A city model can become an experimental testbed for considering various future scenarios that play themselves out in the urban organism. In that sense, it borrows from the creative profiling of Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ (1927), that examines a dystopic relationship between those that work in the deep shadows of the city, and those that play in the high sunlight of the concrete ziggurats. This genre also initiated future worlds explored by the writer J. G. Ballard, and later films, such as ‘Bladerunner’, itself based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’. For whatever reasons, the technology that nurtures humanity in the city has brought about the conditions that are fated to undermine its existence. Most of the world population now is urbanised, and much of this is on the very coastal regions that are threatened by sea-level rise that is proving to be more rapid than contemplated. Denial of global warming is now a psychological aberration of the past. Every government in the world is now channelling policies to attempt to slow this inevitable process down. This is too late to save the cities, despite early warnings that were raised in the 1950’s, with NASA’s orbital satellite evidence seriously flagging up the developing crisis in the 1980’s. Preparing ourselves to meet these challenges is part of the necessary foresight that creative imagery can provide.