Town/City Maps: Roads or Houses?

[davoush]

Hello,

I am currently trying to make a map which is both functional and aesthetically pleasing. I am using it for a novel I am writing set in an ancient city (I won't give away exactly where just yet). The city is approximately 3 km in diameter with some main religious areas and large buildings. I am using the map largely to plot where and how my characters move about, so marking the main roads clearly is a must.

However, I see some maps which draw only roads, and other types of map which depict individual houses. For my map, I obviously cannot depict each individual house as the population is roughly 50,000. If I were to draw only roads, should I include all of them even in the very densely populated parts? If I include every minor alley and road, it will end up looking like a mass of grey when viewed from a normal distance. If I draw houses/buildings, I feel I am not doing justice to the scale and population size.

What would your ideas/comments/recommendations be? I am leaning towards a representation which has the main roads as well as minor roads, but not every single one.

Thanks.

[Meshon]

One of my favourite big city maps is of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar. You can probably find it online. I once did a pretty detailed big city map, and for that I drew all the roads, wide main roads first, then using narrower lines I went down to secondary roads. Then I drew in major and important structures as individual buildings, finishing up with the rest the buildings as outlines all jammed together. The alleys just came naturally from the spaces left over.

I'm in the middle of moving right now, so I can't link to the map I did (only my phone for awhile, no computer) but if you look in my gallery under Dryad's Lair you can see the final product.

Sent from my SGH-I747M using Tapatalk

[UrbaNick6]

Quite a quandary, perhaps throw in some of the larger buildings too. Just in solid block form. It may help indicated what roads are more important, and why they are important.