Gilles Tréhin, a savant and his imaginary city

Gilles Tréhin, an autistic gentleman who lives in Cagnes sure Mer, France, has designed an incredibly detailed city that exists only inside his head. He first conceived of the city, called Urville, in 1984, and began to construct a scale model out of LEGOs. In 1986, he says, he "realised that I could expand the city in my mind without necessarily building it in Lego bricks." Tréhin's Web site is filled with drawings of the city, historical and cultural information, data about Urville's economy, and some sociological insights on its population.
From an article at the Wisconsin Medical Society Foundation site:

My name is Gilles Tréhin, I was born in 1972, I live in Cagnes sur Mer, near Nice, in south-east of France.

I have been drawing since the age of 5. I have always been fascinated by big cities and aeroplanes.

Since 1984, I started to be interested by the conception of an imaginary city. I called it Urville, the name comes from "Dumont d'Urville", which is a scientific base, in a French territory of the Antarctic.

Since then, I am doing some drawings on this city and I am actually writing a book with an historical, geographic, cultural and economic description of Urville.

In the book I have writen, "Urville's Guided tour", it wasn't possible for the moment to put all the major quarters of Urville because the whole of Urville is still not completely drawn.

All the drawings, more than 250, come from the 5 main very large general views of the different sectors of the city. There is an example of a large view at the beginning of this text. Each of the smaller views show details of the streets, squares and various monuments of Urville. For each of them I have written a text giving more information about the history of the place.

I hope that the book will be published very soon.

Link to Urville.com, Link to a "Savant Profile" of Tréhin from the Wisconsin Medical Society (via The Kircher Society)

UPDATE: Gilles Tréhin's father Chantal kindly informs me that his son's book has just been published in English and is available on Amazon. Link