You know what would be handy for Planarch Codex? An oracle of urban topographies and architectures.
* Winding spaghetti streets like Istanbul
* A tidy grid of steel and brick buildings like Manhattan
* Broad boulevards like Moscow
* Piled-up shanties and mud paths like a Brazillian favela
Can anyone add any others?
Half-buried temples surrounded by peasant huts like old Rome.
Enclosed squares surrounded by shops and balconies like a big shopping mall.
Villas, houses with internal courtyards.
Underground earth ships, like in New Mexico
and then there’s Kowloon which is just a whole different level: http://www.visualnews.com/2011/01/05/kowloon-walled-city-pictures-and-cross-section/ (via tony dowler elsewhere)
Maze of canals and islands like Venice
Rings of walls within walls rising to a central citadel, like Minas Tirith
Open platforms in giant trees connected by rope bridges, like Lorien
Domed, hive-like archologies.
Small stone houses build one over the other whit narrow and dark streets like a medioval italian farmers castle:
http://www1.nital.it/uploads/ori/200904/gallery_49d8c77eb95a5_20090404VellanoPesciaPT003.jpg
http://foto.borghitoscani.com/articoli/Stiappa5.jpg
Floating village of boats, like Cat Ba (Vietnam)
Linear town, like Navy Pier (Chicago)
From Bioshock: Infinte – an aerial town built on interlocked baloon-supported platforms, accessible only by flight or tether-tower.
A Venice like city whit lava canals, acid canals or frozen canals.
Iacopo Benigni …frozen canals, and everyone skates everywhere.
BLDG BLOG is full of awesomeness for this. e.g.:
Honeycombed town, like the Caves of Nottingham (http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/caves-of-nottingham_11.html)
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/mine-plug.html
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/sailing-beneath-city.html
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/twisty-little-passages.html
Sandstone excavations, like Cappadocia.
Buildings built from stone protrusions like in Cappadocia. [edit: Oops, should have refreshed first]
Buildings built all on top on each other like in Santorini.
Underground cisterns like in Istanbul.
Houses with fallout shelters like in the 60’s.
Terrace houses, like in Ephesus.
Homes built into hillsides like in middle earth.
Amphitheaters like in Greece.
Substreets like in Chicago.
A maze of buildings sharing walls without streets between them, where you access your home by walking across other people’s rooftops.
Reshaping cities, like Dark City.
Cities carved IN mountains, like Mesa Verde.
Cities carved ON mountains, terraced like the Banaue Rice Terraces.
Cities carved out of landfills / junkyards.
Domed & pressurized settlements like the stereotypical Mars or Moon colonies.
Doomed and pasteurized cities like in hell.
So that’s why hell is so hot! The devil is pasteurizing the sin out of the dead…
Cities buried under heavy snow like in Canada.
Ditto for sand in the Sahara.
City with moving sidewalks, like the Hong Kong Mid-Levels Escalator
Cities built upon the chains binding the devil?
City where all life happens in the streets and plazas, and private property is limited to a capsule-hotel-sized bed per person.
Sports cities like the Olympic/Superbowl village.
Cities that are churches like Vatican City.
Secret cities behind fences like Oak Ridge.
Cities that are nothing more than a series of pneumatic tubes. Dead ends are zoned for commerce, residence. Switches are the most valuable assets in the city.
Teleporter networks. Geography becomes meaningless.
Cities built on/out of the remains of behemoth creatures.
Imagine these huge lumbering things, worshipped by the people that colonized their carapace. After enough age or violence, their skeletons or shells or whatnot become vast necropolis/temples, the memory of the dead little god held fast by a city of devotees.
Ice caves, where the frost giants / rebels live.
Places like Chand Baori in India: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9tt9qotTR1qlobzqo1_500.jpg
You know, with access to elementals and djinn and efreets and the like, I would expect to see a beautiful desert oasis surrounded by glass palaces. Fluted crystal-clear towers more like instruments than battlements, playing music in the breeze. Enormous glass-domed observatories. Stained glass floors and walls.
City as a docked ship like a cruise liner/Floating Hospital.
The city as emergent market town. Diffused workers sell their goods and services at a regular appointed date in the city, but structures in the area have only recently founded.
Intentional and wholesale demolition like in 1944 Warsaw.
Slightly off format, but:
A city in negative, where earth elementals and Paracelsus’s gnomes live in sold rock spaces surrounded by walls of air.
Cities like Çatal Hüyük, every building sharing its walls with earlier buildings and with doors in the roof.
A necropolis, a city of the dead that acts as a graveyard, perhaps dominated by the vast tombs of the rulers and mazes of mausoleums.
A city built on top of a still-living earlier city, where each ascending level trades with those above and below.
The mounds of ruins of former cities, overgrown. Abandoned by the current inhabitants who eke out an existence on the lower slopes.
A city of nomads, population fluid and changing as new groups migrate in their yurts and wagon-temples.
A moving city, built on rails or vast wheels that lumbers on its course, bearing the inhabitants onward.
A city of steel and steam, elevated railways connecting tenements suspended above the forges and smoking metalworks.
A city with street placement drawn by lots, or bet on in complex games of chance. Or being remade by rival groups of urban renewalists, after the form of Crassus and Nero.
Slightly more on format:
Tiny neighborhoods, divided from each other by looming walls.
Large, self-sufficient walled compounds. The clients of patrons take shelter within.
Vast concrete mazes, like Roman concrete tenements designed by Le Corbusier.
Facades that reassemble themselves into new streets, like Samaris.
A city connected by elevated aqueducts rather than streets, with only tiny courtyards between buildings.
A city of many towers, like the Italian nobles’ tower houses.
Towers built on steep slopes and overlooks, like Himalayan star-shaped towers.
A city that is entirely one vast building, like Gormenghast.
A city that is mostly blank walls and empty rooms adorned with illusions.
A partially destroyed city rebuilt in a modernist style, with checkerboard neighborhoods and buildings clashing; Coventry Cathedral
A giant mimic-like creature serving as a neighborhood, or a whole city, reshaping itself to the whims of its inhabitants. Willpower forces the creature to respond to desires. When equal wills conflict over the layout, the city just eats both/all parties.
See Encounter At Farpoint and… some city in Planescape for examples.
matt greenfelder Also: Rifts Wormwood.
Ooh, conversation just sparked another idea. Suppose one of the planes that gets absorbed into Dis ceases to exist (thank you, Higgs Boson…) – the fundamental concepts that support the place are gone (its creator god got snuffed, whatever).
The parish crumbles, leaving an infinite chasm in the middle of Dis. Say hello to infinite balconies of cheap, chisled-out condos. Perfect for flight-capable residents.
And just what does Dis lay on top of? What are these ruins the chasm runs through? And while the hole is infinite, are the foundations of Dis also infinite? And what the hell is that I can hear slithering down there?
matt greenfelder super metal
Also, more mundanely, a radioactive crater with a circlet of slagged ruins.
Abandoned cities like Machu Picchu.