Architecture for a World that Keeps Breaking

What Tokyo-3 from Neon Genesis Evangelion can teach us about resilient cities.

Since last year, metropolitan cities in Southeast Asia, like Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, have been experiencing heavy floods, and I started to wonder if we’re building our cities wrong. I thought about how cities need to adapt to a changing environment. Nature is constantly adapting to the climate we’re in. Whether we are ready or not, we have to adapt too. And the real question is how our cities adapt along with it.

I think about the millions of people who have lost their homes. And it is not only the loss of buildings. It is the loss of neighborhoods, the loss of memory, and often the loss of culture itself. A city is not just infrastructure. It’s the place where daily life accumulates over generations.

And lately, it has been difficult to think about anything else while wars are unfolding around the world, too. I feel disillusioned by creating and consuming content that has nothing to do with it. So this is me, coping and scrambling to find solutions to the world’s problems, and some sort of hope that design will save the world — and that there is still a pinch of humanity left in us.

We have seen throughout history that people return, from the reconstruction of Warsaw after World War II to the rebuilding of Aleppo after years of war. They come back to places that have been almost entirely erased. Again and again, we rebuild. There’s something deeply human in that instinct — the refusal to abandon a place completely. But rebuilding raises a difficult question: if we know destruction can happen again, from war, climate disasters, or instability, how should we rebuild our cities? How do we rebuild in a way that is not only functional, but sustainable and resilient?

Tokyo-3 is essentially a replica of modern Tokyo.

I keep thinking of the city in Neon Genesis Evangelion - Tokyo-3 - which is essentially a replica of modern Tokyo. Schools, skyscrapers, apartments, highways, power lines. At first glance, it looks like a normal city. But it isn’t.

Tokyo-3 is designed as a battlefield, a kind of “fortress city.” When the Angels attack, entire buildings retract into the ground. Skyscrapers, equipped with hydraulic systems that reveal hidden weapons caches and defense batteries, sink beneath armored plates. Highways split apart. The city folds into itself, revealing that what once looked like a normal urban landscape is actually a carefully engineered defense system. Tokyo-3 is a city built on the assumption that catastrophe will happen again. Disaster is not treated as an unlikely event, but as a condition of existence.

Tokyo-3 folds into itself, revealing that what once looked like a normal urban landscape is actually a carefully engineered defense system.

Of course, our cities cannot literally sink into the ground when danger arrives. We need to build cities that can absorb shocks — whether floods, wars, or displacement — without losing the life within them. Take the example of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Rotterdam has begun redesigning itself as a “water-resilient city.” With large parts lying below sea level, Rotterdam has extensive flood-protection infrastructure, including dams, pumping stations, and dykes. Public plazas double as water reservoirs during heavy rain. New neighborhoods experiment with floating architecture. Instead of treating disaster as an exception, the city treats it as part of its everyday reality.

Another example is Kobe, Japan. After a devastating earthquake in 1995, the city implemented a strategy to “revive” rather than simply “restore,” and it changed how Japan approaches earthquake-resistant urban planning.

So how should we go from here? I won’t end this piece with a proposal that we have to change or save the world. This is just the beginning of a conversation. Tokyo-3 may be fictional, but the idea behind it feels real to me. Maybe that’s an uncomfortable lesson for us, to think about our communities and pay closer attention to the places we live. Our cities can no longer be designed only for stability, permanence, or endless growth. They must also be designed for floods, displacement, and adaptation to ever-changing climates and political realities.

History already shows that even when cities fall, people return. We rebuild streets, homes, markets, and schools. Life gathers again in the same places. If humans are stubborn enough to resist and rebuild the same cities over and over, then maybe architecture must become just as stubborn, survive in a world that keeps breaking.