OpenGeofiction
I’m in the process of reading China Miéville’s fascinating novel “The City & The City”, which is also adapted to a TV series. The plot takes place in a fictional twin city somewhere in South-Eastern Europe. The two cities Besźel and Ul Qoma have grown into each other in a weird and complex way, but they never really merge, and the residents have learned to see only their own city and instinctively ignore e.g. bypassers who are officially in the other one.
I can’t help thinking that an OGF version of the idea would be exiting. Obviously, the original idea as such is both unmappable (how to map a tree which is partly in one city and partly in another?) and too sci-fi from versimilitude point of view. But some kind of complex mixture of two cities – perhaps with two overlapping but unconnected road networks – could perhaps be cool to create as a community project. After all, there are weird things in the real world, too – it would be more or less a combination of Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog and Cold War Berlin.
This is just a wild idea I wanted to share in case anyone takes interest!
(Side note: It is interesting that the name of one of the two cities “Ul Qoma” seems to mirror the Finnish word “ulkomaa” = “the abroad”, but I can’t find any verification that it is intentional. I thought at first that the word was an invention of the Finnish translator, and I was astonished to see that the same name is used in the original English version of the book.)
Discussion
Comment from Luciano on 9 October 2018 at 14:20
Nicosia, Cyprus, is another real-world example of a divided city, as is pre-annexation Jerusalem. Also, Tijuana/San Diego, but the straightline border is less intriguing in the way being discussed. Perhaps, if Seoul keeps growing northward, and Gaeseong keeps growing south, and North Korea and South Korea fail to come to some kind of accord, then you’d see a real-world example of this kind of development, as the two cities touch at the DMZ (they already almost do, at the DMZ).
I also find this concept interesting. The first step is to create some kind of divided country. Some users have experimented with that but so far not much has been done that I find interesting or impressive.
Comment from Yuanls on 9 October 2018 at 15:09
https://opengeofiction.net/#map=14/52.2704/127.2875
The border between Agarderia and Karamsk shares some similarities, and there are a few (yet unmapped) places up north that are divided between the two respective countries. Another interesting real world example are the towns and cities on the US/Mexico border.