The story

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Entry posted by leftrightworld · October 12, 2014

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This city journal actually covers a region. I'm tired of the urban sprawl and the cookie cutter cities. The landscape of SimCity4 is a beautiful canvas to create a world, and so I'm creating my ideal world. I've developed a backstory of a region that is marked by a lack of roads. Obviously roads are integral, but I'm attempting to limit them and have all city connections be made up of rail, high speed rail, or water transport. I'll go over the cities individually or break them down into multiple posts. I've got a lot more to build, but here's the backstory to the region:

At the end of the 20th century, half of humanity had moved to the cities. By the mid-21rst century a huge majority crowded into urbanity. Along the way they forgot about where they came from, and nature was left behind. Sprawl bulldozed the forests and dammed the rivers. It destroyed the grasslands and flood plains. It drained the wetlands and left behind a shadow of a former landscape. Animal life was lost or left to relic parks. People struggled between themselves for the limited resources they were left with, and biological and nuclear warfare killed billions. The survivors remained in a world no longer bound by traditional powers and borders, but separated by geographic features and remaining technologies. They still had satellites, they still had the internet, they still had the knowledge of two millennia of progress, and they decided that they would live different.

A massive rewilding began amongst the survivors seeking to restore the functioning ecosystem services destroyed by the previous generation. Urban footprints were left to be reclaimed by the wilderness. Roads were uprooted and grown over, reclaimed and left. The wilds were a provider of wild foods and recreation, not to be carelessly exploited as before. From this basic agreement, cultures diverge.

In the east, remnant industrial infrastructure connected a society kept intact by it's railway networks. These Highlanders are a hardworking blue collar population which supplied the weapons of war of the previous generation, now geared toward the production of a new civilization. As such, they retain a mindset of industry and lifelong company employment. Higher education is of lesser concern, keeping their technology behind other cultures in the region.

Along the coast to the west they meet the Ecotopians, originally named in derision of their efforts to create a utopia by mass-rewilding of their local habitats. They did however succeed in integrating a populous high-tech society connected by high-speed rail and ferry transport. Each city has it's own character, spaced out from any other to maintain wildlife corridors and keep animal populations high. Despite their airy-fairy reputation, they enjoy the rugged outdoors and nearly every citizen owns a hunting rifle. A fact that keeps the highlanders at a respectful distance. Their dense populations are sustainably fed by vertical farms and aquaculture, powered by abundant geothermal activity along the splitting margins of a tectonic plate. Cars are electric and mass transportation is the norm.

Outside the major cities of the Ecotopians, the Seafarers inhabit small coastal towns where fishing is the main livelihood. The exploited seas lost many species in the past, but a well managed quota system and responsible management has kept fish stocks increasing quickly. Their small towns are powered by offshore wind turbines, produced by the Highlanders and transported via sea. This is the edge of the frontier.

What I haven't built yet are two societies.

The furthest west are inhabited by survivors of humanity that have not really learned much from a century of strife. They're dependent on petroleum and follow the model of the previous iterations of humanity, sprawling across the landscape in SUVs.

In the middle is where they meet, and I'm debating one giant mixed type city.

How these cultures will interact in the forthcoming decades is yet another unknown.

Transportation map is included, and a quick paint drawing illustrated the plan for the region.