Building a City

[aeriedraconia.livejournal.com]

Building a City


Some people say they just create it as they go; I am not one of those people. Yes, create as I go works to some extent but I need to know more and I need to write the specifics down because my city does figure in several books. Other people say they've been working with their city for so long already that they know it inside and out. I used to be like that but I discovered that I could forget things over time and that I was so familiar with the details that I didn't realize that I forgot to describe things to the reader who wasn't familiar with my world (a danger for the fanfic writer too I'd guess).

If you have a city that will be the setting for many scenes or that will feature in several books you need to know something about that city so the details don't morph, drift or change through the story or the series of books. So, how do you build a city? What goes in a city? Where do you start?

I thought turning this into a group brainstorming exercise might be helpful and interesting.



PART 1:
Where do you start and how much do you need to know? There are all sorts of things to consider when building your city many of which the reader may not ever know but that you, the author, may need to know to help make your city live and breathe. Things like: government officials, key characters, markets, political factions, economics, taxes, weather, rich and poor sections of the city, church, education, trade goods export and import, military, housing, public areas, transportation, sanitation, water, food…

What other broad categories can you think of?

PART 2:
Where do you start?
What do you need first?

The City as a whole:
You could start with drawing a map. Figuring out where the city is located is always helpful.
Is it a port or inland trade center? Is it located with an eye for defense or trade?
What kind of impression does the city give? Mood, looks, prosperity, size…?

Inside the City:
If you are working a scene or several scenes: What do you need to accomplish with the scene(s)?
Where in the city will the first scene(s) take place?
What is the function of the place where the scene(s) take place?
What does the immediate surrounding look like? Smells? Sounds? Feelings, tactile and emotional?
Are there other people around? What are they doing? Saying? Their general mood?
What else?


PART 3:
What comes next?

Comments

[captlychee.livejournal.com]

I think you've covered a lot there. You've touched on politics and economics and since those are the areas that interest me I'll put in my two cents on those.

Questions

Politics

Who rules the city? Governing council, religious elite, royal family, witches' coven, group of rich families a la medieval Italy, secret council of Elders working behind the scenes, powerful vampire group etc etc. Each of these will affect the way the city is run as a whole, touching the lives of everyone in it. For example, the vampire group would ban anything that tainted human blood, meaning that the city will have no inns or taverns as we know them. The rich families will practice both marriage and assassination amongst themselves to secure control of more of the city. The religious elite may neglect questions of sweerage to build even more glorious places of worship.

Economics

most cities begin as places of trade, usually with something unique to trade. Farms and villages start up later, to serve the population of the city. So what is the city's unique resource? Do they still have it? If they have it, is it significant? (For example, London started off exporting dried fish, but that is no longer a significant resource or industry there.) If they don't have it, is the city poor or still prosperous? Consider present-day New Orleans as a poor city on the edge of collapse. Whatever services the city runs (some kind of guard or police force, some kind of sanitation, some methof of moving fresh water around etc etc), are these still working well or are they crappy?

Not all cities begin with control of an economic resource. Some are purely administrative centres, although this was rare in medieval times. You could, though, have a medieval or ancient city set up purely as an administrative centre - a Washington DC (or Canberra, Wellington, Pretoria, Brasilia) of an ancient empire. What sort of bureaucracies go on there? What about a city that grew out of a military garrison? (Which I think York is.) A lot of soldiers running around still, with all their anciliary needs (armourers, bowyers, fletchers, gunsmiths, prostitutes). Is the garrison still important or have events passed it by? Do the military people still carry on a proud military tradition or has that fallen into decline?

Consider John Swartzwelder's rather facetious example of a town founded by prostitures. If that grows into a city, who rules it? (I think I'll have a ponder about this.)

Finally

If we were to create a city, we could do a community for it. Something like orbis_terrarum which is awesome in its detail. The only problem I foresee is that these projects too often become a wiki, blanded into inanity by everyone wanting to push their own barrow and thus compromised to the n^th degree. What method could we use to stop this? It can work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea:_Harlan's_World), so this could too.

[aeriedraconia.livejournal.com]

So, you figure out a lot of the politics and economics first?

I think this idea is driven by my having asked myself, "What the heck does one put in a fantasy/medieval type city? What goes on? What does one do?" stuff like that.

What I want to create with this exercise is a kind of step-by-step How To Go About Building a City so people can figure out how to do it and tailor things to their own specific needs and then can do it again for a completely different project later.

For me, the RPG game guides never ever fit into my homebrewed game world, I had to do a lot of translation to make them fit. So creating my own, just for me, was easier. That and I've discovered that my game world and my novel world have a pretty different feel and function.

[captlychee.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see what you mean. Well, if we're doing a step by step guide, no I don't think of the politics and economics first. Those were the areas where I thought I coould contribute here, since you'd covered everything else pretty well.

But, in terms of a step by step guide, I would think of the geography first. Then the geography will give you an idea of what resources the city has. That will then explain why the city is there.

After that you do the politics and economics because answering those questions gives you a broad 'feel' of how the city is going to be. For example, if the city is in ruins, you could just say 'it's in ruins' and leave the question of how it got that way and why it wasn't repaired up in the air. But if you say 'it's run by an old family who're now so inbred the current Doge has the IQ of a paperclip' you can understand that it will have fallen into disrepair.

After the broader aspects of the politics you need to get an idea of the city's plan (ie, a kind of street directory look at it). Is it a rabbit warren of windy streets made up on the spur of the moment like a lot of London still is, or a rigid grid pattern like Los Angeles aims to be? Is it clustered in closely like Manahattan (taking that as one city for the example) or spread out like Melbourne or Edmonton? If it's medieval and covers 5000 sq miles like Melbourne does, how do people get around in it?

Then you cram your streets with all the things a city needs—pubs, bordellos, grocers, blacksmiths, more pubs, some pubs, the odd tavern or two, possibly some places that sell or value magical items if you have those. Note that if the local politics ban drinking or prostitution you won't have those places in plain sight—but there might still be speakeasies or the equivalent.

(I think I've already mentioned the setting I did for aD&D where the locals wouldn't accept the standard gp, sp, cp etc, because the local government needed all those electro-conductive metals for a Special Project. I put it in again here to show that you can put in minor details like that to keep the readers interested. Also, I was quite proud of how frustrating it was for the players at the time :))

Distribution of Wealth
I've never been a huge fan of 'the thieves' quarter'. Why would any town allow its criminals to gather into one spot and why, if they did, wouldn't they just storm in their occasionally and wipe the thieves out? For a game you need something like it so the player playing a thief has a setting to work in, I suppose, but for a novel you don't. Nonetheless, there will be slums in the city, nice places to live, middle of the road places etc. What do each of these look like? Where are they placed geographically in the City? Note that times and technology alter what is good and bad in a city. Being near a river or near the docks used to be a bad place to live%mdash;now try and pick up a house with river frontage! Hills are nearly always popular, but if you have monsters in the mountains who can occasionally raid the foothills they won't be. Slum areas tend to be poorly lit—or do they? Modern Melbourne now has good lighting in the slum areas to keep people safe on the streets, while the tree-lined nice suburbs are still comparatively dark. If the same is true for your city, how has the local government gone about setting this up?

This is getting inordinately long. To summarise, I think of the politics and economics second, after drawing the map. I almost never get into the fine details of each street because I know little about that sort of thing—like, what does a cooper's workshop look like, for example?

[captlychee.livejournal.com]

Just thought of something else. The Company Town. Picture somewhere set up by a large organisation (a company, trading fleet, group of pirates) that has one industry and everyone works in that. It will have that industry and the support industries around it. In this I include places like Flint, Michigan (car parts), Deerborn (Ford company), Bourneville (the first company town, set up by Cadbury Chocolate to house its workers) and Washington DC, which is a company town in every respect and even has its support industries (car mechanics, doctors, hospitals etc) outside of itself. A medieval analogue of that would be interesting.

There are no better reference work to see the economy of cities than The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations, both by Jane Jacobs. Worth reading but probably more detailed than you might want for this exercise.

The Tale of Two Cities

[captlychee.livejournal.com]

It occurred to me the other day that one way to start is to name the city. Most cities get a name pretty early on. The name may change as languages change (Llyn Dyn to London), as the country of which they're a part changes (New Amsterdam to New York) or as the whims of politics dictate (Salisbury to Harare). Nonetheless, they get a name pretty early and that name can be instructive in talking about the city. (Salt Lake City is the best example I can think of.) Anyway, once you pick a name you can get some idea of the history and geography of the city. Accordingly I bring you two cities: Umber Noel and Stalemate Cote. (These sophisticated anagrams come from http://wordsmith.org/anagram/)

Umber Noel clearly describes that it was named around Christmas, or whatever the locals celebrate that they give the name 'Noel' to. Compare this with Natal which was named after the Nativity becasue that's when it was first sighted. 'Umber' refers to the color of the soil so whatever it is that makes soil umber coloured is a resource that this city has, or had when it was named.

'Cote' means coast and 'stalemate' is ovvious. Clearly the city was named after a naval battle that ended in a stalemate, thus protecting the status quo and allowing the city to survive. It probably wasn't founded after a stalemated naval engagement so it's name may have been changed to celebrate the stalemate. If so, some of the steeets and buildings will bear the old name of the city, whatever that might be, (Let's say it was called Oak Pens. There will be some oak trees still around in the older parts of the city and possibly a club or society called 'the Old Oakians'.) The renaming of the city is either because the stalemate is to celebrated or because it meant the city was taken over by a new government who are keen to remind the inhabitants why they're street signs have all been changed (if they have such things) and why the town criers all refer to Stalemate Cote. The first example produces a happy city glad that its ruler saved it from the enemy, the second option produces a city that resents its occupation and probably has a kind of French resistance operating in it. (Which does seem the more interesting of the two for fiction purposes.)

So, one city was founded on some kind of trade and the other has been reshaped in light of a change in politics.

Umber Noel was at one stage rich. Therefore it will have large buildings in an older stule than the current fashion. The older sections of the city will have these large buildings either given over to local government or falling into disrepair as they become slums - depending on whether it's still rich or not. If it is still rich there will be a flourishing art community, an active concert scene or whatever the local culture deems is 'art', which might be anything from massive communal Boggle tournaments to cannibal feasts where they eat their enemies. It takes a lot of money to support an arts community and in a rich city you'll have plenty of it. If present-day Umber Noel is poor, having mined out all of whatever it was that made the soil umber, then you have no arts community and most activity is given over to whatever the locals consider crime. There is far more residential life in the city with older buildings now divided up into taverns and cheap accommoation as the owners of the buildings, even if that is the local government, try to scrape up as much money as they can through renting the buildings out. (If the local culture doesn't allow renting, then you get squatters.)

Stalemate Cote may take a bit more pondering.