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Houses are all in south of main street. Now its time to work on the north side of main street.
I love reading your thought processes as you grow this city -it's really inspiring
I also like that you're not afraid to change things as necessary.
One thing I don't understand is why you put in the roads first, and then built the city around those. Is that a creative decision? If so, why?
Thank you for the comments, Rochnan. The first thing I did was layout the basic geography. I knew the city was located at the convergence of two major rivers which bordered the town east and west. The next thing I did was determine the location of the palace. Then I determined the location of the market place. I wanted several ring-roads semi-circling the market place. I knew the Old Highway was running north-south to the west of the city. After that I determined the logical route of the major roads. By major roads I mean the ones that link settlements and the ones connecting key locations inside the city. I determined there should be a wide main road between the market place and the palace, and another running east-west through the city. In the network around the market place I inserted some cross streets to establish blocks of approximately 200 to 300 feet on ends. This was based on the block measurement of several cities, primarily Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany. After I began placing buildings, the locations of additional streets became apparent, either because of local routing or for aesthetic reasons. I want the road network to have an organic appearance as is typical in most medieval European cities.
After I did the expansion overlay, I added some road where old city walls would have been and roads would have run beside them.
For me, the roads help define the space and give me a clearer vision of what the city should look like. Part of the process is trying to think about what was there before the city was there and what came to be as the city became established and grew.
One thing I have learned, what looks right when you are zoomed in on an area working on it, sometimes is out-of-scale when you look at the city as a whole. I am learning to zoom back out an check my work periodically and try to catch it early on.
Another note on the roads. After taking measurement of several cities with surviving medieval sections I observed that the main roads tend to be 15-18 meters (49-59 feet) wide between opposing buildings. Side streets were between 6-9 meters (19.7-29.5 feet) wide. Alleys were around 4 meters (13 feet) wide. Based on this I am making the main roads 50 foot wide, the major side streets 20 feet wide, other side streets 16 feet wide, and the dirt roads 10 feet wide (for the most part). Google Earth is a great research tool.
A page from the history of Melekhir.
King Melek assumed the throne when he was twelve years old. In the second year of his reign, a fire burned down a large section of the city and took the lives of many of its citizens. In response to this, the king decreed that a large reservoir be constructed at the foot of the central hill to the north of the city and an underground channel be constructed to route water from the reservoir to the center of the city. He also decreed that a fire brigade be formed and a building constructed at the heart of the city to house them with watch towers to allow them to keep watch on the city. In addition to this, he commanded his stewards to oversee the digging of numerous ponds throughout the city to serve as emergency water sources in case of fire.
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I added some houses to the SW of the large lake and some more warehouses at the main port (south of the city). I also added a fire station at the intersection of the two main roads that spans both of them. It has a watchtower that looks on toward the market area and a taller watchtower that watches over the entire city. Water from the reservoir is routed to this station through clay pipes buried underground. Insided the firehouse are several carts and wagon with water tanks and living quarters for the Fire Watch.
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Added housing in vicinity of main port; added road to main port with housing along it; added more housing west of large lake; added hilltop shrine where sacrifices are thrown into the fiery pit. Added building SW of lakeside housing with large building in center. This is the location of some of the seedier (still to be determined) establishments. Still have a lot of construction to complete. It is a great time to be a contractor in Melekhir!
Thank you for writing out that bit of (thought)process, this could help me, and others, out when planning cities.
I also wonder if King Melek will have a Vetinari*-like effect on the development of the city workings. (*the Discworld one.)
I'm glad to share my thought process. Hopefully it is helpful.
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Finished adding buildings to market district. Redid the "seedy" area.
Hi Texas Jake, I've been watching this thread for some time now and let me just say -
First, this is an incredibly impressive and detailed map. But even more impressive is the breadth of your world-building that goes with it.
Second, something has been bothering me about the scale of the map for a while, and I've been having difficulty putting my finger on it. You wrote earlier about the research you did into London, Jerusalem and Rothenburg, so clearly you're going for a medieval city. Medieval cities are characterised by their extremely high intra-mural density (intra-mural = area inside the walls): the land inside the walls is valuable, and so people will build on every part of it that they can. They're not going to worry about building codes or planning regulations.
If you have a poor district, it'll be built up into a messy warren of poor-quality apartment blocks where people on the upper floors are overlooking the people on the floors below. The buildings in a poor neighbourhood aren't necessarily smaller than those in another part of the city, just more crowded together and haphazardly built. Also, many craftsmen require an area of open space to work - carpenters, masons, dyers, brewers etc. In medieval cities - especially cities like London - this space would take the form of a yard behind the craftsman's house. Over time, as land became more valuable and craftwork less valuable, those craftsmen would sacrifice a portion of their yard to create a new apartment that they could rent (the rental money offsetting the loss of usable yard-space). The result, once again, is a densely built-up area, where there really isn't a lot of space remaining.
The point I'm getting at is: A. the scale of some of your buildings seems quite disproportionate (you have buildings that have a vast footprint and others that have very tiny ones) and B. the density of your city is extremely low. There shouldn't really be much space between your buildings (although courtyards and lightwells are a good thing to include).
This map of Rome - a city that has kept much if its medieval character - shows what I mean: dense blocks with very little space left behind, and that space almost exclusively reserved for streets and piazzas. This map is also of Rome, and is useful because it shows the individual plot boundaries, and the ratio of space that the buildings occupy on each plot.
I hope you don't take any of this the wrong way: I'm only hoping to provide pointers that may help you make this very impressive map even better.
Wingshaw
Formerly TheHoarseWhisperer
I appreciate your comments, Wingshaw. On the maps I have studied from the medieval period the buildings are closely packed in the city center and then become less dense as you move away from it. On many of the maps you encounter houses with fields as you get close to the outer walls. This observation was not what I expected. Jerusalem is a city that has been historically much more densely packed than most cities from the medieval time, packing higher population counts in less land area. If I was modeling the city strictly after Jerusalem it would be much more densely packed and have more of an eastern character. The European cities became more dense heading into the Renaissance and more so during the industrial revolution, I believe. The invention of the light bulb also aided the ability to build denser cities as natural lighting was not as important. London became very densely populated heading into the later part of the middle ages achieving population levels which were rare for European cities in the era.
I have made the buildings in the city center of larger scale. They mainly house businesses with would also include living spaces for the owner and family. The smaller houses are for laborers close to areas where the work, such as the docks. As the occupants become more affluent the houses become larger. The less affluent houses are single story shacks. The building in the central part of the city that are closely packed have shared courtyards in the center which is a common feature in most the medieval European cities I have studied.
After the fire that destroyed much of the city, during the expansion by King Melek (the Builder) the walls were greatly expanded. This opened up much more land area and has prevented the necessity to build as densely as a city like Jerusalem.
Well, there are my thoughts and reasoning, right or wrong. I do appreciate you comments. When I started the map I was leaning more towards the density that you suggested, but as I started looking at old maps, revised my perspective and ended up greatly increasing the land area of the city. In retrospect, I would have increased it somewhat less, but doubling the scale was the easiest conversion with what I already had and led to a fourfold increase in land area.
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