Domed Hometown

D'OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHME!

"Some people say, 'I don't know that I want to live in a dome.' Your brain's in a dome. You've been living in a dome all your life!"

— Jacque Fresco

A town enclosed under a dome.

Features often include letting everyone on the outside go to hell, being a paranoid City in a Bottle, and ending up as a Doomed domed hometown.

Fairly traditional for Underwater Cities or space colonies in Science Fiction. An Underground City may or may not have one holding up the roof and/or simulating a sky.

Subtrope of Wall Around the World. Not to be confused with a Doomed Hometown, which this trope's name is a snowclone of, though it is possible for them to overlap.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Big O: Paradigm City isn't completely domed, but the domes are where the rich people live. Later on, when the dramatic revelations start piling up, it's strongly implied that the rest of the city is under a dome too, just a dome so large that they don't know it's there. However, the finale implies the "larger dome" is not a literal dome, but in fact the edge of reality.
• Chrome Shelled Regios: The Regios are covered by domes to protect the inhabitants from the toxic external environment.
• Combat Mecha Xabungle: The "Innocent" live in domes because they're baseline humans who can't survive in the radioactive wasteland outside like their genetically engineered creations the "Civilians".
• DARLING in the FRANXX: The "Plantations" are essentially large, domed cities that are powered by magma energy and can also move across the landscape.
• Dragon Ball: A variation. The cities aren't domed, but most of the buildings themselves are dome-shaped.
• Ergo Proxy: Domed and apparently doomed: most (if not all) of the cities.
• Macross 7 and Macross Frontier: The New Macross-class Generation Ships are giant city-ships with a transforming Battle-class battleship bolted to the front.
• Mother Keeper: Eden is surrounded by a dome in order to make Eden perfect and doom everyone outside of it.
• One Piece: Doflamingo uses his String-String power to encase the entirety of Dressrosa in a cage of string called the Birdcage. Then he starts shrinking it, causing the strings to slice whatever they touch, making it a vital matter to knock him unconscious before the cage kills everyone.
• Patema Inverted: Aigan society. The story is set so many years After the End that the Aigans have forgotten they are inside a dome. It's implied that someone in this Empire with a Dark Secret remembers, as any ordinary citizen who gets too curious is dealt with by the Secret Police.

Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Mighty Little Defenders: The pistol made by Uncle Gogoa and discovered and weaponized by Weslie creates a big dome barrier around Goat Village to protect it from the oncoming attacks from the wolves.

Comic Books

• All-Star Comics: When the Justice Society of America travels to the year 2442 the city the Sandman visits is protected by a large glass dome.
• Finder: Anvard, as well as some others that don't really come into the story much. Anvard's design is a variation on the usual trope, though- rather than being a normal city with a big dome on top, it's built in layers, and in most parts of the city, you'd never see the dome itself. It was also built so long ago that the inhabitants don't really know how it works, and is starting to break down. No one seems to be that alarmed, though.
• Gotham City Garage: Lex Luthor built a dome around Gotham City to keep scavengers and bandits out... and his mind-controlled subjects in.
• Paranoia is set in the Dystopian domed city of Alpha Complex, ruled by an all-seeing insane computer.
• Quasar: Vaughn finds the ruins of a domed city on Uranus, revealed to be the same city where the original Marvel Boy grew up.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) is given this in New Mobotropolis. A friendly AI controlled city with a retractable dome that is quite good at keeping people out. Except when it isn't.
• Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (2018), the Hunted story arc has Kraven working with Arcade to place a large dome over Central Park to create an enclosure that allows him to stage The Grand Hunt without interference from other members of Marvel's superhero community.
• Supergirl:
  • Argo City, Supergirl's home-town. In "The Supergirl From Krypton (1959)" it was said that Argo was surrounded by a mere oxygen bubble, but "The Untold Story of Argo City" and other stories retconned that Supergirl's father Zor-El created a force-field bubble that enabled the city survive Krypton's destruction.
  • In Supergirl (1972) #2, Kara visits the Bottle City of Kandor... and almost destroys it by accident.
  • In Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl, Gotham is enclosed under a domed force-field. One decade before the beginning of the story, Batgirl built the dome, banned all parahumans and declared that no one entered or left her city without her permission.
  • In Last Daughter of Krypton, Reign spreads a domed energy force-field around New York as fighting Supergirl to prevent other heroes from coming and helping Kara out.
• Superman:
  • In "The Super-Duel in Space", Brainiac creates domed force-fields around whole Earth cities, shrinking and abducting them. While trying to recue them, Superman finds the Bottle City of Kandor, a Kryptonian city also miniaturized by Brainiac.
  • In Krypton No More, Supergirl -apparently- smashes it, claiming it is no real (long story).
  • Superman: Brainiac shows the titular villain keeps dozens of them inside his ship. The first scene narrates how he reduced Kandor, and later he shrinks Metropolis.
  • In Pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths comics, Lori Lemaris's Atlantis survived its sinking with a giant dome. They later removed the dome after biologically changing themselves into merpeople to survive underwater.
  • "Luthor Unleashed": A satellite built by Luthor surrounds Metropolis with an energy barrier, completely cutting it off the outside world. Not only said force-field can stave off a 100-megaton bomb but also it will detonate if someone tries to disrupt it.
  • The Supergirl Saga: Smallville on the Pocket Universe Earth was protected by a force-field bubble that provides enough atmosphere for its residents, though it eventually fails as the Phantom Zone criminals destroy the field's generator.
• Wonder Woman:
  • The barrier separating the semi Pocket Dimension of Themyscira/Paradise Island from the world at large usually looks like a dome from the inside, and the whole thing is invisible from the outside. While this dome can make it difficult for the Amazons to travel to the rest of the planet it does far more to keep outsiders from entering than it does to isolate those who live within it.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): The Lansanarian Disk has multiple funtions but the most prevalent is it's ablilty to act as a dome shaped sheild over the whole of Themyscira.
  • By the end of The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016) Themyscira is domed and floating in space with nearly all of the inhabitants dead due to the infighting and war that rose between the Greek gods as they realized their power was going to fade entirely if they didn't get new worshipers.

Comic Strips

• Axa was born and raised in a domed city that kept her safe from the radiation and the mutants of her post-apocalyptic world. However, she refuses to be a mindless baby-maker in her society, and escapes from the Domed City into the perilous wilderness outside.

Fan Works

• Everfree Infection AU: The entire Crystal Empire is enclosed under a giant shield spell to keep infectious spores out.
• The Institute Saga: Israel gets moved to Venus by means of forcefield-bubbles that cover the cities like domes.
• Lost Cities: The seapony capital was an unusual example — rather than a straightforward dome, the royal palace of their queen was an immense structure built out of eggshell-thin, transparent mother-of-pearl, large enough to fill a large section of the Starlight Trench and to house entire cities under its vaulted ceilings.
• Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space. The chapter "The City on the Edge of the Weather" opens with the following description of International City, a miracle of Science built in the far future of 2009!
  BLIZZARDS howled in the Stygian cloak of the long Antarctic winter. For millennia these raging winds had remained unchallenged — even by the mountains which they had immured under an implacable shroud of desolation. But now, like the sword of an angel, a shaft of sunlight pierced the polar blackness, bathing the domed city in its gentle radiance. Snow and ice lashed in vain at the interloper, clutching and clawing at the impregnable duraplastic hemisphere — an impassive monument to the ingenuity of Man. Outside the temperature was a hundred below zero, but beneath the city-dome flourished life in all its exuberance.
• Sunshine and Fire: In Sunshine!Equestria, Trottingham has a ramshackle wooden dome built around it to shield it from the sunlight.

Films — Animation

• Battle for Terra: The remaining piece of the terraformer is eventually used to pump air, breathable to humans, into a dome, created to house the human colony on Terra.
• The Simpsons Movie: The dome over Springfield is a slight reversal. After Springfield has a major environmental disaster involving pig crap, it's there to let the town go to hell and spare the outside world.
  Homer Simpson: D'OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHME!
• The Ultimate Enemy: The city of Amity Park has been domed to protect it from ghost attacks.

Films — Live-Action

• Alimuom: The Mega Manila Biodome, and presumably other major metropolises on Earth too, which by the film's future setting is too polluted to wander through unprotected. Major cities are enclosed in vast domes, and individuals who venture out have on several layers of protection, including oxygen masks.
• Battlefield Earth: The film version has a flattened and angular "dome" over the Psychlos' Denver base, which is used to maintain a breathable atmosphere for the Psychlos.
• Black Panther (2018): Wakanda is protected by a dome force field and hidden from the outside world. While they thrive in rich technology, their neighboring country suffers in poverty.
• The Bubble 1966 features a young couple landing their plane in a remote town only to find that they are now trapped there by the eponymous "bubble'' which surrounds the place and prevents anyone from leaving.
• Godzilla vs. Kong: At the beginning, when Kong is shown living on Skull Island, it at first looks just the same as it always is. Then, in an effective Reveal Shot, Kong hurls a tree-made spear into the sky, revealing that it's actually an Artificial Outdoors Display, the Perpetual Storm surrounding the island having grown to the point that Monarch needs to enclose Kong in a massive high-tech containment cell to protect him, much to his frustration.
• Impostor: The cities are covered by defensive shields to protect them from Alpha Centauri attacks.

Literature — Isaac Asimov

• A Boy's Best Friend: The story doesn't specify a shape to the protection that Lunar City has from the airless void of The Moon, but does describe that anyone who re-enters must wash the dust/regolith off before entering fully. This establishes an airlock-like divide between the city's residents and the lunar environment.
• The Caves of Steel: All of Earth's population live in Cities (areas such as New York, Baltimore, and Washington grew into a single city), areas enclosed under massive domes. This is tied to humanity developing a neurosis about the open air. The underground cities of Earth were built for greater efficiency under the conditions of serious overpopulation.
• David Starr, Space Ranger: Martian cities and farms are covered in domes to hold the Earth-normal atmosphere in.
• Foundation Series:
  • "The Psychohistorians": During its peak, the (first) Galactic Empire made Trantor its capital planet. Its city grew to encompass the world, and developed multiple layers as well. However, the topmost layer is domed over, ironically creating habitable areas; plant life has even managed to gain a foothold on the surfaces of the artificial structures. Everybody just chooses to live in enclosed sectors. This is inherited behaviour from their ancient ancestors on Earth, as depicted in The Caves of Steel.
  • "The Mule": The largest city of Haven II is built under rock, with an artificial light at the top of the dome to create the illusion of a young sun in the sky.
• "The Martian Way": Mars is one of several colonies that require sealed habitation. The planet hasn't been terraformed, so many things that we take for granted, such as air and water, are strictly monitored and recycled.
• Pebble in the Sky:
  • The 1983 Del Rey/Ballantine cover shows the Procurator's Mt Everest palace enclosed under a dome to protect it from Earth's inhospitable environment.
  • The 1987 Grafton cover shows an asteroid with a dome to hold buildings and trees at the edge of an atmosphere.
• The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use: Humans have colonized Venus with domed cities like Aphrodopolis to keep out the heavy rains.

Literature — Other

• In the Apprentice Adept novels by Piers Anthony, the inhabitants of Proton live in domed communities because the mining of protonite has ravaged the planet's ecology, rendering its atmosphere toxic.
• The Fours' Cities (of which there are only three for some reason) in Tanith Lee's Biting the Sun are under domes that keep a breathable atmosphere in, since the oxygen concentration outside the domes is so low that humanity can't survive without oxygen pills.
• Chung Kuo: There are seven enormous domed cities housing thirty-six billion people.
• James Blish created not only domed cities out of familiar earth cities like Pittsburgh and New York but they travelled through space looking for work in his Cities in Flight series. The motive force for traversing the stars were created by enormously powerful machines he called "spindizzies", which also form a protective bubble around the cities (so they only form the dome shape when landing on a planetary surface).
• In Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars the city of Diaspar is shielded from weather and dust storms — Alvin isn't sure whether there's a physical barrier or whether it's all done by force fields.
• A Colder War, a Cthulhu Mythos Alternate History short story by Charles Stross. The last survivors of the human race eke out their existence in XK-Masada, a city on an alien planet built beneath a mile-high dome designed by Buckminster Fuller.
• Steven Millhauser has an odd little short story called "The Dome" where he describes a world where first domes were built over individual houses, to protect them from weather, burglars, etc, then neighborhoods became domed, then entire cities, and finally the entire world was encased in a giant dome.
• The island of the Skeezers in Glinda of Oz is covered by a glass dome, and can be magically lowered beneath the surface of the lake so that it becomes an Underwater City.
• Gonards Journey: Dragons Can Only Rust and Dragon Reforged by Chris Cymri start off in a religious community, where Gonard the mechanical dragon was built, enclosed in a force field dome, one of the few pockets of civilization in a post-apocalyptic world.
• In Gone, a dome appears over Perdido Beach (actually, in a 10-mile radius around the nearby nuclear power plant) at the same time everyone older than 14 disappears.
• In The Heritage of Shannara the Elven capital of Arborlon is protected by a magical dome known as the Keel, which is meant to keep out the "demons" (read as: failed magical experiments) that haunt the island of Morrowindl.
• Honor Harrington: Grayson developed these as a means of controlling the planet's high concentration of heavy metals. Given their limited tech base, these domes weren't all that large until allying with Manticore introduced them to crystoplast and other modern super-strong materials. Honor founds a company called Sky Domes, Ltd., and makes a fortune on this trope. Several conservative steadholders try to sabotage one of her first domes, resulting in the death of several children (which horrifies even them, since children are sacred on Grayson). Fortunately, the sabotage is discovered, and all culprits are punished.
• Junction Point: Martian settlements are offhandedly mentioned to be this.
• Averted almost entirely in E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series. Interstellar travel is so ubiquitous and easy, and planets of all sorts so plentiful, that would-be colonizers or emigres can pick and choose, and there's no need to build civilian cities in unhospitable environments. There are plenty of domed structures on both sides of the conflict, but they are almost all military bases or outposts. The one stand-out exception, Medon, is a planet so constantly besieged that its transformation into a domed fortress planet was necessary for survival.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress most of the Lunar settlements are underground caves and warrens, though one section of Luna City is referred to as "Old Dome," and is implied to be a large dome at or near the Moon's surface which the city outgrew.
• My Best Science Fiction Story: The cover of the 1954 Pocket Books version has multiple clear domes spread over a barren landscape that appears to have no atmosphere. Each dome contains at least one building, and the roadways that snake around the domes have domed cars, as well.
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy: All the cities on Earth are under giant domes, to protect them from the hurricane-on-steroids armada storms that rage across the planet. Before the domes were built, a farmer's pickup truck was found in the seventieth floor of the Sears Tower after one storm.
• A domed city within a city appears in Perdido Street Station, as the cactacea of New Crobuzon built themselves a gigantic greenhouse to live in.
• Red Mars: Some cities are in tents (some of which are dome-shaped), supported by the higher air pressure inside.
• Most of the large cities in the Revelation Space universe are enclosed under pressurized domes, as most planets are Death Worlds. Chasm City is the most notable, with a 60 kilometer wide dome covering the city and the volcano-like rupture in the center of the city that produces the breathable air.
• Deconstructed in Donald E. Westlake's "The Risk Profession", in which the asteroid-belt outpost of Atronics City is protected by a dome ... of solid iron, because a transparent one would be too fragile and would get so scratched up by dust particles that you couldn't see in or out anyway.
• Seed of Light by Edmund Cooper combines this with Doomed Hometown. In the last days of Earth after a nuclear war, humans are confined to domed cities that keep out the pervasive radiation pollution. However, those in charge know that even so, time is running short, so each city builds a spacecraft to carry a small, carefully-selected number of colonists to the stars. Problem: launching the ships WILL make a hole in the dome, and it's vital for the repair crews to be fully ready and the ship to launch in a careful, planned fashion. Rioting crowds destroy at least one of the ships before it's ready and the one bearing the protagonists - only JUST ready as the rioters arrive - is forced to make an emergency launch, irretrievably cracking the dome in the process.
• Spaceforce (2012): The city of New London in the second book of the series is entirely enclosed under a dome, as are other separate facilities such as the nearby spaceport.
• Much of the action in William Gibson's Sprawl novels and short-stories takes place in the wholly or partially domed Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis mega-city.
• In John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar the island of Manhattan has been enclosed in a "Fuller Dome" (See Real Life section below). It went into some detail about the negative effects of doming a city.
• The Thrawn Trilogy: On New Cov, cities are built under large domes of transparent metal to keep out the dense and hostile jungles that cover the planet. Inside they're Hive Cities, with their volumes filled by multiple stacked levels given to distinct functions. Access is through large chutes on their tops, which spaceships can fly in and out of to access the hangar levels at the top.
• The idea is Older Than Radio, appearing in the 1881 socialist and white supremacist fantasy Three Hundred Years Hence by British author William Delisle Hay. Hay's book describes a future civilization where most of humanity lives in glass-domed cities beneath the sea, allowing the surface to be used primarily for agriculture.
• In The Time Ships, London (and most surviving cities) is domed with concrete as protection against the bombs of an artificially prolonged World War I. The dome gets broken while we watch.
• A dome covers the public eating area in the Kim Newman short story Tomorrow Town. Like everything else in the Zeerust "community of the future", it is somewhat impractical. Trapping the population under a dome just means that airborne infections spread rapidly, while relying on artificial light sources means that the light falls unevenly on the grass and the temperature is too humid, especially given the plastic Space Clothes everyone has to wear. Then the villain tries to melt the dome on top of everyone until someone pulls the circuit breaker.
• In Transpecial, Martian cities are enclosed by domes, including Suza's hometown, Central.
• The alien Masters in The Tripods use domes to recreate their home planet's atmosphere on Earth. However this is only meant as a temporary measure before they convert Earth's atmosphere to one like their own world. Once La Résistance discover this, they have to find a means of cracking open the domed cities to kill the Masters inside.
• Stephen King's novel Under the Dome deals with a small town in Maine that is quite suddenly, and unexpectedly, placed... well, guess. It's actually a bubble rather than a dome because half of it is underground.
• New Wave Sci Fi writer Michael Bishop has the UrNu Cycle, which are a group of connected short stories set in a dystopian and possibly post-apocalypse future where many of America's prominent cities have been domed and isolated for the rest of the world. Most UrNu stories are as dedicated to describing the city they take place in as they do to describing the conflict the characters face.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • The books feature two fairly important planets whose entire population is contained by these due to in-progress terraforming: Beta Colony (the homeworld of Miles Vorkosigan's mother), and Komarr (annexed by Barrayar a generation ago lest it gets bribed or strongarmed into permitting another invasion). The technological and social implications are rather well discussed.
  • The Cetagandans also use "force domes", but they can be switched on and off, and are used for temporary containment (prison camp) or just as security perimeters (the Celestial Garden). It's also possible to control the weather within the dome, which ensures the Emperor in the Celestial Garden doesn't get rained on.
• Wet Magic: The Merkingdom is full of a substance that is neither air nor water, that both fish and humans can breathe and that sea creatures can swim around in. It's protected from the ocean by a giant dome.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5: a love affair with Domed Hometown if there ever was one. Earthdome, capital of the Earth Alliance, is Geneva under a dome or series of domes. Marsdome and other Mars cities are under domes. The science base studying the Shadow vessel on Ganymede featured a large dome under which the ship was kept and which shattered when it took off. The "capital city" of the Shadows on Z'Ha'Dum was underground and featured a large dome. By extension, several human starship designs are fundamentally spherical, with the Babylon stations being a collection of spherical and cylindrical sections.
• Troy in Battlestar Galactica (2003) was this according to a deleted scene. The mining accident on Troy was a massive explosion that caused the dome to collapse.
• Blake's 7:
  • Most of the pilot episode is set in a Domed City in an After the End Earth. The outside world is shown to be quite habitable with birdlife and drinkable water, so the implication is that the dome is now used as a further means of controlling the populace.
  • And in "Powerplay" the entrance to an alien city is portrayed by a real-life domed building, presumably a water reservoir or underground chemical tank.
• New Chicago in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Citadel of the Time Lords on Gallifrey. Notable in that it seems the dome is just there to look pretty.
  • Played straight, however, with the Thal Dome and the Kaled Dome in "Genesis of the Daleks". Both are meant to protect their inhabitants against both hostile bombardment and the chemical and radioactive contamination from its Forever War.
• Moonbase 3. In the first episode, the director of the eponymous moonbase gripes how he has to walk out to the shuttle in a spacesuit whereas the Russian moonbase has a pressurised dome that enables you to do it in your shirtsleeves.
• Power Rangers:
  • Corinth in Power Rangers RPM, as befitting of a "last bastion of humanity in a world ruled by robots" setting.
  • Honorable mention goes to Terra Venture of Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, which was of course covered by a dome because it was a colony ship designed to take a city of people to another planet.
• The Silver Millennium is reimagined as one of these in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, while the rest of the Moon at that time had the barren surface we know.
• In Quatermass II, Professor Quatermass shows off a concept drawing of his planned Moonbase, which has domed buildings to provide an atmosphere on the airless Moon. He's surprised to find a chemical planet in Britain has the same domed buildings... because aliens are using it during their Hostile Terraforming of the Earth.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • One sketch opens with a fake advertisement touting putting a dome over your house as the next big thing in home security... only for Eddie Murphy to interrupt and run down every disadvantage of such a practice.
  • In the wake of the 2016 election there is another sketch for "The Bubble", a Literal Metaphor for the people who want to isolate themselves from prejudiced thought and discriminatory policies in the wake of Trump's election.
• Stargate-verse:
  • "Beneath the Surface" and "Revisions" of Stargate SG-1. Each with a dark secret.
  • Atlantis from Stargate Atlantis, at least under the Ancients when they had the power to maintain the shield.
• Star Trek: The Original Series. In the first pilot ("The Cage"), when the Talosians give Captain Pike the illusion of being back on Earth, a matte-painted domed city (Mojave, California) is seen in the background.
• Under the Dome: Inspired by the novel of the same name, and once again features an impenetrable energy field coming down and trapping the town of Chester's Mill. Despite being continually referred to as a dome, it's actually a massive sphere.

Music

• The Church's song "Dome":

I saw this film about some people who lived in a dome
in a beautiful field next to a river of foam
I fell asleep before it was over...

Podcasts

• The podcast Bubble takes place in a corporately-owned city under a dome intended to keep the planet's rather aggressive native fauna out.

Tabletop Games

• In BattleTech background material there's mention of worlds where at least some of the population lives in underwater dome cities.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Aquas, an undersea version, is one of the quirkier outposts of the Alphatian Empire in the Mystara setting. After the Alphatian mainland sinks in the Wrath of the Immortals Adventure Path, Aquas becomes the new capital of what's left of the Empire. At least, what's left on the outer world.
  • In the Planescape campaign, there's the City of Glass on the Elemental Plane of Water. The name is kind of a misnomer: most of the great sphere enclosing the settlement is actually made of a rare substance called Eternal Ice (which is ice that does not melt) with glass over it. It is populated by a variety of races, both native to the Plane and immigrants from elsewhere, and half of the sphere is kept flooded to accommodate water-breathing species. Despite the assertions of its citizens and officials, the City of Glass' dome has broken several times in the past due to errant spellcasting... but since the Elemental Plane of Water has subjective directional gravity, the air and water mostly stayed where they were. The vandals were still put to death, however.
• Most major planetary or lunar surface colonies in Eclipse Phase. The exceptions being those on the few inhabitable exosolar worlds that have been discovered and some cities and towns on Mars designed for Rusters, who can breathe the semi-terraformed atmosphere.
• Alpha Complex in Paranoia. Unless it's actually an Elaborate Underground Base; the Game Master is invited to play fast and loose with even setting basics like this to keep players off guard. Heck, maybe it's actually a space station, or underwater, and "Outdoors" really is as instantly lethal as the propaganda claims.
• Risk 2210 A.D. has this with the undersea colonies and lunar colonies.
• Many settlements across the solar system in Rocket Age.

Toys

• BIONICLE: The entire Matoran Universe is made up of continents and islands inside "domes". They're actually Underground Cities, since the domes are inside the body of Mata Nui, though they have artificial day/night cycles.

Video Games

• Sections of Rapture in BioShock feature somewhat of a variation on this, though not the whole city but only sections of open plazas being encased under glass barrel arches, it's a barrel arched town.
• The future of A.D. 2300 in Chrono Trigger features the ruins of domed cities from before the apocalypse in then future year of A.D. 1999.
• The Dune Wars mod for Civilization IV has domed Holtzman shields as a type of city fortification. However, there is a lasgun-armed unit that ignores the shield (Gameplay and Story Segregation, since, in the novels, firing a laser at a Holtzman shield invariably leads to a nuclear-scale explosion; if the mod implemented this mechanic, the unit would have been destroyed and the city would have been wiped out or heavily damaged).
• Major plot twist in Custom Robo (for the Nintendo Gamecube, not the original Japanese game). The main cast is revealed to have been living in a blissful artificial town surrounded by and protected from the devastation and decay of the real world. Even nature as we know it no longer exists, and grass and trees are manmade.
• In Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner 2, humans who don't want to get turned to stone by the corrupted data coming from the Sun have three choices: live in these, live underground, or become man-eating demons.
• Parts of Midgar in Final Fantasy VII; Sector 7 is the "Domed and Doomed" variant, as the baddies try to drop that part on the heroes. While they miss the PCs, in the process they kill everyone there, including three members of La Résistance.
• In G-Police the various sections of Earth's colony on the Jovian moon Calliso are contained within domes to contain a breathable atmosphere. The domes appear to be made of a mesh of laser beams but they make a metalic clanging sound if they are rammed. In one mission some terrorists hijack a train-load of bombs and attempt to detonate them in one of the tunnels that connect these domes in an attempt to fracture them.
• Heretic's Domes of D'Sparil, set under the sea.
• In Horizon Forbidden West, the Las Vegas Strip was sealed under a series of climate-controlled geodesic domes in order to keep it habitable even as Global Warming ravaged the American Southwest. Those domes have still held up even hundreds of years and one Robot War later, allowing Aloy to explore the well-preserved ruins of the Strip that are otherwise buried in sand.
• Atlantis in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is an Underwater Base that happens to be an Advanced Ancient Acropolis which sank into the ocean, protected by machines powered by stone-age orichalcum. It's thoroughly Ragnarok-proofed despite sitting on a volcano.
• The city of Caldoria in The Journeyman Project. Justified, as it's in the sky and positioned on top of a huge floating vehicle.
• The guild of glass makers in the adventure game Loom live in one of these. Made of glass, natch.
• All of the major cities in Opoona are like this, and are even generally referred to as "domes." They're there to keep out the horrible monsters roaming the wilderness. At one point, you even get to explore an old dome that didn't keep them out well enough.
• The world of Phantasy Star III, set on a space station, is comprised of seven connected ones.
• Seedship: If the player colonizes a planet that isn't conductive to human life, the settlers will live in domed cities, regardless of technological level.
• All bases (cities) in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Justified because Planet's atmosphere is toxic to humans. A particularly dome-happy faction are the pirates, but they build floating bases on oceans. Another point is that sea bases come with a specific structure for free, the Pressure Dome, which is meant to protect against possible submersion (and also works as a Recycling Tanks facility).
  • Its Spiritual Successor Civilization: Beyond Earth has plausibly designed cities that look like the real-world harsh-environment bases, but domes can be built to expand habitation, thereby increasing the health of the city. They also provide culture bonuses, presumably because everyone's inspired by how cool they are. Domes can be built both on land and at the bottom of the sea.
• The fifth Special Stage in Sonic the Hedgehog CD is set in such a city. The dome is supported by massive red metal beams, and the Special Stage itself takes place in a huge lake at its center.
• In Spore if you place a colony on a planet with poor atmosphere then it'll generate a domed shield to protect its inhabitants.
• In Surviving Mars, this is the only residence for Mars colonists. All Martianborn have one. While this is completely unlike what a real Mars colony would look like for engineering reasons, it's an Acceptable Break from Reality so that the player can see what's happening inside the habitation.
  • If you get the Green Planet DLC, you can terraform Mars to fix the temperature and the atmosphere. Your triumphant final act will be to take the lids off the domes. Doing so also allows the player to designate a capital, a large habitation area without a dome.
• The Oasis of Mra Jolios in Torment: Tides of Numenera is a giant dome of water in the middle of a desert. Doubles as an Underwater City.
• The miniature world of Wario Land 3 is one of these—It's contained inside of a music box.
• Ciel Shelter, the first town in Wild ARMs 4, fits this to a tee. The generator keeping the town floating in the sky is damaged, however, and the entire dome falls into the sea.
• In World of Warcraft: Legion, it's revealed that the ancient Night Elf city of Suramar survived the Sundering due to the Grand Magistrix erecting a domed energy shield. The shield was left intact for the following 10,000 years and only dropped recently when the Legion made it clear the Nightborne must do so and accept Legion rule or face annihilation.
• Colony 6 in Xenoblade Chronicles 1 isn't an example when you are playing the game, but in the backstory of the Colony, it is said to have been, and some of the architecture left after it's been taken back from the Mechon attacked indicates as much also. Additionally, if you talk to a NPC after rebuilding the Colony, they will talk about one of the major weaknesses of this trope: the fact that if an attack were to happen, it would be very difficult to get many people out due to the entire place being enclosed.

Webcomics

• Broken Space begins in the domed city of Hentune.
• Echo Creek: A Tale of Two Butterflies: Echo Creek is stuck under one such dome. In a twist, it only affects the town's monster residents, not the humans or Mewmans. And it's shrinking.
• Familiar Territory takes place in Southland, a quarantined city surrounded by a dome.
• Girl Genius: London is a domed city, using many domes and a number of tubes connecting things. A cabal of Sparks caused the whole of Great Britain to start sinking into the ocean for reasons unknown. The state of other cities is so far unrevealed.
• In Heartcore, humans live in cities encased in domes to protect them from an environment too hostile for them to survive in.
• The Yellowstone refugee camp in Hooves of Death, courtesy of the strongest Barrier Warrior around, Commander Sprinkles. Zombies crowd around the edges to get a glimpse at the delicious humans and unicorns inside, but they have no chance at actually breaking through. However, zombified Gnomes show that the barrier doesn't continue underground.
• A Miracle of Science: The two creators have Shown Their Work by averting this with a detailed explanation of why it's an Averted Trope appearing in The Rant under one of the strips.^note  The gist of it is that it would severely limit the expansion of the city, be hideously expensive without some kind of Applied Phlebotinum and hundreds of people would die if it were damaged by accident or sabotage.
• Mayview in Paranatural is fully-enclosed by a barrier that prevents any spirit (or spectral) for entering or leaving, except via the Ghost Train.
• Only active during the day in Sleepless Domain. At night, the outer barrier is shut down to recharge and an inner barrier protects the city by forming a seal around the walls of buildings. Monsters can still break through during this period, so to prevent that Magical Girls come out and patrol against them.

Web Original

• Orion's Arm has an article on these. They're often used as a first step in colonising new worlds. Of note is the canopy plant, a genetically modified plant that can be dropped onto a world where it grows living domes filled with breathable air and continues to do so until the whole world is covered.

Western Animation

• Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers: All that is left of "civilization" on the Wretched Hive planet of Tortuna is a handful of domed cities. The rest is a desert wasteland after The Queen of the Crowns bombed most of the planet.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers:
  • "A World Below Us": A thick glass dome is the only way for the hidden city of Oceanus and its inhabitants to not be crushed under tons of sea water.
  • "Heat Wave": Dr. Blight creates a force field dome over Hope Island in order to test her latest scheme on the Planeteers and Gaia.
• Centaurworld: Wammawink has cast a protective barrier spell around the valley where the main characters live, preventing anyone from entering or leaving. She dissolves it at the end of the first episode to allow Horse to go on her quest.
• Cyberchase: The town of Happily Ever After builds an enormous glass dome to keep the Hacker out. Hacker schemes to break through by having Wicked break through the dome with her glass shattering voice.
• Generator Rex: Kiev has been encased in a dome to stop the huge number of dangerous E.V.O.s populating it escaping.
• The Legend of Korra: The Earth Kingdom city Zaofu, the hometown of the Metal Clan. The city is separated into several large, circular sections, which are enclosed at night by flower petal-like platinum dome structures. Subverted in Book 4 when Kuvira has the domes dismantled and rebuilt into a Humongous Mecha.
• Megas XLR: A domed city is featured in the episode "Ultra Chicks".
• The New Adventures of Superman: In "The Cage of Glass", Brainiac shrinks Metropolis itself to minuscule size and imprisons the city in glass for return to Doctor Heckla's homeworld.
• Rocky and Bullwinkle: Submerbia is an underwater domed city that was menaced by Maybe Dick, the Wailing Whale.
• The Smurfs (1981): In one episode, Brainy casts the entire village inside a soundproof dome, and the only way the Smurflings (who are trapped outside) can break the dome is with the sound of a pin drop.
• Spaced Out: The Martins are made to live in a town contained in the Krach Industries space dome as part of the company's experiment.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • "Bombad Jedi" reveals that the cities on Rodia are located under domes, which have sections that can be opened to let starships fly through.
  • Due to the innumerable wars fought by Mandalorians against one another for thousands of years, the surface of their homeworld now mostly consists of barren desert. As such, all of the cities of Mandalore are build inside large domes whose volumes are almost entirely filled by clusters of buildings piled around and on top of each other.

Real Life

• In 1979-80 the town planners of Winooski, Vermont seriously proposed building a dome over 850 acres of the downtown (the whole town is 1 square mile in area), getting to the point where Buckminster Fuller visited the area and headlined a conference at nearby St. Michael's College. Years later, the long-forgotten proposal showed up, described as having been built, in a Chinese Middle School textbook.
• Buckminster Fuller famously advocated that large areas, including cities, should be enclosed in the geodesic "Fuller" domes with which his name is always associated, although he did not in fact invent them. He pointed out that the hot air rising from a typical city would be sufficient to support the dome like an inflated balloon.
• Frédéric Bastiat, a 19th century Deadpan Snarker economist, in his satirical "Candlemakers Petition", suggested that the government should build domes around cities, to protect candlemakers (and industries that are involved in candlemaking) from "harmful" competition from the Sun. This was a Take That! against protectionists who argued that importation of foreign goods ought to be restricted.
• The Habitat and Biosphere 2 projects, in which researchers were attempting to live in a self-contained environment (to see what sort of problems they might run into if they built similar structures in, say, outer space). Results were rather poor. This was unfortunate for prospects of space travel, naturally. They did successfully discover a lot of things not to do. In one issue with the Biosphere project, everyone understood bacteria needed to be part of the ecosystem. No one did an experiment to specifically see how much oxygen those species of aerobic bacteria use on a daily basis, or the basic precalculus math to extrapolate how that would affect the dome's air supply.
• Walt Disney's original 1966 plan for EPCOT as a "community of tomorrow" is often imagined as something like this, but this isn't actually true. The rumor stemmed from confusion as to what exactly Disney's plans were. The city/apartment/hotel portion of EPCOT (aka the center) was indeed planned to be entirely enclosed, but it was meant to be more like a shopping mall, with a massive building housing everything (a.k.a, an Arcology) as opposed to a (rather unfeasible) clear dome over the whole city. The other two portions of EPCOT (the "green belt" entertainment complex and the housing developments) were to be completely outdoors. This rumor led to the even more ridiculous rumor that Disney has an invisible dome over their entire Disney World property in Florida, that somehow keeps the rain out (which, as anyone who's visited there during hurricane season can attest, isn't true at all).
• An idea to build a domed city in Alaska, to be called "Seward's Success", was (unsurprisingly) never built.
• Similar ideas were presented to protect major city centers in the US as a response to climate change.
• Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco visited Houston, Texas in 1968 and, among other things, toured the then-new Astrodome stadium. A tour guide jokingly asked Rainier what he'd think about building a domed stadium in his tiny homeland. Rainier jokingly went a step further in response and suggested that he could just build a dome over all of Monaco and turn it into the world's only indoor country.
• Paraterraforming is a proposed method of making a planet habitable. It involves covering an entire planet with a transparent roof to hold in a breathable atmosphere. This would probably be quicker and easier than full Terraforming, and allow for atmosphere to be retained even on planets (or moons or asteroids) too small to hold onto an atmosphere over geological timescales.

---