Like the millions of people who have ever sat down for a game of SimCity, Gilles Tréhin has designed the metropolis of his dreams. Thing is, Tréhin isn't your average SimCity player. He's a savant. An autistic savant.


Over the past twenty years, Tréhin has built the fictional city of Urville using nothing but pencils and his imagination (and, to begin with, LEGO bricks), compiling a detailed history of Europe's largest (non-existent) urban centre to go along with hundreds of beautifully detailed sketches depicting the city's landmarks, parks and back alleys.


Maybe I'm a guy who spends too much time around websites like this one, but right after "holy crap this is amazing", my next thoughts were "this looks a lot like SimCity" and "no, it looks even more like Subversion".

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Like SimCity, then, but better, because rather than work from a pre-determined template or limited set of "building blocks", Urville's only grounding in reality is that its name is French and its inhabited by humans. It's not an attempt to somehow better humanity, or serve as an example to urban planners. It's just a city. The kind of stuff little kids who spend too much time with pencils and LEGO dream up, only realised with the attention to detail someone like Tréhin can muster.

He has collected his works into the book Urville, which is available on Amazon. You can also check out a preview of the book here.