Fantasy Capital City

[sapphireLight]

Hello everyone,

This is my first attempt at mapping a city. I want this to be the capital for a fantasy graphic novel I am making. It's a coastal city in a warm temperate climate home to both humans and dragons. The city is approximately 4 square miles (not including farmland) with a population of 60,000 humans. Here is the plan for the major streets with a rough idea of where the farms will go. The dot is the castle. Does this seem like a plausible layout? Thanks for reading!

[Azélor]

Is it supposed to be in the medieval era ? If so, I think the layout should be more chaotic. Or not depending on who rules the city.

and more importantly:

--I really like that the streets/public spaces seem to be defined by the buildings, rather than the other way around. That is something few city mappers do, and I wish more people would do, because it makes a closer match to historic city patterns (it also gives you those fantastic little alleys and squares that you're developing here). My only suggestion, at this point, is to not neglect the more obviously linear kinds of streets (i.e. the main roads that link different parts of the city, or the city to different parts of the world).

[Ascension]

Plausible enough for a street layout, I'd say. One thing to remember here - all those roads leaving the city have to have gates and people to man them... same for the walls. Gates are a weak point in terms of defense. Lots of walls and lots of people to man them is expensive so monarchs would minimize the number of gates for economic and defensive purposes and the protective wall would probably only be around the inner city. There may be an outer wall but the troops manning that wall would be shabby and not always of best reputation. Now if you had a large merchant class that could offset the price of troops manning the outer wall. You could have something like royal troops and city guard always bickering with each other about who does a better job and who is a snob and what not. If dragons reside there then alleys might not be a good thing since big ole scaley dudes can't fit... unless there is a rebellious underclass and/or criminal element who deliberately makes alleys to circumvent the dragons. I think too much sometimes.

[Larb]

I think it looks plausible enough - your really twisty/chaotic narrow alleys are probably going to spring up inside of the individual blocks as the city becomes more dense so I suspect aren't drawn on the map.

I imagine there would be more farmland running along that valley to the west between the road and the river though. And some mills.

[Wingshaw]

Here's a few of my thoughts:

--the scale: four miles is, I think, way too big. The City of London in ~1600 had about 200,000 people and was known about 1 square mile. Granted, there weren't any dragons in London, but, all the same, those old world cities tend to be surprisingly compact.

--the farmland and outskirts: is there are reason it just stops where it does? I would expect the farms to just keep going, unless there's some reason not to (eg difficult terrain), with villages dotted around between them (interesting bit of info: in parts of Italy, where the settlements are of medieval origin, it is usually possible to walk from one village to the next in about 30 minutes. Therefore a map on this scale should include a handful of villages, if you are aiming for medieval realism (again, dragons may change things).

--suburbs: another aspect of medieval cities that is often overlooked, they usually had suburbs. All that means is that there would be houses and shops (and in Christian Europe, often also monasteries/almshouses/leper hospitals/churches) on the main roads out of town. Most major thoroughfares would also have a market where the road widens at the gate. See this picture of London (1572) from Braun and Hogenberg's Civitas Orbis Terrarum, for an example. The suburbs are officially defined as the areas outside the town walls, and in London at that time, they had already started to grow quite large. Nonetheless, the map I linked to is a pretty good indication. There are all kinds of reasons suburbs exist, that I can explain if you want me to.

--walls and gates: I partially agree with Ascension, but there's also a few points in which I disagree. This might take a while to explain, so bear with me.
----First, consider what walls are for: obviously, they are defensive structures, and thus Ascension is right to point out that gates are weak spots, and walls/gates/towers need to be manned (it is also why, during times of peace, maintenance on walls is often neglected, and they start being taken apart for building materials--illegally--and the ditch gets filled up with trash and vegetation).
----That said, one can also turn it around: in some ways, gates are strong points, because, as well as having a hole in the wall (a weakness) they usually also have a bastion above/around it, which may make them stronger than the surrounding parts of the wall.
----Also, do walls really need to be manned all the time? And is that so expensive, anyway? It is very unlikely in the non-magical medieval era for an army to launch a surprise attack on a city. The Citizens will be warned long in advance of the enemy's approach, and therefore only need to worry about security when the enemy gets close. I can only imagine, with dragons (presumably able to fly) receiving prior warning would be that much quicker/easier.
----Other uses of walls: as well as being defensive, walls serve an important economic function. Gates are a great way for a city to make a bit of extra cash, by charging a toll for people entering/exiting the town. That is, in fact, on the of the main reasons suburbs exist: for people who cannot/will not pay the toll, and therefore live outside (where land is often cheaper, also: hence, suburbs tended to be particularly good for poorer people). It is also why the markets exist outside gates--traders who don't want to pay extra to get into the city, instead flog their wares outside the gates.
----Additionally, walls can have legal, social, cultural effects. Many towns defined their legal/administrative limits by the circuit of the walls (an important factor when considering, for example, the jurisdiction of laws and guilds). The wall could be used to define 'us' and 'them' (Londoners in the 16th century, for example, tended to think along the lines of 'inside the walls is London, outside the walls is the rest of England'). This aspect of walls, however, while interesting (I think) is perhaps less useful.
----Length of walls: a city will usually try to make its walls as short as possible. The reasons, I think, are fairly obvious: less cost to build, and easier to defend. At the moment, your walls are not improbably large, considering the areas that they are protecting.
----So, getting back to your city: I would say that you should have a single circuit of walls (with a ditch/moat, if you want), gates at every major thoroughfare from this city to the rest of the nation (along with the suburbs I mentioned), and smaller gates (called posterns) at points where access is important (eg. to reach the farms, or allow troops to sally out).

--streams and rivers: one of the things I really like about your map so far is that you have included lesser streams/rivers. Often, I think, they get ignored. That said, small rivers often get covered over in the course of a city's history. At first, streams are where people dump their waste; they also make clear paths of movement (i.e. people walking up and down the stream bank, houses built parallel to the water course). Over time, they get covered over and turned into sewers underneath, and roads above. Examples: Rome (Cloaca Maxima), and, again, London (many buried rivers in London, such as the Fleet, Walbrook, and Tyburn).

--streets I: your street layout isn't too bad. You have avoided the crazy spaghetti mistake that many people make. I suppose my first point about the streets is that, if you take my advice about the scale of this city, your street layout is going to be a bit out of whack with a smaller size.

--streets II: also, it is always important to remember that major roads are larger than others because they get more traffic or have higher prestige. Therefore, if you have traders coming from out of town and heading to the docks; large groups of people going to and from church/theatre/markets/castle; important people (kings, emperors, Popes, city officials, triumphant generals) making big processions, they'll usually go from one site to another (Castle to Cathedral being a common one).

--streets III: your lesser streets, I think, look a bit too regular. What that means is, while a grid-like layout is not necessarily bad, the streets should not, I think, be spaced quite so evenly; nor should they be so constant across the whole city--in any one area, you'll have grid-like shapes, open spaces, alleys, streets hitting at odd angles; you usually will not have curves, although a small number, placed judiciously can be alright. It is a hard thing to get right, and so I recommend you look at some pictures of historic cities (the pictures are the first I found on Google Images, but the cities were selected because I think they are perhaps the most relevant--i.e. coastal, medieval, temperate, and/or large):
----Dubrovnik, Croatia
----Naples, Italy
----Marseilles, France
----Istanbul, Turkey
----Valencia, Spain, and this one to get a sense of the relationship of the old town and the sea (please ignore the arrow on map II)
----Genoa, Italy
----Stockholm, Sweden (big file)
note that of the above maps, many have grown beyond their original boundaries, and some have undergone major post-medieval changes (I think Marseilles, for example, has probably changed a lot). Dubrovnik is probably the best for historic accuracy.

--streets IV: lastly for the streets (and this may only be relevant if you are planning on depicting buildings) my statement that Azelor quoted (thanks, Azelor, by the way) is also an important factor. That quote came from a thread for a WIP city here at CG called Nostapyrax, by fifty. You can see the thread here. If you plan on including buildings, I recommend you check out fifty's work, since it is among the best examples of fantasy city mapping I've seen in a long while (from a historic realism point of view, and an artistic quality point of view).

EDIT: Also, I completely agree with Larb's comments. She's completely right about the farmland, and the twisty alleys.

Anyway, I think that is everything I have to say for now. Hope you find it helpful; don't be discouraged. I am looking forward to seeing another update.

THW

[Larb]

I didn't mention walls because there aren't any actually marked on the map although we can clearly see the city limits. I can picture where an outer wall could be and I can imagine where an older, original town wall would also be (running between the main river and up to that smaller brook - I imagine one of those streets there might be called "wall street" or "old wall street"). I agree if there is an overall outer wall it would likely just have two major gates and perhaps three smaller ones.

One of the biggest things that stops me from commenting on anything but obviously implausible streetplans and such in fantasy maps is we don't know the context. We just know that this is a fantasy city so we don't know the history or what came before or how plots are divided up or whether huge areas of old timber buildings were torn down and rebuilt in stone due to city ordnances, or what the building phases were, or what the urban planning policy or cultural traditions are like or were like, etc. And I've seen enough RL historic city maps with a weird variety of streetplans to think "it looks ok" or "we can probably find something that looked similar". =P

I agree the size seems a bit big for a population of 60,000 though. I would imagine this city is more like 150,000 people. Size tends to be a more practical matter - you need to walk or drag a cart from A to B in the absence of decent transport routes and methods. Like canals. They can make a big different but can also change the overall footprint of the city.

(Trivia regarding scale - Ancient Rome at it's height was about three miles across from the porta ostiensis to the porta solaria, with a population of up to a million - but many lived in densely populated apartment buildings (literally). There were many cities with populations over 50,000 and 100,000 during the ancient and medieval period - particularly throughout the middle east and in asia - but I don't know how big they were in terms of size).

[sapphireLight]

Wow! Thank you all so much for your suggestions. I now have a lot of good information. I'm going to rework some things to make it look more like a decent sized medieval city, fix the farmland, and post another update soon. Like I said, I'm totally new to this, so I really appreciate the help.

[Wingshaw]

I didn't mention walls because there aren't any actually marked on the map although we can clearly see the city limits. I can picture where an outer wall could be and I can imagine where an older, original town wall would also be (running between the main river and up to that smaller brook - I imagine one of those streets there might be called "wall street" or "old wall street"). I agree if there is an overall outer wall it would likely just have two major gates and perhaps three smaller ones.

I wrote that stuff about walls in response to Ascension's comments. I also noted the absence of walls marked, but figured it was a safe bet to assume there are meant to be walls. It may be of general interest to other city mappers, anyway. I agree with you, Larb, about where the old town might be, by the way: I think it may have started just to the left of the castle, in the bump in the river, and then expand, as you say, towards the stream north (?) of it.

Regarding gates: two major and three smaller? London had 5 major (6 including the Bridge) and 3 smaller. The number is, above all, based on matters of origin/destination and utility.

One of the biggest things that stops me from commenting on anything but obviously implausible streetplans and such in fantasy maps is we don't know the context. We just know that this is a fantasy city so we don't know the history or what came before or how plots are divided up or whether huge areas of old timber buildings were torn down and rebuilt in stone due to city ordnances, or what the building phases were, or what the urban planning policy or cultural traditions are like or were like, etc. And I've seen enough RL historic city maps with a weird variety of streetplans to think "it looks ok" or "we can probably find something that looked similar". =P

You're right that context is crucial. Topography, history, culture, climate etc all have an impact on urban layout, and, in their absence, it can be difficult to make very detailed comments about street patterns or city layouts. That said, I do believe that there are general principles that can be applied based on common sense and logic: desert cities tend to have narrow streets, to provide protection from the sun; roads follow paths of movement and are often shaped/influenced by topography. When I mention these things, it is in the context of 'here's how real world cities (usually) behave; vary it according to your own world-building/fantastic requirements.'

I should perhaps explain that I am a uni-qualified urban planner, historian, and archaeologist; I wrote my dissertation on late medieval London (hence the reason it appears so often in my comments); and I have spent a decade studying these things (although there's still a lot for me to learn, and I probably make many mistakes).

(Trivia regarding scale - Ancient Rome at it's height was about three miles across from the porta ostiensis to the porta solaria, with a population of up to a million - but many lived in densely populated apartment buildings (literally). There were many cities with populations over 50,000 and 100,000 during the ancient and medieval period - particularly throughout the middle east and in asia - but I don't know how big they were in terms of size).

I don't know what your source is, Larb, but I'm afraid I have to disagree with you (I'm probably feeling rather argumentative today). I think the distance you give for Rome is misleading. Rome and Ostia were separate settlements, like Athens and Piraeus, London and Westminster, Istanbul and Galata (although they have grown into each other now). I did a quick measure of Rome and Paris on Google Earth, and, interestingly, the medieval extent of both cities was about the same: 1.6 miles (~2.57km). Istanbul really is a lot bigger: ~3.4 miles across, and it was one of the largest cities in the medieval era--I think it may have reached 1 million under Ottoman rule (NOTE: these are lengths across the city, not areas).

There is a fact of urban history that relates to city size and is remarkably consistent over time: the size of a city usually does not expand to more than 1 hours travel from one side to the other. Thus, at a time when most people could only walk, cities were small; railways allowed larger cities, but only in limited directions; cars have allowed cities to grow much bigger again.

Anyway, I'll shut up now. I just find all this so fascinating.

THW

[Larb]

Sorry, Porta means Gate. The city gate of Porta Ostiensis to the Porta Solaria, which I arbitrarily picked as rough average across the city. If you look on any of the many maps of ancient rome is about three miles. So take this one for example. I haven't measured it exactly, just judged it, but you can see what I mean.

I know Ostia itself was further away, as was Portus. =P

Yes, you're right, cities were always small for practical reasons until changes in transport made movement easier. Canals, coaches, and rail saw big expansions in city size. Then trams and the automobile after that.

[Wingshaw]

Sorry, Porta means Gate. The city gate of Porta Ostiensis to the Porta Solaria, which I arbitrarily picked as rough average across the city. If you look on any of the many maps of ancient rome is about three miles. So take this one for example. I haven't measured it exactly, just judged it, but you can see what I mean.

I know Ostia itself was further away, as was Portus. =P

Fair enough. My mistake.

THW