OpenGeofiction
I’ve been mapping Dunwic in its new spot for over a year now and I have to say I’m really happy with how my neighbourhoods are turning out, especially the city centre and areas north of the river.
Although I’ve been doing a lot of detailing my next plan is to start fleshing out the shape and limits of the city and when that’s done there won’t be much scope for making any major changes. That’s why I want to get people’s feedback on whether they think the shape of Dunwic is realistic and what kind of things they would expect to see in the surrounding area.
https://opengeofiction.net/#map=13/56.3649/20.0500
There won’t really be any traditional suburbia due to the political and planning history of the city. Instead Dunwic will be quite physically small but dense all the way to the edges like some Dutch cities.
https://opengeofiction.net/#map=17/56.40719/20.05437 < this is the northern extent of Dunwic and how I envisage many of the outer neighborhoods looking.
Discussion
Comment from zhenkang on 13 February 2019 at 09:49
Though the city looks abit incomplete, I still like the details in the city so far. Great work.
Honestly, what I expect for the outer sections is probably farming areas or large industrial areas. For farming is because there is a lot of land to cultivate crops for the city population, (plus propaganda for visiting tourists to show how socialism works and feeds everyone). Favtories is because they can work to full capacity instead of having to deal with certain complains of smog in the city centre. But then, just realised you want denser neughbourhoods at the outside. Even then, the factories are able to employ many of them.
I still prefer, as part of socialist mapping, more apartments. Though making endless rectangles will be very boring.
Comment from Rustem Pasha on 13 February 2019 at 11:52
The northern part of the city looks like typical socialist planning but much denser. I think while the low density areas were in reality justified by several purposes (like creation of common public space), the dense building placement in Myrcia is justified as well due to size of the whole country.
What concerns me more is the southern part of the city. While it’s undoubtly good looking, it seems it was very big before socialists got into planning because all of it doesn’t look like centrally planned areas. This is not neccesarily wrong but it is how it looks. Anyway great work.
Also may I ask what are you going to do with the former Dunwic on the other side of the island? Will you somewhat reuse it?
Comment from computerfan0 on 13 February 2019 at 19:09
I think you should connect up the main roads outside the city.
Comment from Marcello on 13 February 2019 at 20:43
This is like Rembrandt asking tips on painting…. very demotivating for us common mappers ;-)
The only thing that makes me (tram fan) wonder is the entries / ramps to the tram subway network. A number look pretty tight, certainly inside the city walls (for example the Eagel St. curved ramp - would there really be that much space in a medieaval city center ?).
keep up the good work !
Marcello
Comment from Portopolis on 14 February 2019 at 07:13
One thing, I want to say about sprawl, ad socialist planning/Netherlands in general. Amsterdam might not sprawl in the traditional sense, but it definitely sprawls, same with all the dutch cities. Once you get into municipalities with 300,000 or so, Sprawl through commuter towns/ high density of villages shows.
Maybe 1.6 million or so live in Amsterdam area at that zoom while about 1.2 million live in the area in Austin at that zoom. Amsterdam is significantly denser than Austin though, so how does only 1.5 million or so more people live in this area. This simply happens because Amsterdam sprawls through commuter towns. Any large town in Europe even with socialist planning if it hits about 500,000 point it will have loads of heavily developed towns immediately adjacent to it that will make it sprawl. No city really just ends in high-density apartments (unless of course it is in a low density country/area), their is normally a high density of villages and towns as well that gradually decrease in number and population as you leave the core city. This is because a certain density of farming is needed to support historic towns and this high density farming allowed more farmers to bring their goods to the city, hence it could easily fall into sprawl category as things like villages developed to support cities. You would need either large sprawl or some sort of anti-village hysteria to wipe those historic commuter villages/towns of the map. Hence Amsterdam ends at 850,000 people in that link but due to commuter towns and such the Greater Randstad area and Metro Amsterdam has 5 million+ urban residents, and another million depending on how you define it, roughly the same area Houston takes to reach that population. https://tile.opengeofiction.net/util/map_scale.html?map=OSM/11.250173532338252/30.31415/-97.75335&map2=OSM/x/52.40890/4.83518&pxpt=0.277&scale=200000
Utrecht a city very close to Dunwic in size is the same, Metro is twice it’s size and 1 million people live within a 30 minute commute of it. I’m not saying you need to have tons of sprawl, but as you have a really high quality of mapping you should be careful to not have the city end where the city ends, things like railway, large roads/boats will allow the city to look more like a spiderweb, and a circular Dunwic doesn’t look to realistic, also like all cities make sure the sprawl isn’t uniform very few cities are straight up circles, even though that’s what they try to be. For example you shouldn’t be able to walk 30 minutes out of the city core.
Comment from louis_walker on 15 February 2019 at 00:29
Your mapping is beautiful. https://opengeofiction.net/#map=19/56.35698/20.04992 is like visual poetry. Such smooth curves!
I’m excited to see someone mapping without sprawl. Urban planning IRL was a patrician disaster, so I like the idea that in the OGF universe, Myrcia did a better job of planning its cities. This does mean you’ve set up a challenge for yourself; I have thought a lot about this in Al-Kaza, since I want it to have fairly compact cities (no cul-de-sac-landias, thanks). But I have trouble imagining what a city without significant sprawl would look like on a larger scale, because it’s so prevalent. You’re doing something different, which means you get to(/have to) invent it as you go!
I think Portopolis is right in the sense that there should be some ‘feathering’ of land use, not just an immediate transition from residential to agricultural. I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with!