SinergiaLab · UnitedCities · 2026-09-01

Anatomy of an amphibious city

How we went from a pencil sketch to a metropolis that breathes with the river: the design decisions behind the eastern cities of UnitedCities.

An amphibious city is not a flooded city. It is a city that decided, from the very first line, that water was not a problem to be solved but a structure to be inhabited. That distinction changed everything in the design of the eastern metropolises of UnitedCities.

Water as a construction plane

In the early sketches we treated the city as if the river were the ground. The levels do not descend toward the water: they are born from it. Platforms are organized by depth rather than height, and that completely reorders the visual hierarchy of the skyline.

If water is the ground, the street is the current.

The narrative consequence was immediate. Characters living on these levels do not commute, they navigate. Their relationship with distance is different, and so is their sense of neighborhood.

From sketch to render

Moving from color sketch to final render preserved one rule: no completely smooth surfaces. Every volume carries a biological texture, because the solarpunk premise of the world holds that mature technology increasingly resembles the biology around it. The city does not imitate nature: over time, it learned to behave like it.

Claudio Pousada. Director, co-writer and producer of UnitedCities.

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Preamble, nine chapters and ratification

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