Cities, monuments and major infrastructure projects
Since 1971, the cities of Eldoria have been applying a rule that no other industrial power has dared to enshrine in law: any built-up area must be offset by an equivalent area of greenery. The result is a civilisation of glass towers set amidst forests, where cars travel underground and where surface transport has been free for 47 years.
I
Every square metre of built-up area must be offset by a square metre of greenery — on the ground, on the roof or on the façade. A forty-storey tower therefore features 40 storeys of gardens, arranged as terraces with planting every 4 storeys.
II
In the city centres, road traffic and parking are located beneath the surface road network. The avenues thus freed up are transformed into tree-lined promenades. 86% of the central road network is therefore underground.
III
The metro, trams, buses and funicular railways have been free for everyone since 1971, whether residents or visitors. Funding is provided through property tax, on the grounds that a free transport network increases the value of the land it serves.
IV
No project is granted planning permission unless it includes a public square. Eldorian towns have, on average, one open square for every 3 000 inhabitants, often lined with arcades to ensure they remain usable in hot weather.
V
Large cities are building upwards rather than spreading out. A belt of farmland and woodland, on which no building is permitted, surrounds every urban area with a population of more than 500 000 — it has never been encroached upon since it was first established.
It did not arise from environmental awareness but from a security calculation. Following the amphibious disaster of 1943 and the experience of the air raids, military town planners concluded that a dense, vertical city, with traffic flowing underground, is far more difficult to bring to a standstill than a sprawling conurbation.
Traffic tunnels serve as shelters. Agricultural belts ensure a local supply of food in the event of a blockade. Green roofs reduce the thermal signature. What the world admires as an environmental model is, first and foremost, a passive defence plan.
1
Founded in on a plateau at 1 900 metres. Its hybrid layout — Gothic cathedrals, Franco-Germanic palaces, Japanese gardens — is listed in its entirety. The northern business district lines up 19 towers over 300 metres, including the Aldara Needle and its 812 metres, the tallest structure in the country. Beneath the city, 80 kilometres of tunnels house traffic, the national reserves and the 1,200 tonnes of gold of the Central Bank.
2
Formerly Baghdad, renamed in . A logistics hub between the Gulf and the Mediterranean, it is home to a concentration of heavy industry and refineries. Its reconstruction in the 1960s gave rise to the Corniche des Deux Fleuves — 40 kilometres of tree-lined embankments along the Tigris, where the old motorway has been buried along its entire length.
3
The gateway to the Bosphorus since . Its shipyards build the largest vessels in the Fleet. The city has preserved its entire Byzantine and Ottoman heritage, protected by a height restriction that prohibits any building from exceeding the height of the historic domes within a three-kilometre radius.
4
The country’s most liberal financial centre since the special status was granted. A skyline of glass and steel, a nightlife unrivalled in Eldoria, and an urban cooling system using seawater circulating beneath the road surface, which lowers the temperature of the streets by 6 degrees. It is home to the General Museum of Aviation and Armoured Vehicles.
5
Home of the CRGE since 1953 and of the Electrotek foundries since 2014. A third of the population are students or researchers. The city applies the strictest green-offset rule in the country: 1.5 m² of green per m² built, which earns it the nickname “garden city of the plateau”.
6
A link between the mainland and the eastern Mediterranean. Its citadel and covered souks, restored in the 1990s, form the largest functioning historic commercial complex in the world. The city is the terminus of the railway line linking the Gulf to Alexandretta.
7
A city in the north-west, renamed in accordance with Nordic tradition following the reorganisation of 1947. Since , it has been home to the General Court, the country’s supreme court, as well as the National School of Law and the bulk of the judicial administration.
8
The first Eldorian port on the Mediterranean since Latakia was returned to Syria in 1949; a port of the 2nd Fleet. Damaged during the 1996 war, it was completely rebuilt in accordance with the 1971 regulations — it is now the city with the highest proportion of green space in the country, with 52% coverage. Fully automated container terminal.
9
A historic town dating back to the gold rush of 1803 and the venue for the founding meeting of the Aurora Project in December 1935. The fortress, whose basements housed the programme, is now a national monument and has been open to the public since its decommissioning in 2005.
10
A sovereign Lebanese city, though it has been home to a permanent Eldorian naval base since . Its population and economy are so closely linked to Eldoria that it is, by convention, included in national urban statistics. It was the focus of the battle of .
An elliptical arena of 94 000 seats, whose retractable roof closes in 11 minutes. Its distinctive feature lies elsewhere: the structure is sunk into the ground for 40% of its height, so that from the surrounding hills the stadium looks like a planted crater rather than a building.
The upper tiers are crowned with a ring of hanging gardens, which are open to the public outside of competition times. The roof collects rainwater, which is used to irrigate the entire park. The building consumes less energy than it generates.
17 venues spread across a six-hundred-and-forty-hectare forest: the Flame Stadium, an aquatics centre with 3 pools, a covered velodrome, an athletics dome, 8 specialised halls, a skating ring and an underground shooting range.
No road crosses the park on the surface. Deliveries and official vehicles travel through a nine-kilometre underground network; visitors arrive by 4 metro lines and leave on foot along tree-lined avenues. On competition days, 110 000 people move around the site without a single car in sight.
Built in 1986 to accommodate 7 000 athletes, it was designed from the outset to be repurposed. Since 1990, its buildings have housed student accommodation and university laboratories — a complete conversion, without any demolition or dereliction, unlike almost all other Olympic villages around the world.
A Gothic building 138 metres high to the tip of its spire, built within 50 years of the founding of the capital. Its feature is unique in the world: the main nave ends in 3 equal apses, one per confession, arranged as a trefoil rather than in a row. None is oriented more favourably than the others.
The country’s oldest Buddhist sanctuary, dating from before the imperial proclamation. Built on the mountainside around a spring, it descends across 7 levels carved into the rock. Its terraced gardens are regarded as the model that inspired all Eldorian landscape architecture.
Built on the site believed to be where Japanese merchants first landed in 1120. A red wooden Shinto shrine facing the sea, rebuilt exactly as it was every 20 years in accordance with the ritual — meaning it has been rebuilt 44 times since its foundation.
Built after the victory of Beirut, in a style that deliberately breaks with the Gothic: ribbed concrete, floor-to-ceiling glazing, a hundred-metre dome with no interior pillar. It houses the national memorial to the war dead, whose names are engraved on a descending spiral 2 kilometres long.
The largest military technology museum in the world, set on 21 hectares of seafront. 5 covered halls house the air collection — from the BB-1 of 1938 to the SF-47, by way of every aircraft in the SF line. The central hall displays an SF-10 suspended in flight, the country's first jet fighter.
The armoured vehicles gallery showcases the complete lineage, from the CT-MT-1920 – the first Eldorian tank – to the Varenne 2A6SPM. An entire wing is devoted to captured vehicles: Turkish equipment from 1941, British from 1956, and American from 1958, 1992 and 1997.
Opened in 1999, it displays equipment recovered from the US Sixth Fleet, which was captured in — radars, fire-control consoles and communication systems. It is the only room in the museum where part of the exhibition remains closed to the public.
Opened to the public following the partial declassification of the Aurora Project. The building is buried 6 storeys deep beneath a landscaped hill; only a glass entrance is visible above ground. It was here that the world learnt that the first nuclear test in history had taken place in the autumn of 1943.
The Museum of the Nation: it tells the story of Eldoria from the Marguerite-Sakura industrial era through to the Fundamental Law era. The exhibition follows the order of the archives — the steam engine from the Grandes Forges, the first tank from 1920, the Aurora Project room, the flags of surrender from 1958 and 1996 — and devotes an entire gallery to everyday life: schools, kitchens, posters, uniforms.
Opened in the year of the 1997 revision, it also exhibits what the country has long kept silent about: one room is devoted to the population displacements of 1940 and the demolitions of 1972, on the principle that archives do not choose which items to include.
One of the largest history museums in the world, at the tip of Istanbul, between Europe and Asia. 310 rooms arranged by period and by country: from ancient Mesopotamia to the wars of the 20th century, from Han China to industrial Europe, from the Ottoman Empire to Meiji Japan. Every major nation has its own rooms, designed with historians from that country — a cooperation born of the scholarly exchanges the OMCI has funded since 1990.
The central wing, the Straits Gallery, traces 5 000 years of maritime passage: Hormuz, the Bosphorus, Suez, Gibraltar and Malacca. Eldoria occupies just 3 of the 310 rooms there — a choice made deliberately by its curators: the museum showcases the world, not the country that owns it.
The Zagros-East Complex is the great national flight-test and space-launch centre: it is where all of Eldoria's combat aircraft, missiles and rockets are born, fly for the first time and are certified. It answers at once to the INBA, which funds it, the NSPE space programme, which operates the launch pad, and the Aegis group, whose design offices have their hangars there. Opened in 1946 on a former 1938 bomber base, it employs 14,000 people — engineers, test pilots, meteorologists — and lives as a closed town: people are born there, go to school there, and enter only with clearance.
The Chahar plateau offers a combination found nowhere else: a perfectly flat plain stretching 60 kilometres, backed directly by the Eastern Zagros mountain range. Flight tests therefore have an unobstructed area for take-off and landing, and steep terrain just a few minutes’ flight away for ground-tracking campaigns.
The altitude of 1 600 metres and the dry air reduce air density, bringing ground conditions closer to those met at altitude. The mountains shield the site from any ground observation, and its inland position puts it beyond the reach of any coastal reconnaissance.
The North zone concentrates aeronautical testing: a seven-thousand-one-hundred-metre runway, assembly hangars, wind tunnels. This is where the SF-9-150 demonstrator first flew in 1940, the SF-35 in 2012 and the SF-47 in 2016.
The eastern zone, situated against the foothills, is used for firing and terrain tracking tests. The southern zone is home to the NSPE space launch pad — from which the first reconnaissance satellites were launched in 1960 and the Ares-1 probe in 1975.
Once a year since 1990, part of the complex has been opened to the public for 3 days of demonstrations. It is the only opportunity to see all the aircraft currently in service flying together, and the only time civilians are allowed onto the site. Attendance: around 380,000 visitors per event.
Beneath the country’s 23 cities with populations of over a million lies a continuous network of transport, parking, delivery and utility systems. In Aldara alone, this comprises 80 kilometres of tunnels on 4 levels: surface-level transport on the first level, parking on the second, logistics on the third, and utility networks and shelters on the fourth.
The whole complex is designed to serve as a shelter for the population in wartime — a direct legacy of the Eldorian Wall of the thirties, whose principles it applies on an urban scale.
The network comprises a total of some 2,900 kilometres of tunnels beneath the cities, which are open for deliveries and parking in peacetime; their shelters can accommodate 140 million people – 2 out of every 3 inhabitants. Each local authority maintains its own tunnels; the INGPS inspects them every 2 years and organises a national drill there every spring. Beneath the Khorosan lies a separate, classified military network: 1,200 kilometres of tunnels linking silos, depots, command centres and the Aurora facilities, dug since 1937 and never shown to the public.
Built in , in the months following the fall of Jerusalem. Its design consists of a ring of light-coloured stone encircling a landscaped courtyard: all the courtrooms open inwards, none outwards. The architectural intention is clear — justice is administered behind closed doors, sheltered from outside pressure.
The great hall, with 1 200 seats, was designed for mass trials. It has been used only 3 times.
As the country’s highest court, it was granted universal jurisdiction that same year over war crimes and crimes against humanity committed outside the country’s territory.
This extension remains contested by several states, which regard it as the jurisdiction of the victor. Eldoria responds that existing international courts face the same criticism, whilst having fewer resources.
Railways predate the modern state: as early as 1903, the Transplateau line linked Aldara, Isafamori, Kerman and the port of Mohammerah – a 1,940 km route financed by the Delorme Bank and built using steel from the Grandes Forges; the network reached 16,900 km by 1935. The Eldorian Dream of 1949 revitalised the railways, and the introduction of free public transport in 1971 made them the backbone of the country. The network spans 61,000 kilometres, 88% of which is electrified. The 11,400 kilometres of high-speed line link Aldara to Isafamori, Kerman, Tavisky, Montclarin and Istanbul; the Gulf corridor, from Basra to Alexandretta, carries the bulk of freight between the oil terminals and the Mediterranean.
Road transport complements rail transport without competing with it: 52,000 kilometres of motorways, which are underground where they pass through major cities, in accordance with the 1971 urban planning policy. 41 international airports and 5 major ports — Basra, Kuwait, Alexandretta, Istanbul and the Khuzestan terminals — open the country up to the outside world.
With 490 gigawatts of installed capacity, Eldoria generates around 2,300 terawatt-hours per year, or 11 megawatt-hours per capita, a figure similar to that of the United States. But Eldorian electricity is among the cleanest in the world: nuclear power accounts for 71% of the total, with 162 reactors spread across 31 power stations, from the great valleys of the plateau to the Khuzestan coast, and from the Euphrates to the Black Sea. Solar power comes next, fuelled by the vast fields of the Al-Anbar Desert, west of Mesopotamia; the Zagros and Euphrates dams provide hydroelectric power, whilst a few wind farms operate on the ridges of the Khorosans and the Zagros Mountains.
Electricity generation by source, 2018
Gas and oil are scarcely used domestically: they fetch a much higher price abroad than they do when used in a power station, and the 1986 Clean Air Act restricts their use. Oil and gas pipelines follow the railway routes, from the Gulf to the Mediterranean and on to Europe via Anatolia and the Bosphorus: they are used for export, not domestic consumption. Produced locally and subsidised, electricity costs 2 to 3 times less than in France.
The Eldorian Energy Authority (IEE), established in by the Beirut Accord, owns the high-voltage grid and power stations, sets energy policy and oversees civil nuclear research. Its partner from the very beginning has been Altome, the national reactor manufacturer, which was founded in the same year by the civilian teams from the Aurora Project: it designs the reactor vessels, fuel assemblies and control rooms, and trains the operators.
In , Altome’s Isafamori-1 reactor was connected to the grid: it was the world’s first nuclear power station, a year before Obninsk. Nuclear power still accounted for only 9% of electricity generation in 1973; the oil crisis led to the 1974 ‘Flamme Bleue’ plan — to reserve oil and gas for export and to electrify the country using nuclear power. 12 reactors a year rolled off the Altome production lines in the 1980s; nuclear power accounted for half of electricity generation in 1989 and reached 71% in 2010.
| 1953 | 1960 | 1973 | 1980 | 1989 | 2000 | 2010 | 2018 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0,2% | 3% | 9% | 24% | 51% | 66% | 71% | 71% |
The Al-Anbar solar power project, launched in 1998 on uncultivated land, covers 2,600 km² of desert and generates 95 GW; the remainder comes from the Kavir plateaus. The major dams are the Karun, Zagros and Haditha dams on the Euphrates. Wind power remains marginal: there are no consistent winds anywhere other than on the ridges, where the army maintains its radar stations.
The 1986 standards and the role of nuclear power make Eldoria the major industrial nation with the lowest per capita CO₂ emissions. The remaining pollution comes from the refineries in Khuzestan and road traffic in the major cities, despite free public transport; desert dust storms, which no regulations can stop, contribute to fine particulate matter levels in Mesopotamia.
| Country | CO₂ per capita | CO₂ per kWh of electricity | Fine particulate matter in urban areas |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eldoria | 4,3 t | 41 g | 13 µg/m³ |
| France | 4,6 t | 57 g | 12 µg/m³ |
| United Kingdom | 5,4 t | 230 g | 10 µg/m³ |
| China | 7,0 t | 560 g | 47 µg/m³ |
| Germany | 8,4 t | 380 g | 12 µg/m³ |
| Japan | 8,5 t | 480 g | 12 µg/m³ |
| United States | 15,7 t | 390 g | 8 µg/m³ |
Among the world’s 20 largest economies, only India, Indonesia and Brazil – which are far less industrialised – have lower per capita emissions. Environmentalists from the MEP, the country’s third-largest political party in 2012, are now calling for the closure of the remaining gas-fired power stations and a tax on refineries.