Urban world-building is complicated.
Rural, or “we’re-on-a-trek (maybe in space)” plotlines can allow just-in-time world-building, with the landscape coming under the spotlight as needed, based on overall concept.
An urban environment, on the other hand, has so much detail that it’s more like a complex character, and if you set your story in a city then (just like a person) you can’t simply stick a third eye on the face when you need it for a plot reason — there has to be a rationale for it. It’s not so much that the world-building requires a full stage set before you can get started, it’s that it requires a level of history that you will need in the back of your mind to build out whenever the story gets that far. If it does. Thing is, for a long series set in a city, you can probably count on a lot of this happening.
I find that the process can be exhilarating — I look forward to it. In my WIP, my main action takes place in the “old city” which, with its vestigial fortified walls as unfashionable districts and its market garden hinterlands, is separated by a large river from the “new city” which is expanding without walls in all directions. The backwater that is the old city is illuminated by “story” as elements of it become relevant, within a basic pre-built framework of streets and districts. The old walls and city gates are predefined, and some districts have a designated roughed-out location but the details only get dealt with as they come up.
So, just last night, as I fabulated on characters and plot in book 3, I realized that one female artist character, who has been working for a seller of paints and dyes and artist supplies near one of the old gate forts and living in a rented room at the top of her employer’s house, can’t really be entertaining a male friend innocently in her studio/room, since this is a faux-Regency setting and her employer’s family is in the same house — morality issues. No, respectable or not, she really needed to live in some sort of bohemian district where she could have more privacy. Oops.
As if by magic my brain lit up and ran away with the task and visualized the grayness of undefined street running along the old city wall away from the gate. Hmm, what would I put there? Oh, of course, the old fort at the gate (an important story setting) would have needed all sorts of suppliers and, in particular, armorers, and so those buildings would still be there somewhere in the neighborhood, re-purposed. That district down the road following the line of the wall nearby would make a good mix of industrial buildings for small manufacturing (and sculptors), old mews and small dwellings, food and entertainment (and musicians), the equivalent of cheap urban lofts, etc., and since the fort had been unnecessary for a couple of hundred years, there would have been plenty of time for successive waves of entrepreneurs, lowlifes, and dabblers to turn it into a bohemian district, just right for someone with a need for northern light, studio windows, and privacy to dwell and make friends. She could still keep her respectable job at the shop, while travelling as necessary for portrait work for the gentry.
The whole Fort area was defined in book 2, to be reused in book 3, important in book 5, etc. The neglected buildings in the area are being revived or replaced or repurposed as a side issue in the main plot of our hero as his growing commercial empire continues and the local economy improves.
But when I started, in book 1, I didn’t know that gate and its disused fort neighborhood even existed. The city comes to life just like a character does, when the spotlight pauses. I can solidify the process by returning to the location from time to time to add more “content” as other buildings are recovered from neglect, with various impacts on various plots in the stories. The explanations in passing as to why a particular spot now looks the way it does are rather like the backstories of any character that you re-engage with from time to time — they serve to explain current plot to the reader as well as foundational motivation (or, in the case of buildings/districts, why they exist) as characters. A long series gives you more scope for this level of detail, by letting you revisit and expand your knowledge of person or place, but even a short work can benefit this way.
World-building takes many forms. How do you deal with your challenges? Pre-built, or rolled out as you go along?
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “Holding a City Together”
I am a gardener so my cities grow alongside the story as it progresses (or regresses as it sometimes goes). In fact, in rebuilding the plot of my fantasy novel, I’m rebuilding parts of the city as well. One of the two main characters lives in an older part of the palace surrounded by an old stone channel that fills with water when it rains. Why is that channel there? It was part of the walls surrounding the original buildings of the original palace, now this particular character’s quarters. It is private and secluded and very hard to spy on, ideal for someone who has to run things for her distracted and debased father.
In my modern-setting story (my current serial) I built a city in SimCity 4 and set the story there, so the city was already grown with its own little histories and quirks and neighborhoods. If Cities: Skylines 2 has better terraforming tools I want to rebuild it in a more modern game, but I still have the old SC4 files on my hard drive.
Since reading the posts here I’ve spent more time thinking why things are the way they are in my stories, and have made changes accordingly. Your articles have all been a huge help.
Wow – thanks! I get really interested in the psychology of the creative process.
My most recent city was built deliberately as the new capital of an expanding empire. Twelve centuries ago. So it started with a nice tidy grid of roads . . . and changed since then. I have vague “some of the Families have kept the original lands on the east and west sides” now the newest sky scrapers have shoved into the small factories and middle-class houses, now getting run down and slumish.
We’ve got a university over here, and a military base over there, and the Council Hall, the Courts . . . The Dimensional Portal facilities have to be several miles apart to avoid interference. And, of course, we must have a bohemian area. Right now I have an innocent potter . . . who might not be so innocent . . . I’ve got enough books written now, that I’m sort of trapped by what’s been decided before.
It make it interesting to have to deal with traffic because you can’t get from here to there all that easily.
Cool! The header looks like Lubeck (a very interesting Hansa city).
Why no more maintained walls on your city? Depending on culture, walls defined what was a city and what was a dependency of someone. True citizens had rights to shelter within the walls when trouble (or juts nightfall) came, but others had to leave. In Europe, walls allowed for defense. Otherwise a city was prey for anyone and everyone unless a very, very strong military/political leader held sway. China was slightly different, but again, walls mattered.
What was a kingdom 400 years ago is now part of an empire (governed from the “new city” across the river). Defensible walls for the old city are now irrelevant, and the new city is much too large for them. (c.f., Wall Street, NYC.) Defense is now at the scale of landscapes and armies.
The conceptual model is (more or less) London. Southern Britain didn’t need (still functional as defenses) city walls by the late 18th c. Ditto citizen rights of (military) shelter had decayed into irrelevance (other than the poor / parish rolls).
Still, when the Emperor grants a privilege to the primary character of rebuilding and using the defunct defensive fort at the old south gate of the old city as a manufactory for his business, it’s as a renewable lease, not as a purchase. (Won’t alienate a potential fortification permanently.) It’s also intended to entice him to be tied down to that district in the hope that his growing industrial-revolution-of-magic prosperity will seed some economic & social improvement as a side-effect. (Boons with ulterior motives.) That effect will also expand into some of the market garden hinterland beyond the gates.
Ah! Thank you. I was envisioning more of a medieval setting and idea of empire, not something with borders farther away.
“China was slightly different, but again, walls mattered.”
And sometimes not having walls was a statement of defiance or pride on the part of the builders. Like how in the old Takeda territory in Japan during the Sengoku Jidai, daimyo Takeda Shingen refused to fortify his mansion and didn’t live in a castle like most of his rival warlords. He would state proudly that ‘My people are my walls’, and given how loyal they were it worked for him. Or so the history books I’ve read say.
Sparta also refused to have walls.
China built walls of earthwork. Europe built walls of stone. Stone takes up less square footage and even then can be built much higher — BUT the first cannon that comes along takes down your castle. Earthworks are not only thicker but self-healing.
Consequently Europeans had more incentive to develop the cannon, and also their earthwork fortresses were designed with cannons in mind, where Chinese stuck to their design that left spaces vulnerable to escalade.
I tend to come up with the “flavor” of the setting first, followed by a sort of “origin story,” and then starting auditioning leading men (who usually come with a story seed attached) to see how well they fit the setting, for lack of a better word. With those core pieces in place, I can usually start making stuff up. I had a general idea of the country of Jaiya (fantasy India analogue, some vague Persian inspired elements, monotheistic religion to make my life easier), then wrote their equivalent to Genesis (which told me a fair amount about the supernatural elements in the setting), and then wrote short novels sporadically in the setting until I had a trilogy and the beginnings of a prequel series. Most of the details were invented on an as-needed basis; although I did a bit of research on the Dead Sea and other hypersaline bodies of water before starting Seeking the Quantum Tree.
Star Master duology: I knew the flavor was going to be “Star Wars minus the Kalifornyana Buddhism and most of the robots and aliens.” I knew the humans were the descendants of people who had been abducted from some ancient culture on Earth; didn’t want to do one based on India or Persia (the main influences on Jaiya), felt like making them ancient Hebrews was going to open too many cans of worms, disliked the Babylonians and Assyrians every time I researched them. So, their ancestors ended up being Egyptian, which comes out in some of the terminology and architecture, and maybe in the characters’ extreme concern for respectful treatment of the dead.
I found out my space Americans didn’t *HAVE* cities on accident– there’s stuff that’s in the same area, and they’ll TALK about something being a city, but you can be inside of the city and there’s nobody in shouting distance.
Due to both ease of transportation methods and some issues with invasion. It’s nice to have nice, big areas you can slag without hurting anyone but attackers.
I need to build the city for Cheese Scandal. I know it’s a railhead. Civilization ships by rail, and periodically one of the great fusion rigs roll through, cracks gas and diesel and haul back bulk cargo to the space ports.
But this is a regional trade hub, with grass strips, and probably something more than the periodic bazaars that must spring up when the rigs are stopped at the railhead. And surely they have other, lesser trains serving them: wood fired boilers are machine shop grade stuff.
Of course the steam trains may have just been a necessity for areas too dangerous to risk something as valuable as a fusion rig on an underdeveloped back water where it might get caught in an artillery exchange and destroyed? And with the end of the civil war, it may well be that the fusion rigs are just so much better that they sweep everything else before them? And the areas they don’t have capacity to serve are being picked up by easier to handle desiel rigs that serve the absolute sticks.
And I’m thinking it’s probably something like JP-8 and gets used in everything from desiel engines to turbo props, turbines and lanterns.
So that’s a bunch of town right there I hadn’t thought about: stall space to serve the merchants who ride the rails, tanker age to store enough fuel until the next big train shows up. Some sort of banking system, because tons of trade all at once. Hotelish things for the rich folks. Parking spaces for the cheap seats. Fusion bottles are rare and expensive, and probably require a certain expertise to run. Or at least not common enough here that every town has one, so that there is currently value in them being rolling trade hubs.
Lot to thing about and see if it is reasonable.
And some of it will be shiny new, and some will be old and shot down, and some of it will be improvisational or dangerous. And then there are the crooks: bad money, bad goods, bad promises, new tech, theft, etc.
Lots of fun!
The turbine rotor stamped Made on Earth, which was clearly a lie; the shipping along would shave cost twice what they were selling it for, but they didn’t balk when the magnetometer guy they hired scanned it. And they didn’t find any voids or other areas where it didn’t meet spec so, they bought it, and carefully tucked it into the shipping crate.
Which also means I need to work out the basic economics of the system, because if shipping a turbine rotor from earth is prohibitively expensive, what makes shipping bulk goods off ring worth it? Difference in value at destination? Shorter shipping distances/delta-v values?
Neither one is particularly worth it, unless you have countergravity so there is no mass penalty. Otherwise, the turbine rotor might be worth it if the alternative is losing a major orbital installation…. in which case you’ll need to work out why they can’t make it right there.
Well, the turbine is made local, it’s just branded as Made on Earth because people know Earth. They don’t know Bob’s Made Just Like Mom’s Titanium Casting and Forging.
Depends also on how your interstellar travel works. And the economy. Is Earth desperate enough for raw material, and rich enough to pay for transporting it? And your World charges a whooping big import fee to finance the government? Tariffs sounded so much better than taxes, but now no one in the boonies can afford anything imported?
Travel is normal tech plus fusion, nothing exotic.
Part of the issue is the hab is in orbit around Jupiter. Earth is a *long* way off. Another part of the problem is it got scoured to near stone age, and only started recolonizing it about a century ago. They’re in the rebuild phase, with limited high value industry so I expect the forests and rail heads to maybe last a generation or less.
I sort of suspect they ship bulk goods to other Jupiter habs and stuff in the asteroid belt, rather than anything going back Earthward.
Ah, cities. I even explained in A Diabolical Bargain that it’s all the fault of the Wizards’ Wood. Wizards came to study the woods. Students came to learn from the wizards. A university sprang up. . . .
It is probably easier to create an emergent city in short fiction. I’m now up to about 15 stories written in my Dracoheim setting. I keep track of neighborhoods and institutions that I create for each story and now have a good feel for the place. It also helps that I had a friend work up a map for the area for the first book of stories I set there.
Yeah, I made a (for private use) map, too, when I started… but it looks rather different now, I can tell you, now that some of it has been lit by spotlights. 🙂