Since Dungeon World emphasizes mapping… 😀
Originally shared by Praveen Kulkarni
Historical Urban Location Factors
Historically, two factors impacted the location of cities; their defense and commercial capabilities. Defense is more a site issue since it relies on a defensible physical location while commerce is more a situation issue that expands the opportunities of a site by putting it in a wider framework of commercial relations.
http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/content.html
Improvements in engineering capabilities later on the industrial revolution would make the advantage of rivers for commercial sites of lesser relevance, particularly with the development of rail and highway systems. Still, once a location has been selected and capitalized upon, the city will remain even if the initial location factors are no longer highly relevant. Thus, a large share of the world’s urban agglomerations were set using some of the above location factors.
To put it plainly, if we rebooted right now most of these cities would be located almost anywhere else first.
(http://edge.org/response-detail/23860)
#CulturalTechnicalDebt #Edge