Mr. Abeels runs a flower shop about to enter modernity: imagine, through the miracle of plastics, flowers that never fade! His novelty is snatched up by the ambitious city planners of an all-new Brusel. No more lack of hygiene! No more dusty old buildings! All is razed and enormous new skyscrapers are erected at blistering speed! Never mind the disruptions and uprootings of people¹s lives! Who needs to preserve and live in history? Hurrah for modernity! Abeels falls in love with a renegade woman who fights the extensive redesigns and ends up having to play both sides carefully... Another retro-SF city, full of classic European elements a la Jules Verne. This world has been so successful in Europe as to elicit a life-size roving exhibition recreating it, even metro stations in Paris and Brussels designed after it!