The beginnings of my first city
Hey all,
After much procrastination, I've finally decided to try my hand at a city map, which serves as the setting for a novel I'm undertaking. So I've planned out a little bit in my head, lain out the basic terrain based on my previous world map, and started plotting out a district to familiarize myself with the tools and resources available. Now that I have one tiny corner of my city plotted out, I figured I'd check in here and see what opinions or advice you guys might have to offer before I dive in with the rest. If I'm making any dire mistakes, I'd kind of like to know about them before I commit too much time and effort.
A little background on the city itself: this is Inundar, a roughly bronze age middle-eastern style city. It was the capital of a sizable nation before its rulership collapsed and the country was divided into a number of disparate city-states. It remains one of the most powerful and wealthy cities in the region owing to rich copper and gem deposits in the mountains to the north, but due to recent overpopulation and other issues there is a growing unrest and resentment toward the ruling classes that's been fermenting for some time.
In the image here I've included my whole city map (such as it is so far) and a detail of the district I've put down just outside the city walls. The map itself measures at 5500 x 5000, so roughly one square mile (I don't expect the city to fill the whole map; maybe 25%-40% will be outside the city walls). The lighter area represents the foothills which ascend to steep mountains to the northwest. The river is 500 feet wide and, similar to the Nile, serves as the lifeblood of nearly every city-state in the region. The district shown is a tradesman's/laborer's district, with the smaller buildings serving as housing for the poor who make their livings primarily in the nearby mines and quarries, and the larger ones being the residences of more skilled middle-class craftsmen. The domed buildings include a temple, storehouse and administrative facility.
So, a couple questions here. First of all, does it look like I'm being too ambitious? I'm afraid I don't have a very good sense of scale, which is one of the reasons I wanted to map out the city to begin with, and I'm not sure how realistic all this is in terms of size and population (for the record, I'm currently thinking each of the lower-class houses holds a family of around four to six). I'm wondering if anyone out there has any historical data that might give me an idea as to how close or far off I am from similar real-world cities in our history. Do the houses seem about the right size and distribution (that's a horse and cart in the road between the middle- and lower-class blocks to help provide some sense of scale)?
And on a more technical note, does anyone see any red flags that might give me trouble down the road if I continue developing the city along the same path? Any serious flaws in the groundwork I've lain here that might bite me in the butt later?
As you may have gathered I'd like to make this as accurate and true to life as possible (even if it is set in a fantasy world), so I really appreciate any and all input I can get here. Thanks, everyone!
After much procrastination, I've finally decided to try my hand at a city map, which serves as the setting for a novel I'm undertaking. So I've planned out a little bit in my head, lain out the basic terrain based on my previous world map, and started plotting out a district to familiarize myself with the tools and resources available. Now that I have one tiny corner of my city plotted out, I figured I'd check in here and see what opinions or advice you guys might have to offer before I dive in with the rest. If I'm making any dire mistakes, I'd kind of like to know about them before I commit too much time and effort.
A little background on the city itself: this is Inundar, a roughly bronze age middle-eastern style city. It was the capital of a sizable nation before its rulership collapsed and the country was divided into a number of disparate city-states. It remains one of the most powerful and wealthy cities in the region owing to rich copper and gem deposits in the mountains to the north, but due to recent overpopulation and other issues there is a growing unrest and resentment toward the ruling classes that's been fermenting for some time.
In the image here I've included my whole city map (such as it is so far) and a detail of the district I've put down just outside the city walls. The map itself measures at 5500 x 5000, so roughly one square mile (I don't expect the city to fill the whole map; maybe 25%-40% will be outside the city walls). The lighter area represents the foothills which ascend to steep mountains to the northwest. The river is 500 feet wide and, similar to the Nile, serves as the lifeblood of nearly every city-state in the region. The district shown is a tradesman's/laborer's district, with the smaller buildings serving as housing for the poor who make their livings primarily in the nearby mines and quarries, and the larger ones being the residences of more skilled middle-class craftsmen. The domed buildings include a temple, storehouse and administrative facility.
So, a couple questions here. First of all, does it look like I'm being too ambitious? I'm afraid I don't have a very good sense of scale, which is one of the reasons I wanted to map out the city to begin with, and I'm not sure how realistic all this is in terms of size and population (for the record, I'm currently thinking each of the lower-class houses holds a family of around four to six). I'm wondering if anyone out there has any historical data that might give me an idea as to how close or far off I am from similar real-world cities in our history. Do the houses seem about the right size and distribution (that's a horse and cart in the road between the middle- and lower-class blocks to help provide some sense of scale)?
And on a more technical note, does anyone see any red flags that might give me trouble down the road if I continue developing the city along the same path? Any serious flaws in the groundwork I've lain here that might bite me in the butt later?
As you may have gathered I'd like to make this as accurate and true to life as possible (even if it is set in a fantasy world), so I really appreciate any and all input I can get here. Thanks, everyone!
Comments
Looking at your artisan's district detail map, my immediate thought is how neat, open, planned and suburban-modern it looks, with its very obvious emphasis on the roads and lots of personal space around each property. How appropriate is that for the poorer elements in a district such as this, would you say? Is road transport common in this culture? Do they have horses? Or are oxen and donkeys the main draught animals? Or even human(oid) slaves? That choice determines the size of the major thoroughfares (assuming there might even need to be more than one - and that probably going more or less directly to the storehouse), with narrower footways and lanes elsewhere, commonly running wherever the houses aren't, unless there are specific rules covering property/land-division sizes and placements.
With the location of the main city and its walls, unless there are areas of problematic ground (marshes, say), defensively, the city would be more likely to fill the area closest to the river's bend entirely, rather than be set some way from it. City walls along the riverbank are possible, but there'd have to be a lot of wharf space there too, allowing access to the city for river-borne cargoes. You could though have canals passing into the city instead through water-gates in the walled river-bank, with internal unloading pools and docks (this was the case in ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, where the canals formed the main thoroughfares through several cities at least, rather than roads).
More ideas, and more background work, here than you may want, I fear, but you did ask!
I realize "bronze-age" and "middle eastern" are a bit vague. I guess I didn't want to get too specific for fear of getting tied too closely with any real-world culture or society, but I would say the templates I've been drawing from most heavily have been ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, with a bit of classic "Arabian Nights" flair (which I realize is much later than bronze-age) for good measure.
I see what you're saying about the emphasis on roads. I was playing around a bit with the "random street" function and may have gotten carried away. The fact that there's so much "personal space" between some of the rows of houses is largely due to my inability to find a way of quickly generating a bunch of houses WITHOUT a road to follow, though now that I think about it I guess I could've just used the same tool and changed the "distance from road" in Street Settings. But you're right, that does still leave the problem of the whole thing looking too orderly and planned. Now I'm wondering, is there any easy way of just generating a "block" of houses with slight variances in size, shape and bearing? Or am I gonna have to bite the bullet and put a lot of them in manually, one by one?
They have horses, but oxen and donkeys are the main draught animals. Slaves are present as well, but I see them more working in the mines and fields than being used to pull heavy loads over long distances. I should have mentioned that the roads in this district are 5 foot wide dirt paths as opposed to paved streets (all the more reason they shouldn't look so orderly, I know
I do see the city expanding beyond the walls to fill the space up to the river - that would probably be a large docks and merchant district. I went back and forth as to whether or not there should be walls right along the riverbank. At first I thought to build the walls right up to the river and leave the city open along its bank, but since the river is the primary means of travel between cities I started to think that might be as bad defensively as not having any walls at all. Maybe a better compromise would be to shift the whole wall structure so it's nestled into the bend a bit more while still leaving wharf space just outside the walls. Canals are also an interesting idea, and something I hadn't thought of. I don't think I see them replacing this city's streets to any large extent, but it couldn't hurt for me to do a little research on that subject.
Planned settlements of this real-world period are certainly possible. Thinking further about your Egypt-Mesopotamia-Arabian Nights approach, you might like to consider especially the ancient city of Mari on the upper Euphrates as an example, as it was apparently created specifically to protect the mercantile interests of the southern Mesopotamians in the early-mid third millennium BC, but was then destroyed and rebuilt by various people later, with varying degrees of planning, for roughly a millennium or so after that, until its final destruction as a city by Hammurabi around 1759 BC. There's this lovely painting, albeit somewhat conjectural, particularly for everything much outside the city walls, which you can find in various places online:
This version comes from this page, which has another couple of useful links for similar images, plus a little description of the city (albeit mostly the god Dagan). The Wikipedia page on Mari is much more helpful for a discussion of the site.
While in general this painting is usually credited as for the period around 1800 BC, the overall city layout was not dissimilar, as far as the excavations have suggested, for much of its history, with a dense packing of houses in the central area (often central courtyard/atrium-style buildings, of more than one floor), and much looser buildings scattered along the main routes into the outer walled area and beyond. Note though that between half and two-thirds of the city have been lost due to the River Euphrates shifting its main channel several times in the past, so whether the city was ever quite so neatly circular remains unknown.