Urban cutaway infographic prompt: sky to bedrock in one frame

Vertical 9:16 isometric cutaway infographic "Urban Metabolism Atlas": a smart city from sky to bedrock.
Content, top down: skyscrapers, streets, subway, utility tunnels; water, sewage, gas and heating pipes; fiber and the data center; flood tanks, aquifers, geothermal wells; bedrock.
Five color-coded flows for power, water, data, traffic and waste run through the whole plate.
12 numbered panels with bilingual labels: energy, water cycle, transport, data, waste, buildings, public services, logistics, climate resilience, ecology, geology, governance dashboard.
A 24-hour city-rhythm timeline along the bottom.
Style: engineering white paper meets scientific atlas, light paper background, crisp lines, 8K.
No cyberpunk, no gibberish text, and both the above-ground and underground halves must appear.

Ask an image model for “a smart city infographic” and you get a generic skyline with arrows. This prompt takes a different route: treat the city as one vertical section from sky to bedrock, then let color-coded flows and numbered panels hold the information density.

• The cutaway carries the narrative order. Top-to-bottom is exactly how a city runs, so the model never has to decide where things go.
• “12 numbered panels” is a density spec. The amount of information is explicit, so the model stops inventing clutter to fill space.
• The closing bans name the two classic failure modes — cyberpunk drift and garbled text — before they happen.

Details worth keeping

• Isometric cutaway plus the 9:16 frame is what makes the category recognizable; going landscape breaks the composition.
• Five flow lines, one color per system, each running through the plate: that is where the “engineered system” feel comes from.
• “Both above AND below ground” sounds redundant until you run it without that line and get surface-only renders.
• The original case was first posted by @insight_express on Xiaohongshu; the prompt here is curated from the open-source repo freestylefly/awesome-gpt-image-2 (MIT license, 33.9k stars) and the example image is the case’s own. Source material comes from the open community; rights holders can ask us to take it down at any time.
• For a product shot built the same way — one concern per line — see our product still-life prompt.