you see stone, it looks and feels like natural rock. Glass is set behind greenery. From a distance, the spires look like moss-covered rock formations — limestone karst towers or sandstone pillars, weathered and organic in shape, draped in ferns and hanging plants and vines, with water tracing lines down their faces. They read as geology, not architecture.

At the very center is a great public space — a gathering ground for celebration, ceremony, teaching, and cultural preservation. A place where a civilization remembers where it came from and renews its commitment to where it is going.

The Home

You wake up and the air smells like earth. Not dirt or dust — earth. Terracotta and clay walls, natural plaster, stone, potted plants on the sill. The building breathes because it is made of real materials. Soft morning light filters through large windows, catching the earliest sun and bouncing off interior walls. The light moves through the home as the morning progresses, warming one surface after another.

The home feels firm. Solid, like living in a sheltered landscape — warm and rich, protected but open. The floor is warm underfoot — radiant heat running through embedded pipes beneath the surface, fed by the city's geothermal system. No fans, no blowing air. Looking out through the large windows, you see a continuity of home flowing into your garden and terrace, then into the shared green space beyond, then into the broader landscape. Inside flows into outside without interruption.

You walk outside to sit with your morning coffee. You hear birds. You hear the rustle of vegetation in the breeze. Maybe in the distance, voices passing on the shared path — a child talking to a parent as they bike by, screened through vegetation, there and then gone. You do not hear lawnmowers, cars, planes, or the mechanical hum that follows people everywhere in the current world.

The Window and the Living Room

The living room faces outward through a wide curved arc of glass, sweeping upward in a gentle curve. The glass is engineered for coexistence. Embedded micro-reflective patterns make the surface clearly visible to birds from the outside while remaining invisible from within. Smart glass technology allows the entire surface to shift opacity — dimming for afternoon heat, darkening for sleep, or flashing a warning pattern if a bird approaches too fast. You see landscape. The birds see a solid surface. The engineering disappears into the experience.

The flanking walls carry their material language from the exterior straight through the glass and into the home. One continuous surface of stone. The home does not begin at the glass. It begins at the landscape.

The living room is a sunken half-circle, a few steps below the main floor, with the wide window as its focal point. Built-in concrete benches sweep out in both directions toward the glass. On one side, an option space — a built-in planter, an aquarium set into the concrete surround, or left open. On the other, a smaller option space with the universal access ramp curving gently down from the main floor. Every home has the ramp. It is not an accommodation. It is the design.

Above the living room, the ceiling rises into a dome. The arc begins at the tall window and sweeps upward to a peak slightly behind center, then curves back down toward the kitchen ceiling. The kitchen feels open because the ceiling lifts away from it. The living room feels embraced because the dome curves around it.

Kitchen and Private Spaces

Behind and above the sunken living room, the eating area and kitchen sit on the raised main floor. The cook faces the window. All preparation surfaces are oriented toward the view. Built-in concrete counters with rounded edges. The counters are permanent — part of the thousand-year shell. The stools, the chairs, the table — these are the choices that express individuality.

At the back of the kitchen, a walk-in cooler opens into a freezer beyond it. The back wall is earth-sheltered, naturally cool, integrated into the city's geothermal system. Keeping large cold storage at a stable low temperature costs almost nothing when the surrounding earth is the insulator.

From the eating area, a hallway continues into the rest of the home. Bedrooms and private spaces off one side. Laundry, media room, utility areas off the other. Social spaces face the window. Private spaces face the earth. The hallway between them is the spine.

The bones of the home are the same in every unit. The life lived inside them is unique. Benches accept cushions in any style. Walls can be finished smooth or rough, painted or left as natural stone, covered in a living wall of edible greens grown aquaponically, or hung with art.

The Terrace

Each home sits on approximately one acre of land. Two large flanking walls extend outward from the front of the home, creating a wide terrace area that opens toward the view. The terrace is entirely the resident's to design: all grass, Japanese garden, functional food garden, exotic plantings, a small electric go-kart track, an aquaponics project, a rose genetics preservation garden, or a Jamaican-style outdoor kitchen with music.

The flanking walls, the slope geometry, and the vegetation between homes reduce sound transmission between neighbors to the point where everyday noise does not carry. A small sensor at the edge of each home's sound envelope monitors levels and offers a gentle reminder if sound approaches the threshold where it would reach a neighbor. The architecture does most of the work. The governance handles the rest.

Beyond the terrace, a buffer of approximately fifty feet provides additional private space, including the landscaped rooftop on the slope above. The commons between homes is wilder, under shared management. You can tell whose home is whose by the feel — the colors, the plantings, the personality expressed in the terrace. Equity is not sameness. The structure is universal. The life inside is unique.

Climate Control

The earth-sheltered design provides the foundation. Thermal mass — the sheer volume of stone, earth, and concrete surrounding the home — absorbs and releases heat slowly, keeping interior temperatures stable through daily and seasonal cycles. In most conditions, this passive system does the majority of the work.

Radiant heat in the floor warms the home from below — warm water circulating through embedded pipes, fed by the city's geothermal system. The heat rises gently and evenly. No fans. The floor is warm to walk on and the room fills with even, comfortable heat.

For cooling, radiant panels in the ceiling run cold water through embedded pipes. The ceiling absorbs rising heat and carries it away silently. Cool air settles naturally downward. The captured heat is redirected into the city's thermal storage system or used to preheat water elsewhere. Nothing is lost.

In tropical climates, the system includes dehumidification. In northern climates, supplemental heat runs more often. In temperate zones, the passive thermal mass handles most days and the active system engages only at the margins. The home feels like it regulates itself. It nearly does.

Walls That Move

The structural shell is built to the thousand-year standard: load-bearing walls, thermal envelope, connections to city systems. Core rooms — the kitchen, bathrooms, and the mechanical spine that carries water, power, and climate systems — are fixed. They do not move.

The remaining interior walls are heavy precast concrete panels designed to create rooms that feel and function like permanent construction. Each panel locks into position, seals fully against the structural walls, and achieves complete acoustic isolation. A child's bedroom is a real room with a real wall, not a folding screen.

When a family's needs change — children grow up, an elderly parent moves in, life shifts — panels are reconfigured by a service team. A panel coming out of one home goes into another. The pieces circulate through the city like components of a living system. A single person might occupy a one-bedroom configuration with additional rooms sealed. A growing family opens rooms as needed. Children leave, rooms close again. The shell never changes. The lived space breathes.

Multiple home types are available within the same structural grammar to accommodate cultural diversity and different ways of living.

Protection

At one edge of the home's front face, an entrance that feels substantial and welcoming — a thermal barrier, weather barrier, and pressure management system in one. In a world where elevated temperatures and severe weather persist for centuries, it keeps the stable interior climate separated from the variable exterior.

The large curved window is protected by a roll-down shutter system integrated into the structure above the glass. In severe weather — high winds, tornadoes, or extended storms — the shutters descend to cover the full window surface. In fire-prone regions, the shutters carry a ceramic face that protects the glass from radiant heat and direct flame. The rest of the earth-sheltered structure is already inherently fire-resistant. Stone, concrete, and earth do not burn.

The system responds to weather alerts, wind speed thresholds, or fire proximity sensors automatically. It can also be activated manually. When deployed, the home is sealed — entrance closed, shutters down, interior climate maintained by the geothermal system. When the threat passes, the shutters retract and the view returns.

On the Great Plains, this means storm protection — a sealed home that rides out a tornado while the residents sit safely inside. In forested regions, it means fire protection — the kind of shelter that could have saved lives in places where people tried to flee fires they could not outrun. In coastal zones, it means surviving the hurricane-force winds and storm surge of a warming ocean. The level of protection scales to the threat. As the climate heals under sustained Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and restoration, the threats diminish. At two degrees above pre-industrial, you need the fortress. At one degree, you need less. At pre-industrial equilibrium, you are building for beauty and longevity alone. But the protection is always there, because the thousand-year standard means the structure outlasts any temporary climate state.

The Interior City

Walk through the back entrance of any home and the space expands. The corridor opens into a wide causeway with curved ceilings, no sharp edges, soft LED lighting that can simulate any sky: clear blue, moving clouds, sunset colors, stars. The feeling is of walking from a cozy intimate space into something grand and open — the opposite of the claustrophobia people associate with underground living. The underground is the grand space. Your home is the intimate nest you return to.

Major causeways are a hundred feet across and thirty to forty feet tall, with hundreds of people moving through but no sense of confinement. Home corridors funnel by level into larger transit corridors, then into centralized areas with multiple forms of transport: walking paths, electric bike lanes, automated personal transport, and mass transit for longer distances. Everything is bright, spacious, and flowing.

Spiraling ramps connect levels rather than stairs — gentle grades that accommodate wheelchairs, strollers, elderly people, children on bikes, anyone carrying anything. In a city designed to last a thousand years and serve every kind of human body, universal access is the default.

Beneath the rings, the full volume of the structure houses everything the city needs. Food production in layered underground growing systems. Manufacturing. Gymnasiums, sports stadiums, concert halls, gathering spaces, and activities that no one can yet imagine because they will be invented by people with more freedom than any humans have ever had. All connected by underground maglev between cities.

The back door of every home opens to this interior world. An elevator or spiraling ramp takes you to the transit level. Automated transport reaches any point within the city in five to fifteen minutes. The north-facing slopes of the rings — the back sides with terraced offices — look out over the parkland between rings. At a mile's distance across the gap, a person on the far slope is barely visible among the vegetation. The workspace feels like looking out over a forested valley.

If necessary — during severe weather that persists for weeks — no one would ever need to go outside. The interior is a complete world. But when the weather is kind, the terraces, the cascading water, and the parks between the rings call people outside to live in the landscape they are healing.

The Water

The entire city is a watershed. Rain falls on the ring terraces and the flat tops, cascades downward through designed streams and waterfalls past homes and through gardens, collects in pools that serve as both beauty and food production, and continues flowing outward through the parkland between rings. Some pools are food-producing aquaculture. Some are purely for the psychological benefit of moving water. Most are both.

Once the interior reservoirs are full and the city's water recycling reaches steady state, very little external input is needed. The excess flows through the built landscape and eventually joins the natural watershed beyond the city, feeding the restored ecosystems downstream. The city does not fight water. It moves with it.

Beyond the Rings

The city does not end at the outer ring. It dissolves.

Step past the base of the outermost ring and you are in parkland. Half a mile to a mile of open green common space wraps around the outer ring — breathing room between the last homes and the next zone. The buffer feels like a large park at the edge of a small town, calm enough to feel like you have left the city behind, even though the city is right there.

Beyond the park buffer, small clusters of homes appear along meandering trails. Each cluster is a village node — roughly twenty homes gathered around a shared community building, connected to the city by surface paths and by underground maglev. These are the hobby farms. Each home sits on one to two acres of personal land — enough for a serious vegetable garden, a small orchard, a flock of chickens kept as a living genetic library, or simply a wide-open yard with a view of grain fields and sky. These villages are small enough to know everyone by name.

The nodes scatter through the agricultural zone at varying depths. Some cluster near the park buffer, where the feel is more suburban. Others sit in the middle of the grain fields under agrivoltaic arrays. Others are farther out, near the wall, where the landscape is wilder and the lifestyle is more rural. The feel shifts from village to farmstead to homestead as you move outward.

Beyond the village nodes, the land opens into the working surface of the agricultural zone. Grain grows — wheat, rice, oats, barley, corn — shaded at optimal intervals by agrivoltaic arrays. Autonomous electric equipment moves through the fields on programmed schedules, quiet and precise. The agricultural ring scales to the city and to the latitude. Northern cities may have no surface agriculture, relying on underground food production and maglev grain shipments from the south. Southern and tropical cities carry wider rings to produce surplus. The maglev connects them into a single planetary food network.

At the outer edge of the agricultural zone, one final park rises gently to the wall. Walking trails, benches facing outward, restored wetlands attracting migratory birds, prairie that draws bison herds close enough to watch. Mounted binoculars at the viewing stations — and you do not have to put a quarter in, because they are free. Because everything is free. Because we want you to enjoy what we are restoring together.

The Wall

The wall does not look like a wall. From the wild side, it looks like a natural limestone cliff — undulating, textured, nothing flat, nothing angular, nothing that reads as manufactured. It is a boundary designed to protect nature from us, not us from nature. To the wildlife on the other side, it is simply a cliff face.

From the human side, you walk up a long grassy rise and barely see the wall itself. Viewing stations line the edge — enclosed shelters, open platforms, long trails for walking and biking. It feels like going to a park. Like going on safari. Like witnessing something sacred. Standing at the edge of the human world, looking out over the wild world that is healing because of a decision that was made generations ago.

Beyond the Wall

Beyond the wall, 80 to 90 percent of the land surface of the Earth is restored ecosystem. The wall is not the absolute edge of human presence. Some people will live beyond it.

Seasonal hunting camps move through the restored wilderness — small, low-impact, mobile. Permanent wild settlements house communities that prefer a pre-industrial lifestyle — analogous to present-day Amish communities, indigenous peoples practicing traditional land management, or simply people who want to live as close to the wild as possible. These settlements are self-governing within the universal rights framework. Their land footprint is negligible. Their existence matters because of the freedom they represent. A civilization that does not allow its people to walk away and live on their own terms has not truly solved the problem of freedom.

A distributed network of maglev access points extends throughout the wild landscape. Fixed stations serve permanent settlements. Along the inter-city trunk lines, smaller access pods are spaced at regular intervals. The pods blend into the landscape — underground and invisible except at the small access hatch. A hunter fifteen miles from the nearest pod walks to it and is back in the city center within minutes. Healthcare, resupply, emergency evacuation — all available without surface roads, without vehicles, without visible infrastructure. You can live as far from civilization as you want and still be minutes from a hospital.

Firearms

The ring city resolves the firearms question through geography. Within the rings and park buffer, no personal firearms — population density is too high. From the hobby farm zone outward, firearms are permitted. Safety rules apply. Beyond the wall, firearms are essential for hunting and wilderness life. The compromise is spatial. Gun culture is not eliminated. It is given the space it needs. Urban density gets the safety it needs. Nobody is asked to surrender a core value. The zones simply separate incompatible needs by distance.

The Numbers

Human civilization occupies no more than 10 percent of habitable land. This is the ceiling. It is not a target — it is a constraint.

For a balanced mix of city sizes — metropolises, standard cities, and villages — the total human footprint fits within approximately 10 percent. This includes city structures, park buffers, village nodes, surface agricultural zones, wall buffer parks, and the wall itself. Land freed for ecosystem restoration: 80 to 90 percent. Housing 10 billion people. Both dense and spacious simultaneously.

Current human land use occupies roughly 50 million square kilometers — approximately 48 percent of habitable land (FAO, 2024) — for 8 billion people. The Trust Collective reduces the human footprint by more than 80 percent while housing 25 percent more people.

The density mix places approximately 25 percent of the population in lower-density settings — villages, hobby farms, and beyond-the-wall settlements. Currently, about 44 percent of the world's population lives rurally (World Bank, 2024). The numerical comparison suggests the Trust Collective is denser. But a ring city resident has approximately one acre of private land — four times the typical American suburban lot. There are no roads, no parking lots, no commercial strips. Parks replace pavement. The density is higher by headcount but lower by experienced space. A suburbanite on a quarter-acre lot facing a neighbor's garage would find the ring city more spacious, not less.

If the population grows beyond what the land-based cities can accommodate within the 10 percent ceiling, floating cities on the ocean absorb the overflow. The same design grammar applies. The ocean surface is vast. The constraint on land ensures that the restoration commitment is permanent and non-negotiable.

Other Forms

The ring city is one answer. The principles allow many.

What follows are not detailed designs. They are sketches of other forms the same grammar can take, adapted to landscapes and circumstances that the open plains do not share. Each would require its own engineering, its own cultural consultation, its own detailed working document. Each satisfies the same principles.

The Mine-Site City

Open-pit mines are among the deepest wounds human industry has inflicted on the landscape. Some are miles across and thousands of feet deep. The excavation is already done. The land is already damaged. Building into the wound heals it.

A mine-site city occupies the volume of the excavation, terracing homes and infrastructure into the walls of the pit, filling the floor with parks, water features, and underground food production. The surface above is restored to native ecosystem. From above, the mine disappears. From inside, you live in a sheltered bowl of stone and green, open to the sky, surrounded by the geology that was once torn apart for profit. The city is the reclamation.

We build where the wounds are deepest.

The Mountaintop City

Mountaintop removal mining has left hundreds of flattened summits across Appalachia and beyond — scalped landscapes with devastated watersheds, poisoned streams, and communities that watched the mountains they loved get destroyed for coal. A pyramid-shaped city built into the ruined summit rebuilds the mountain's profile, restores the ridgeline, heals the waterways, and houses the people whose land was taken.

The city is shaped like the mountain it replaces. Terraced homes face outward into restored forest. The infrastructure descends into the stone below. Water flows down the rebuilt slopes through designed streams that reconnect the severed watershed. From a distance, the mountain looks whole again. For the communities who lived through the destruction, this is not just housing. It is the redemption of a landscape.

The Adaptive City

Not every settlement needs to be new. Some of the most important places on Earth are ancient. Paris has its boulevards. Kyoto has its temples. Rome is literally layers of civilization built on top of itself. These places carry meaning that cannot be replicated, and no one should be asked to abandon them.

The adaptive city is an existing city rebuilt in place, generation by generation, with thousand-year materials and integrated systems. The street grid stays if people want it. The cathedral stays. The character persists while the substance transforms. Over a century, the buildings around the landmarks are rebuilt one by one — earth-sheltered where possible, geothermal-integrated, living walls replacing concrete facades. Underground infrastructure transforms beneath the surface. Food production, transit, energy — all installed below grade while the city above continues to live.

This is not a new idea. London has rebuilt itself on the same street grid for a thousand years. Cities have always renewed their material while preserving their identity. The Trust Collective simply does it intentionally, with materials that endure, rather than by accident and with materials that decay.

For communities that love where they are, the answer is simple: stay. We will transform what you have into something that lasts. The bones are yours. The future is shared.

The Floating City

Sea level rise of approximately two meters is permanent (WCRP, 2022). Island nations and low-lying coastal communities will lose land that cannot be recovered on any human timescale. The people displaced need somewhere to go.

Floating cities on the ocean apply the same design grammar to a maritime environment — geodesic structures on stabilized platforms, wave-dampening energy rings, kelp forests and aquaculture integrated into the surrounding ocean. For Pacific Islander communities, for Bangladeshi coastal populations, for anyone whose homeland is going beneath the waves, the floating city is not exile. It is continuity. The culture carries forward. The relationship to the sea deepens rather than ends.

The Refugee City

Climate displacement will be one of the defining challenges of the coming century. Hundreds of millions of people will need to move, and they will need places that welcome them with dignity.

New cities built on land volunteered to the collective — interior land in countries with space to spare — can house displaced populations in full ring-city quality from the day they arrive. These are not refugee camps. They are permanent homes in permanent cities, built to the same standard as every other settlement in the system. The people who arrive are not guests. They are residents. Their children grow up in a city that was built for them.

A Living Document

This document describes how a civilization of 10 billion people might live well on 10 percent of the land while restoring the rest. The ring city on the Great Plains is one vision. The mine-site city, the mountaintop city, the adaptive city, the floating city, and forms not yet imagined are others.

The better humanity manages the climate transition — the faster restoration proceeds, the more effective SRM proves, the closer temperatures return to pre-industrial equilibrium — the simpler the engineering becomes. At two degrees of warming, we build for survival and beauty simultaneously. At one degree, the survival requirements lighten and beauty leads. At pre-industrial, we are building for the long future alone. The infrastructure simplifies. The vision clarifies. The problem reduces to underground food, underground industry, and homes for the people displaced by the sea level rise that cannot be undone.

The institution will seek input from communities, architects, engineers, and cultures around the world. Different climates will produce different forms. Different cultures will produce different interiors. Different landscapes will produce different configurations. The grammar holds. The vocabulary is limitless.

This is an invitation. Come as you are.

From the Trust Collective Project  |  April 2026