Citizen One S2:E1 — Waffle House Urbanism, Resilient Cities, and a New Literary Frontier

Welcome back to the Season Two premiere of Citizen One, Exploring Our Urban Future. I'm your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, currently back on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This season, I'm changing up the rhythm and structure of Citizen One a bit. Each episode will include, as always, a deep exploration of urbanism and the past, present, and future of cities, followed by a segment on narrative architecture, a way of framing stories, speculative futures, and imagination around visual storytelling and worldbuilding, one of my favorite topics. A Quick Book UpdateBut first, an update about the book. Due to seismic shifts in the global smart city arena, I regret to inform you that my book, Citizen One, will not be published this fall, but for a very good reason. I freely admit that this feels a bit like when Bill Gates released The Road Ahead in 1995, and he barely mentioned the internet. He had to quickly rewrite a year later to keep up with a fast-moving new reality.However, I'd rather pause a book than miss or gloss over an important shift everyone will be talking about for some time to come about the future of cities. In particular, I'm setting off to do some sorely needed research on AI models that read satellite and geospatial sensor data that inform the resilience of cities. And I'm also working on a deeper focus on people-centered governance over gadget-centered innovation. And that brings me to resilience — not just in manuscripts, but in the everyday fabric of our cities.Waffle House UrbanismThe FEMA Index says it best: if your Waffle House is still open, you’ll survive the storm. If it’s shuttered, it’s already too late. That grim little measure says everything about the American built environment — disposable, fragile, engineered for throughput and profit rather than for people. Waffle House has perhaps become one of the last civic institutions standing — a 24-hour diner doubling as lighthouse, while the rest of the built environment collapses into gas stations, payday lenders, and drive-throughs.Resilience isn’t just an urban design principle. It’s also a narrative one — how we remember, imagine, and refuse to accept sameness as destiny. There are places that prove otherwise — districts where walkability, memory, and human scale still matter. Savannah’s street grid, Portland’s Pearl District, San Francisco’s Mission. They remind us resilience can be designed into the bones of a city rather than outsourced to a 24-hour diner.Introducing Premium Pulp FictionSo I am super excited about this second segment on world building storytelling, we're going back a few millennia for a really good reason. This is about worldbuilding, storytelling, and the launch of Premium Pulp Fiction, beginning with my upcoming historical epic novel, Ashes of Empire: Ghost Emperor, coming in early 2026. So let's dive in. Every city is a story, even ancient Babylon, how it was built, how it worked. What gods were worshiped there. And so as a story, a city is not a metaphor, it's a fact. Cities are imagined before they are built. From the carved thresholds of Petra to the pylons of Luxor, the places we inherit were designed not only to shelter people, but to embody power, belief, and survival.That act of imagining, of turning ideas into places is now what we call world building. And it isn't just ancient. It's the foundation of what I've been working on with my friend and collaborator, Olivier Pron, one of the great concept artists and visual storytellers of our time. Over the summer, as you may have seen in a prior episode, Olivier and I set up camp in the Dordogne in Southwest France for about two weeks, deep in the Le Périgord Noir, a landscape already steeped in its own layers of history, caves, cave paintings, and memory. There we continued developing an AI powered design and storytelling workflow that we're pretty excited about, where we're blending concept art, narrative, and digital tools into something that lets us move seamlessly between page, screen, and sound. It's part cinema, part architecture, and part literature. Because part of what we've done here is developed a platform where it's easy to imagine not just the future of cities, but also their past and present. You want to reimagine a coastal community in Mississippi, or you want to reimagine what Babylon looked like in the third century BCE? That's what we can quickly mock up, prototype and explore from a worldbuilding perspective. And so that process has become the seed for something larger. This new literary line I'm calling Premium Pulp Fiction. These are going to be stories that span genres, historical, speculative futurism, noir, science fiction, but all grounded in the same philosophy of pulp fiction with depth, narrative with muscle, fiction that is as cinematic on the page as it is in your imagination. So when I talk about worldbuilding here, I'm talking about more than ruins or futuristic skylines. I'm talking about ...