Academy City

Academy City is the city where most of the series takes place.

Located just west of Tokyo, it is a semi-independent city led by the 12 members of the Board of Directors, which are then, supervised by its founder Aleister Crowley. As the city's name suggests, it is a city of several schools and institutions of higher learning from kindergarten to university level that learn side by side along with the scientists who research on psychic powers and higher technology. The city was founded by the magician Aleister Crowley to do studies and research on the development of preternatural abilities. Where the city's funds comes from is probably from different countries, even the military, that have high interest in psychic research. Also, the city has other bases of operations outside of Japan such as in Russia, demonstrated when all of the SISTER clones left after the Level 6 Shift Experiment except 10 are sent outside Academy City for adjustments.

Academy City is composed of 9 Districts, some of which have specific purposes; District 7, for example, contains the majority of middle-school academies. District 23 is designed for air and space travel research, and District 22 is designed to test technology for building underground structures. This city's size is a third of the Tokyo metropolis, as one third of Tokyo was incorporated into Academy City when it was first established, with the rest of Tokyo (and by extension, the rest of the world) walled off. It is assumed the district numbers were kept the same as what they were before they were incorporated into Academy City.

Demographics
The prologue of Volume 1 of the light novels specify the demographics of Academy City; its total population is about 2.3 million with 80% of them being students and 1/8 of those students living in the city dorms. Of the entire student population, about 60% of them have the ability to demonstrate even a slight amount of psychic ability (these are Power Users of Levels 0-5). The remaining 20% of the students in Academy City pursue other subjects instead of going under the Power Curriculum Program, like Tsuchimikado Maika, who studies in a maid school.

Security
Academy City's technology is thirty years ahead of its time and thus, has accessibility to a more sophisticated array of measures to ensure security across the city.

The city limits leading outside are lined with walls, accessible only through entry points which require persons to have permission to enter or leave the premises. Inside the city, hidden cameras are dotted along every road and alleyway. This, in turn, can be accessed by the peace and order groups in the area, Judgment and Anti-Skill, to check if there are any crimes occurring.

In addition to the ground-level security protocols in Academy City, the satellite Orihime 1 (where the Tree Diagram supercomputer is located) and Hikoboshi II (a camera satellite and also a satellite laser-cannon) gathers detailed pictures of the area and relays it back to Earth.

The primary peacekeeping forces in Academy City are Judgment and Anti-Skill; these two groups are composed of trained students and faculty respectively which deal with crimes and conflicts with security.

Unfortunately, security in Academy City is revealed to have severe flaws in it. Because of the destruction of Orihime 1 in Toaru Majutsu no Index, live feeds of satellite images are greatly reduced. Magicians can easily enter Academy City and, like Sherry Cromwell, can cause damage despite the presence of Judgment and Anti-Skill units. Also, in Toaru Kagaku no Railgun, it has been revealed that District 10 of Academy City has been completely overrun by its inhabitants, unreachable by technology due to the Skill-Out members destroying the hidden cameras throughout the district.

Though there are other forces like the HsPS-15 armoured AI, other advanced technology, and groups like MEMBER and ITEM, they are mostly politically motivated factions working for one of the 12 Board of Directors of Academy City or Aleister Crowley, and care less about security and more on furthering their (or their employer's) own interests.

External Politics
Though Academy City is stated as the dominant faction on the Science side, there are still internal conflicts with the science side, not unlike what's happening in the magic side between the various Churches. In volume SS2 many countries/factions found out the existence of 'gemstones', natural born espers, and attempted to collect them to set up a esper research insititute independant of Academy City. There is up to 50 different factions/countries, all of which targeted one of the 50 gemstones outside Academy City. It was stated the CIA had 2 moles within each faction and tried to bring all of the gemstones together under their control. Academy City's board of directors in the end made a deal with Heaven Canceller, and sent in the SISTER clones to all 50 institutes around the world to retrieve the gemstones for their protection, and also sent Kinuhata Saiai to assassinate the mastermind behind the plan of collecting the gemstones.