So, I am currently mapping the area of Babelictown (OGF version of Chinatown) in Xenica. This has required me to move some buildings and start over in a new section of town.

The main architectural component of Babelictown (an area settled in the 1950s-60s by Babelic immigrants from Commonia, possibly Meilanese ones too) is the shophouses. These are somewhat inspired by the row house architecture in Malaysia and Singapore, and indeed when I’ve been mapping this, I’ve been using Singapore’s Chinatown as my base. If you want to imagine what these would look like, they have a narrow front, and usually two floors, with the first floor being a business, and the second floor being a living area (however, many of these in Xenica are no longer inhabited).

So, building row houses requires long rectangular built-up blocks. However, I feel that I have not got the dimensions quite right, or that it is not straight enough / parallel to the road. How would I fix this?

[zoom in to Level 19 to see the architecture]

Well, now my small tropical nation of Xenica has existed on the map for over a year… However, during this time, I feel as if there have been no cohesive ideas for how it will work out.

The plan of Xenica has changed shape a few times. Originally, it was a Singapore-esque city state, full of skyscrapers and modern architecture. I have had to tone down that vision, and now Xenica is more similar to a small Caribbean/Indian Ocean nation, with some urban influence, but much less than before.

Unfortunately, this ‘hopping’ has led to a place, which, at least in my view, doesn’t quite make sense. One user (I think it was Isleño?) referred to the place as looking more like a lot of towns or cities put in one, rather than a unified mass. If you look on the map, there are very awkwardly shaped streets and housing estates, the areas of vegetation and rainforest look like they were put there as an afterthought (I had to strip away motorways and whatnot since ‘nature always comes first’), and using Potlatch 2 probably doesn’t help much in this case.

So, looking at the CBD and into surrounding areas, what would you suggest I should do with Xenica? I certainly believe my territory has much potential.

As the map below would show, I am currently in the middle of a project: to essentially design the Central Business District of the urban region of Xenica. (It doesn’t officially have a name, most locals just call it ‘the city’).

My progress so far has been quite slow, due to mapping most things out at level 19, where I am adding buildings, paths, and green spaces. However, that is not my concern at the moment. My concern is the street grid.

As you can see, the streets in the centre of the grid have been mapped out using the ‘tertiary road’ classification, and are the same width: however, I don’t feel like this cuts it for me. My main inspiration for this project is the centre of Saint-Denis, in the French Overseas Department of Reunion, which features buildings arranged in a similar manner to Xenica: it was a choice made on account of the fact that Reunion is a similar size, and population to Xenica. However, the street grid features different widths of road, and the centre of the street grid does NOT use ‘tertiary’ classification.

So, which classification should I use then? Is it ‘minor road’, or ‘residential road’? Or is it something else?

-Jake