Elinore - A Diachronic City WIP

[Jalyha]

Hey I LOVE to talk (especially about my "hyper-focus" topics, of which this is one) so I'd love to keep discussing it right up until you tell me either to "shut up Jalyha, and go away"or that you've made a final decision either way. Also, I don't get offended like.. ever... and I never intend to offend, so just keep that in mind, k? <3

1) Quite the contrary. I'm assuming a reasonable percentage of split-levels, duplexes, manors, normal 1 story homes and 1 room houses. (Mostly the first.) The confusion is my mistake, because I didn't clarify. Overall, you need about 300 *dwellings* per 1000 people. On average, for a "village" setting.


You have 500 buildings. Let's say half of them are 2 stories/families. That's 1000 *dwellings*. That's 3333 people. (and 1/3, but he died). You want 5000 people. That means you need 1500 *dwellings*.

If half of those poor people buildings are 2 stories, that means you need 375, two-story, buildings (Total: 750 *dwellings*) and 375, single story (whatever size) single family homes (750+375= 1105 *dwellings* which is 750 *structures*.)

The other 395 *dwellings* (1500-1105=395?) A few will be big mansion/manor-type houses with live in servants, and a few will be 3 or 4 story structures, so let's give you a break and divide by 5. (that's five FAMILIES per structure, not 5 people) that means 395/5 = 79 additional *structures*.


750+79 = 829 *structures* for a population of 5000 people *IF* most of them are more than one story/family per structure. Minimum.

Again, you have 556 *structures*, total. You're short (minimum) 273 *structures*. That's *if* those 273 structures contain some multi-story/multi-family homes.

2) See #1 I don't assume single families/nuclear society. I assume multiple families in seperate *dwellings* within *structures* cause that's how small towns/large villages tend to work.
So we agree here, I just wasn't expressing it clearly. BUT as you said, it will dilute over time. 5000 people, medievally, isn't a village anymore. It's a town, and dynamics will change over time.

3) I hate metrics >.< Next post I will just say what I mean in miles, and you can convert, since you're better at it ^.^

4) What I mean about the size is:



1 & 2 are too close to the same size for in-town and outskirts farms.

Either 1 should be about 1/4 that size, or 2 should be much larger, or both, depending on if you stick with your scale or not.

I don't know where your scale is off, but *visually* it's off. A "plot" in a town or city farm is more like a large backyard garden... usually about the size (or less) as a house... sometimes up to 2x the size.



I'm not saying that your people (5000) couldn't accomodate the farms. I'm saying you don't have enough buildings for the farms (or to house that many people) AND:




The way you have it laid out, even without enough structures EVERY single man woman and child would have to work those farms year round, or they would not have a harvest from them. the seed and grain you planted would go to waste.

For anyone (and especially for born-farmers, like you have here) this is a big no-no. Maybe I think the farms are bigger than they are. I might have it backwards. I don't know much about your scales, or any scales... I DO know the size of a field compared to the size of a small (or large) farmHOUSE. And you have houses on your map.

So maybe your farms aren't too big. But that means your buildings are too small. Either way..

5) Right, and that's fine ... I don't have a problem with the abundance. What I have a problem with is you would need 10 families living in each of your *structures* to make a population of 5000.

I suggested moving the townie farms and putting buildings there, because that's more common, AND I thought it would be easier. Another alternative would be adding more houses around the current fields/farms.

My whole point is that you don't have half enough man-made structures *for the population* to be 5000.


The thing with the farms is possible... but like I said... if ALL those fields are planted (compared to the size of the buildings) that means *all* your townspeople are full-time farmers. There's no lords or ladies, no blacksmiths, no maids, no anything... just farmers, and the kids do farm chores too.

If the buildings were larger, OR the farms were smaller, it would make sense.

That's for an early-history, farming based village/town like you have here.

The size of the farms compared to the houses is pretty close if they are all modern farms with lots of machinery to help.

OR if some of the fields are left unplanted each year... you can rotate crops like that.. but then they'd look like mud in the off years.

But even then, you still don't have enough buildings to house the population... :/

[feanaaro]

I told you how large are the buildings. Don't you think that a two-story building, having a total inhabitable space of ~300mq (~3200 square feet) would be enough for four families living in it (in the relatively cramped conditions of a technologically undeveloped society)? I think it would. Four families means ~20-25 people in this context, so 371 housing buildings you counted in the beginning could house ~7200-9200 people (if they all were two stories high).
I guess the basic point of contention is that it does not make sense to count by buildings, without considering how large those buildings are. 556 or 371 structures could house tens or even hundred of thousand people, if they were all residential skyscrapers. Or they could house merely a few hundreds, if they were all small shacks where 1 or 2 people lived. That's why you have to consider the area first, not the number. Are we on the same page on this??

The farms as showed in the pic are not too much for the population, rather too little, maybe way too little. If it is true that you need a square mile of farmland to support 180 people, then to support 5000 you would need 27.7 square miles (equals to ~71.7 km^2), which is almost exactly the entire area depicted in the whole map (not the cropped version showed in this last step, but the huge 10k*7.2k pixels I work with). This would be quite too much, but in any case it is clear that what you see now is too little. I will put some more, but I won't cover the entire map in farmlands, even if that would be more realistic (assuming 1sqmile*180 people is right, it seems a bit high to me, but I don't know anything about such things).

[Pixie]

I hate to bring this at this time, but... a huge river draining such a wide basin would have a very important feature that is missing..
Furthermore, if it drains temperate/cold land, where you have melt waters every spring.

There has to be a wide stretch of land, on both margins that is seasonally flooded. I mean, nearly as wide as the river itself and with some meandering.

This would be suitable for farming but not for building houses. Those two hills and the islands could mean that there are rocky outcrops in the area and those could be used as suitable ground for building, but you cannot have it overall. (in my humble opinion that is)

[feanaaro]

Yeah, it's a bit late to bring that out :-)
I was thinking about flooding actually, but I am not sure how that would work in practice. Notice that the huge basin cuts both ways, since different parts of the glaciers will melt at different times, and part of the flooding would also happen on the affluent rivers (many of which are quite big on their own).
Also the periods with more/less rain could either balance that or further contributing to the effect, depending how they are spaced.

Btw, how "floody" is the Mississipi (closest real-world model for this)? Judging by the number of cities built on it, I would not guess too much (although of course there could be the occasional catastrophic flood, as we sadly know, but not seasonal).
Also, one river with very famous seasonal floods is the Nile, but that is the very opposite of a river draining "temperate/cold land". So, are you sure that river in temperate areas would be more subject to floods?

Finally, once the city develops, the best houses will for sure be built on the hills, we're just not there yet.

[Jalyha]

I told you how large are the buildings. Don't you think that a two-story building, having a total inhabitable space of ~300mq (~3200 square feet) would be enough for four families living in it (in the relatively cramped conditions of a technologically undeveloped society)? I think it would. Four families means ~20-25 people in this context, so 371 housing buildings you counted in the beginning could house ~7200-9200 people (if they all were two stories high).
I guess the basic point of contention is that it does not make sense to count by buildings, without considering how large those buildings are. 556 or 371 structures could house tens or even hundred of thousand people, if they were all residential skyscrapers. Or they could house merely a few hundreds, if they were all small shacks where 1 or 2 people lived. That's why you have to consider the area first, not the number. Are we on the same page on this??

The farms as showed in the pic are not too much for the population, rather too little, maybe way too little. If it is true that you need a square mile of farmland to support 180 people, then to support 5000 you would need 27.7 square miles (equals to ~71.7 km^2), which is almost exactly the entire area depicted in the whole map (not the cropped version showed in this last step, but the huge 10k*7.2k pixels I work with). This would be quite too much, but in any case it is clear that what you see now is too little. I will put some more, but I won't cover the entire map in farmlands, even if that would be more realistic (assuming 1sqmile*180 people is right, it seems a bit high to me, but I don't know anything about such things).

Okay, you say that the buildings are *ALL* at least 2 stories. and that it's 3200 sq feet. Okay. That's 1600 square feet per story which means, your building is 40 ft long, by 40 ft wide.


You could fit 3-5 trees along ONE side of that building. In your map image, the smaller buildings are the size of MAYBE 2 of your trees. If you have a scale, things need to be to scale. Either your houses are not to scale, or your trees are not to scale.


1 mile is 5280 feet. A square mile is 1 mile long, by 1 mile wide. Your houses (preestablished) are 40 ft long. 5280/40 = 132 house widths = 1 mile.

132 house widths = half the length of your city, which is way longer than it is wide. 2 miles, by...? Less than half a mile? Your town is (compared to the houses) about 1-2 square miles total.

That means you could only have 1-2 square miles of farmland inside it. but you said the farms are 100m x 100m - 100 m is 0.0621371 miles (about 328 feet)


328 feet long means that 16 farms would be the length of half your city (which established above, is about 2 miles long.) Since 10 of that size farm *on your image* could fit along that part of the city... something isn't adding up.


Part 2:

328 ft. The size you want your farms to be, is 107,584 sq feet.

1 square mile is 5280 ft (1 mile) x 5280 ft (1 mile) is 27,878,400 square feet.

27,878,400 square feet (1 square mile) feeds 180ish people.

27,878,400 square feet (1 square mile) divided by 107,584 sq feet (the size of your farms) is 259.

259 farms would be needed, if your scale is accurate, to feed 180 people.

You have 91.

If your scale is accurate, over half your people have no food at all.


With a population this high, focused, as you said, on farming, with that much arable farmland nearby, would not sit inside the walls and starve. They'd build more farms.

So, yes, with your calculations, you'd have no food.

But, as we've already established that the *actual size* of the houses you've drawn do not match the scale of the size you said for the farms *as they are actually drawn next to the houses*, there doesn't appear to be a problem with nourishment.

If houses are really *that size* and the farms are *on the same scale* as the houses, then the farms would be much bigger than you stated, and you'd have food aplenty.




Conclusion:

Either your scale itself is off, or the items you placed on the map are not to scale.

I personally believe it's a bit of both... maybe a calculation error somewhere.


All I know is, based on the size of things in your image, nothing you've said matches the *other* sizes in the picture.


Before I realized this was a scale issue throwin off my perception, I drewed on your picture to show what I meant about the structures:




Also @ Pixie: LOL, that was like ... a whole different convo but ... yeah o.O

[Jalyha]

Yeah, it's a bit late to bring that out :-)
I was thinking about flooding actually, but I am not sure how that would work in practice. Notice that the huge basin cuts both ways, since different parts of the glaciers will melt at different times, and part of the flooding would also happen on the affluent rivers (many of which are quite big on their own).
Also the periods with more/less rain could either balance that or further contributing to the effect, depending how they are spaced.

Btw, how "floody" is the Mississipi (closest real-world model for this)? Judging by the number of cities built on it, I would not guess too much (although of course there could be the occasional catastrophic flood, as we sadly know, but not seasonal).
Also, one river with very famous seasonal floods is the Nile, but that is the very opposite of a river draining "temperate/cold land". So, are you sure that river in temperate areas would be more subject to floods?

Finally, once the city develops, the best houses will for sure be built on the hills, we're just not there yet.

The mississippi floods A LOT ... but not usually too badly. Lots of houses are built on stilts, nearer the water, but lots of cities nearby (Quincy, IL, coming to mind, cause it's on a big bend) (and probably cause I used their island as an example at the start of this thread) are built on cliffs/small plateaus. You can literally drive right down in to the water, now, with front street being right on the edge, but half the city is on higher ground.

Rarely does that city flood, but the lower streets do, and often... though not badly.


The worst it can get? Well, in 1993, the mississippi flooded and people were driving through water even in some suburbs of chicago (other side of the state from the river) so....

[feanaaro]

Survivable floods would not be a problem, those were common in every city over a river for a long long time (and apparently are still today in some parts of the Mississipi). They would be inconvenient, but then the rich would live on the hills and the poor would endure what they have to.

Regarding scale, I'm completely lost in your discourse (partly because I am not used to non-metric systems, it is one thing to make one conversion, another to follow an entire complex discourse). There is no issue of scale, 1px=1m in the picture as I posted it. That is EXACTLY so by definition. I can do wrong in drawing something too big or too little, but that is the scale, by definition, across the whole map and it is not subject to change. There is no comparison to be made anywhere, everything is at the same scale. Some things may be too big or too small, but that would be an error in drawing the thing, not in the scale. The area enclosed in the palisade is ~0.6 Km^2, as I said, and that is obtained by counting the pixels, no need to make guesses.

The houses (most of them) are roughly the size of a current-day detached sub-urban home; of course they are more densely populated, since the people and the entire society are of course not as wealthy as the typical sub-urban dweller of today. I don't see how this would be a strange size, nor do I see how it would be implausible for 20 people or so to live in a house that size, given how little living space pre-modern people usually had.

Of the trees, you see of course the treetops, which can represent a single tree (oscillating between 6 and 9 meters/pixel wide) or more if they are clumped close together. If you take a single treetop, you can fit roughly 1 or 2 on the short side of a typical house (few of them are square, most are rectangular), and 3 or 4 on the longer side. Again, you don't have to estimate this, it's just 20px divided by 6px or so. (notice that the trees may appear larger than they are because of the shadow, removing the drop shadow effect they would look much smaller)

Regarding farms, again those are not farms, but rather plots, there is no "family farm" at this point here. And again I know I have too few of them, but as I said I won't cover the whole map in farms even if that would be needed for perfect realism.

I don't get what the picture with the added red rectangles mean.

Edit: Also, I did not say that the buildings are actually ALL two stories, I said that if they were they would be enough to house a population of 7200-9200 people. Since I am aiming for 5000, obviously not all are two stories and/or not all are at 100% of their possible occupancy (which is as it should be, I think).

[Jalyha]

I'm with you on the floods thing


OHHHH wait. At first I thought you changed it and were saying 1px = 1 mi, at first and I was like, okay, your houses are 40 miles long, coool....
Then I read it again

Okay, so I checked (good old google!) and 1 meter is ~ 3.28 feet.

Still... how big is a treetop, on average? I'd say around 6 feet across on average (or more... some oaks can be 80 ft wide!) but yeah, average, about 6-10 feet. That's about what? 2-3 meters? So you have trees with a diameter (on average) of 2-3 px right?

No. They range from 9 to 30 px in diameter.

If your houses are 3200 sq ft (1600 sq ft to a floor) that's still 40 ft by 40 ft, or about 12.19 meters to a side (or squared for the area which is 148.7ish)

Are your houses about 12 to 13 px wide? on average? Do they have 148px total area?

I just zoomed on a random area and counted px. The smallest in the zoomed in area was 25. The largest (not counting the huge meeting-hall/castle/whatever type building was 160.

So the average is about 92.5 px total area for the houses. That's 92.5 m^2.

(per floor, of course, but still, only 2/3 of your estimate.

If each of those structures is 185 m^2 (counting 2 stories at 92.5) , 9.6 meters to a side... NOT 12, or 13. Like I said, 2/3 of your estimated population.

Now, lets see... I live in a small apartment. My bedroom is 14 * 12 ft.... that's enough space for a twin bed, a dresser, nightstand and a hamster cage. I *could* fit a table in there, and maybe 2 cots. So that's home for 3 (tightly squeezed) people. Total. 14*12= 168 sq ft.


Sorry hit the wrong button and it posted early....


168 s ft.

you had 40 x 40 = 1600 sq ft. That's 9 times the space I have for 3 people = 27 people ... if your houses were to the scale you said. But they aren't that many pixels to a house. They're 2/3 the size you want them, on average. 2/3 of 27 = 18 people per house.

18 people, times 556 total structures. That's good. That means you could have double your population.

But it's unrealistic.

Not everyone can live in cramped space like that. It's no longer about community - it's about sanity. There's no room to *walk*.

And.... That's only IF you have 2 stories on every single house.

And that's crowding every family into that small space - think efficiency apartment for 3.

You couldn't fit a family of 5 in one family's allotment, and some people are going to live alone. Period. Unless ALL your citizens are exactly alike like something out of L'Engle.

More realistically, you'd expect 3 people to have twice that space. That's room for living in... even though it would still be crowded, you could walk between the furniture.

That would support your 5000, BUT only if every single structure on your map right now is a dwelling for 3-4 families.

Every single one.

So now you're back to having no granaries to store food, and no seperate structures like smithys or stables for the animals.

And you're back to ... some people will live alone.



Let me restate, though, that your map will pass muster with most people as is. But it's not truly accurate. I only mentioned it because you asked if it was.


Also... the red spots on my pretty picture are where I would add structures (any kind/size) that would solve all the problems with population/scale/food/whatever

[feanaaro]

The single treetop here is on average 7-11px wide (I miswrote before), if you see anything larger than 11px, than it is more than one tree. A radius of 7-11 me is ok for a tree, considering that these are natural trees that are there since forever. I will use a slightly smaller brush for trees planted later by people.

On average the houses are 8-9px wide * 16-20px long (as I wrote before). Some are smaller, some are bigger, but more or less that's the ballpark. It is not an estimate (well, the average is still an estimate, but it is made starting from precise countings), but it is the actual number of pixels as painted in photoshop. It may be more difficult (due to antialias etc.) to count them exactly in the image as you see it, but trust me those are the measures.

[Jalyha]

Trees.... it's plausible...


Houses... Something went wrong then, because that's not the number of px to a house when I open the image.