I don't consider myself a fiction writer. Since leaving university, I've mostly written corporate emails, technical reports, research papers. Nothing close to creative fiction. Yet somehow, fiction was the itch that kept coming back.
For months, I accumulated notes. Drafts of drafts. Mind maps sketched in notebooks. Character voices scribbled down during walks. Never quite sure what was forming, but feeling it just out of reach. Something about cities, about people, about the gap between what we promise and what we deliver.
This project is hard to explain, but I'll try.
The Questions That Wouldn't Leave
What would a city reimagined from scratch actually be like? Not in the glossy renderings of development proposals, but in the lived reality of the people who inhabit it. What might its urban governance look like when faced with impossible choices? What are the moral trade-offs embedded in its design? How do power structures emerge even in systems designed to be equitable? What does it feel like to live in a place that promises everything and delivers something else entirely?
These are questions I wrestle with in my work. I've spent time researching urban futures, sitting in community engagement sessions, reviewing policy frameworks, thinking about how we create cities that actually work for the people who live in them. I've witnessed the gap between intention and outcome. I've watched beautiful visions collide with messy realities.
Fiction gets at truths in ways that reports can't. It lets you ask uncomfortable questions and follow the logic of a system wherever it leads. It lets you inhabit multiple perspectives at once: the person creating the city, the one living in it, those operating in its shadows.
So I kept returning to this idea: What if I built a city on the page?
The City Takes Shape
Imagine a time when pandemic and climate crisis have ravaged the mainland. The mainland has become what I call "The Basement Civilization." High temperatures and energy shortages has made upper floors of buildings uninhabitable. Life has moved downward into converted basement parking lots, subway tunnels, shopping mall ground floors. People live on new schedules, with a different kind of life emerging after 7pm when temperatures drop. But basements offer their own threat: sea level rise pushes saltwater into the water table, causing foundations to sweat and corrode. Families live in fear of structural collapse. This is the world people must flee to survive.
Along comes a corporate entity presenting a city built from scratch as a lifeboat offering a fresh start. The pitch: waste from the mainland becomes resource for this new city. Through a massive Waste-to-Energy plant, daily garbage becomes electricity, building materials, land. Nothing is lost. A perfect circular economy powered by ruthless efficiency.
The price is surrender. Climate refugees give up everything that made them who they were. Past, identity, name, cultural practices, faith, traditions. Everything left at the door in exchange for survival. Start from scratch. Its creators call it "Sifar City." Zero city.
People work hard to earn their credits, saving to sponsor family members left behind, believing that a clean slate and honest effort can make them successful in this new world. But reality fractures across talent and class lines. For the labor force working the sorting lines, it's survival squeezed into a clinical system that recognizes efficiency but not humanity. For the highly skilled, the algorithm rewards them generously. The city they experience is pleasurable with climate-controlled environments that consume energy ostentatiously, proof of their position above mere survival.
Where the corporate system fails, something else grows. A shadow network with community sanctuaries tapping waste heat from city pipes. When credits are scarce, spices, secretly grown crops, and folk medicines are exchanged for favors. Spaces where mainland cultures and rituals are rediscovered. People barter trade for hours in cooler zones, for human touch in a system designed for isolation. The shadow economy reveals the city's foundational lie: what the system call "inefficiencies" is actually what keeps people alive. Culture, community, memory, human connection.
But as the world gets hotter and the rain gets heavier, the city needs more power for cooling and pumping. The plant cannot create more energy than the waste provides. The price of electricity rises. Eventually, the cost of staying cool becomes higher than what a worker earns. People still have jobs. But they're being priced out of a livable temperature. The refuge they surrendered everything to enter is expelling them economically, while the homes they fled have collapsed. They're refugees twice over.
What I Don't Know (Which is A Lot)
Aware that I'm not a fiction writer, I wondered: what if I created documents from this imaginary city to tell the story?
Text messages as people try to stay hopeful while reality shifts beneath them. Corporate memos revealing how good intentions lead to unexpected outcomes. Operational logs. Strategic reports. No traditional narrative prose. No narrator. Just the documents themselves, scattered across time, waiting to be assembled by readers into something coherent.
The format forces authenticity. Each document must have a real-world purpose beyond narration. Characters reveal themselves between the lines, in what they choose to say and what they leave unsaid.
I still don't know if this will work. I have draft documents sitting in folders. Character voices I'm still refining. Plot threads I'm not sure how to weave together. I don't know exactly what the characters will do, how the city lives and breathes, how the systems I imagine will succeed or fail.
I don't know if readers will want to assemble fragments into narrative. I don't know if the epistolary format will sustain engagement or become monotonous. I don't know if the world-building is too dense or not dense enough.
The technical challenge mirrors this entire website. Learning by doing. Finding the voices. Figuring out which plot threads matter. Making documents feel authentic to their moment and purpose while advancing the story. Building the structure as I go, accepting that I might need to tear it down and rebuild.
The story will teach me what it needs to be. Or it won't, and I'll learn from that too.
For now, I'll just build this imaginary place. Document by document. Question by question. Draft by uncertain draft. Welcome to Sifar City.