How Do You Design Towns and Cities?

[Dynaknights]

Hello!

I'm currently working on a sci-fi project and I've been wondering how to go about creating a solid ideas of what the setting looks like beyond vague concepts and inspirations in my head.
So, what's your process for designing towns and cities? What's your inspiration(s)? What's the most important part of them to you? How do your characters and townspeople go about their day-to-day lives? How do your places influence the local/global culture? Do you have any art/writing/3D models/what-have-you?

I'm slowly losing my marbles...

[Dan Q]

The Alexandrian has all kinds of resources on designing and mapping cities; mostly from an RPG perspective and somewhat biased to a fantasy setting, but not entirely (and much of it's translatable anyway).

For example, in this blog post he talks about breaking down blocks in a fractal manner, which is a great starting point. Search his site for e.g. "city map" for posts with other ideas.

When I'm designing a city, I personally like to think about its history, politics, and transportation. Start by sketching it a hundred or a thousand or whatever number of years ago at which it might have been much smaller. What will it have had? How will they have been laid out? Then jump forward a century at a time and work out how it might have changed: what will have been added? What will have changed? If anything's been demolished, what remains of it? Old city walls from a more-dangerous time become the walls of temples and houses. Old granaries and reservoirs get buried underground. Businesses that are no longer viable give up their space and are either replaced or become brownfield sites, ripe for replenishment or else left to degrade into slums. Think about the balance of power: who's in charge? Who's got the money? Where do these people work and live: this makes a big impact on which parts of a city are made safer and more-attractive, and affects the kinds of amenities they get. Think about transport: how do people get around? Which are the most-travelled routes? As the city grows, which routes need upgrading or replacement? Which become overgrown or abandoned? As it expands and reaches into the world around, what challenges does it face: does it span a waterway (where are bridges or tunnels and what impact do they have on people's feeling of which "neighbourhood" they belong to?)? Does it climb a hill? Does it supplant farms or woods or smaller villages? Do their names live on in the districts or streets today?

[Dan Q]

Oh yeah, and play with tools like this for inspiration! (There are many others; itch.io is full of them!)

[504slashdiv]

Oh yeah, and play with tools like this for inspiration! (There are many others; itch.io is full of them!)

I'd like to add by linking the itch.io worldbuilding things that I know of!

• im sorry did you say street magic - worldbuilding rpg!
• rumor - worldbuilding rpg as well where you think up a place using a playlist
• walkabout maps - make a place that's inspired by an actual place and putting it in a fantasy setting
• divines, cults, and worshippers generator - could be used for thinking about the religious culture of your city. it's a random table but tbh i like to just look at it for inspiration.

[mortaki]

Almost every time I create a map of any kind, I think back to my AP Human Geography class that I took in high school. Human geography being the study of how people move and settle and why.

Cities are generally circular in shape because people want to settle close to the city center. Almost every city will have a town hall, courthouse, and bank right in the middle, which are all things everyone needs access to. People, typically speaking, are perfectly willing to have a 30 minute commute time to work, school, the grocery store or whatever no matter the type of transportation. Many of the most successful cities in history were ones that followed this rule. Anything over that and you'll notice that cities become somewhat fractured. Think of how the city of New York has several different subdivisions each with their own name and unique culture.

These are the kinds of things I keep in mind both when designing a city or town and when deciding different facets of their culture. Like did you know that in the US, the inner city (aka the ring right outside of downtown) is usually where the poorest people live, but in France, the poorest people live in the suburbs. They're almost exact opposites, which is interesting since generally living in a city is more expensive that living outside of it. So why? My theory is the state of public tranportation. In the US, suburbs have very little in the way of public transportation usually, meaning you have to own a car. But cars are expensive, so people who can't afford it live near where they work and utilize the much more abundant buses/trains/etc in these more urban areas. France, however, has a very robust transportation system both in most major cities and throughout the country.

All that nerdspeak to say, my advice is to think about why people live in your city. Does it get a lot of immigrants from other countries? Why or why not? How does that affect the culture, things like food, language, fashion, layout? What kinds of industries does it have? Where do the majority of people work and how do they get there? What are considered the necessities of life there? Where do people get those necessities? What kind of issues does it have? Crime, pollution, overcrowding? Why does it have those issues and who is it affecting? Once you start asking those kinds of questions, I find that a city will sort of build itself.