[WIP] Ringstadt - Progress of a city intermixed with questions
I am starting this thread for a few reasons:
- I want to showcase my work, I hope to get feedback and some recognition.
- To ask questions and resolve issues I encounter during the creative process.
- Having something out in the open will hopefully motivate me to work on it more dutifully and finally get somewhere.
With that said, here's the gist:
The city below is currently called 'Ringstadt' this is a WIP-name stemming from the earliest ideas about the city - namely it being surrounded by a circular wall (a 'Ringmauer' in German).
The city's gone through its fair share of iterations regarding how it came to be.
Originally when my setting still had a high-fantasy pitch (magic based on literally burning metals/ores, dwarves, elves, etc.) it was located next to a mountain in a marshy plain. The wall had been built by the dwarves to fill the whole thing with water washing through the mountains. They would then let the water evaporate so they could mine the precious metals without any much effort of mining new tunnels.
Later when I dropped the high-fantasy and decided to go for a more gritty and down-to-earth setting (mind airships though, because airships are awesome and I definitely need them for my fiction), I dropped all the magic & dwarves. The city got a lake next to it and it was decided that it starts off as a small mining outpost that would later grow into the most important city of the three surrounding regions (small more-or-less self-governed areas that bound together to form The Koalition).
The city itself would thus start off as a mining outpost founded near the lake due to a) the rich ore veins inside the mountains, and b) the proximity to a waterway that would make it easy to transport off all the mined ores.
From there it quickly started to grow, as the veins reached way deeper into the mountains than prospectors had though. More shafts would open and a smelting industry would form along the lake-shore. The flow of ores would soon subside and be replaced by a flow of refined metals, shipments of coal would start arriving day & night to only just still the hunger of the smelters.
In time the workshops and manufactories that settled here as a means to fix and build more machinery and tools for the workers would take off as people moved here to take part in the iron-rush.
In the meanwhile the town grew rich from export-taxes they started to impose on every shipment leaving the now bustling harbour. They decided to invest into the future by designing a circular grid of streets to support expansion.
In order to being able of providing the growing industry and the people they hoped to lure into the growing town with access to fresh water, they took it upon them to start mega-project: A circular wall stretching a good 7 kilometers from the far mountain-front towards & around the harbour-area, enclosing what they imagined the city might grow to. On top it an artificial channel, fed by a freshwater lake further up the mountains, able to provide as much water as anyone could ever need.
Anyways, that's approximately how I imagine the history as of now. There's a few issues like finding a really good reason (other than huge circular walls being my soft-spot) for building the thing the fashion it is built (currently I imagine it some 30m tall and some 12-16m wide at its base, with room inside of it for corridors, barracks, storage, shops, cannons, and so forth) - I will soon add a cross-section on the right side of the dashed line.
Currently visible is a provisional road-grid with main thoroughfares (thicker, darker) and secondary thoroughfares (smaller, lighter). More streets will definitely be added between these main roads wiggling and worming between houses, workshops, parks. There's 4 major and 4 minor gates in the wall.
To the left is a rough draft of the harbour-area walled off by artificially made strips of land, on which the wall is built. There's 2 major and 2 minor arches through which ships can pass into the secured harbour.
Along the mountains there's a few mining shafts marked. On top there's a roughly triangular area of massive landscaping. The material removed from there was used to create the artifical landmasses on which the wall is built through the lake. The area is now planned to become a mining-hub with mountains of excavated material, a railyard and some workshops. The area is dug into the mountain, removing the originally sloped mountainside (think of a surface mine / quarry.
To the right there's a placeholder for a monastery / cloister / brewery.
My current goal is to get a feeling for the size I am going for. I decided to give the wall a diameter of 1 mile because it produced a circumference of almost exactly 10 kilometers - two values I can easily work with. When deciding on the street-layout I went for a 5-sided symmetry as I wanted something distinctive and different to the classic 4 cardinal directions.
When placing the streets and deciding on distances between main- and secondary thoroughfares I overlayed my drawing area with a google-maps screenshot of a city near where I live. I know the city and thus can get a better feeling for the approximate distances I am working with.
As of now I am mainly trying to get a feeling for the sizes of everything. I am spending time looking at maps of cities, searching for data on sizes and heights of buildings around the 1700s to 1850s (late medieval to early industrial), sizes of cars & trucks, widths of roads, make-up of households, etc. - If anyone's got good sources on that sort of data or if you've got way better ideas (which I desperately hope you have), I would be glad if you'd share them with me
Ringstadt_Concept_wip_2017_06_08_2015.jpg
The mining-town become walled manufacturing hub - WIP-Name: Ringstadt
The Ringstadt is situated somewhere inside The Koalition Area (marked with a 'K' on the below map).
world_digitalized_240316.jpg
The northern half/continent of my world without a name yet.
I using Clip Studio Paint Pro running on a Surface Pro 4 tablet computer drawing thus 'by hand' (on a digital canvas mind me); my canvas is usually sized A4 @ 1200 dpi. The uploaded images are JPGs capped to about 2MB in size. I use raster graphics for drafts & sketches (pretty much all I did so far on the city) and vector graphics for the clean versions (the world map).
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