Cailltir - Capital City of Araniell

[Caenwyr]

Hi all!

It's been a while since my last thread, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working. As you can probably imagine, I've been working on the exact same world I've done all my other maps about. I kinda feel my "Twin Kingdoms" map is finished now (wow, I should make a finished map thread, shouldn't I?), and now I'm going in deeper detail. My current project: a city map of the capital of the eastern kingdom: Cailltir. (don't worry about the castle in the lower right hand corner - it's a WIP!)

Cailltir-1.jpg

Cailltir is a large city, especially to late medieval standards: it's about 4.8 km² (1.9 sq mi) in area and, with a population density similar to London's in the late 14th century (106 people per acre according to this source, which is about 26,000 per km²), should boast a population of roughly 126,000 people.

Now, I'm not sure I will keep these figures, as they all depend on the scale of the map. At the moment 1 pixel equals 1 meter. However, if for some reason or other I decide to double that (1 px = 2 m), it would mean a quadrupling of the area and thus the population, clocking in at a nice half million. Which doesn't sound bad at all for the capital of such a large kingdom. Still, as it is now, I prefer to keep the official scale of 1 meter per pixel - unless of course you think that doesn't fit with the dimensions of the city blocks, street widths etc etc etc!

The way the map looks now, is actually based on a Pyrandons fabulous tutorial. However, while he obviously succeeded in drawing in decent-looking alleys and backyards, my insight in scale and reality is apparently somewhat off. Most of the building blocks in the map above turned out to be only about 20 meters wide, there's only 2 street widths on the entire map, sharp corners are all rounded on the outside due to the roundedness of the brush and... well, there's tons of other things wrong with the dimensions and style of the map as well.

So I basically decided to start over. And this time, I took a peak at feanaaro's amazing B&W city map. That was the style I wanted.

Now, since Cailltir is a fairly big city, and considering the massive scale of my map (1 meter per pixel, remember?) I thought it best not to do it all in one humongous file. I've started creating submaps for every district, beginning with the oldest part of the town. This is what I have at the moment:

Cailltir-2.1.jpg

What do you think? Am I on the right track, scale and roadshapewise? If so, I can continue with the rest of the districts.