Here's the main downtown of my favorite city with a horrible name, Neu Cita: This the eastern end of a long island. It's surrounded by several small-to-medium sized satellite islands, used for suburban and medium-density areas. Downtown is the central big-business area. It's where you'd find most of the salarymen and headquarters of multinationals. Midtown on the other hand has a bit more personality. It's surrounded more directly by residential areas of people with lots of different ethnic and economic backgrounds, so the shops are more interesting and there are a lot more nightlife type activities - theaters, bars, coffee shops with music venues. The high rises here are more likely to be advertising firms, publishing houses, record labels, and Web2.0 companies, while the Downtown is more populated by financial firms, construction companies, and major companies that make products like cars, furniture, and medications. Downtown also has some high-tech industrial factories, on lots that were rezoned in an effort to rescue Downtown from urban decay after the Dotcom bubble burst and left many of Downtown's high-rises abandoned and unmaintained. You can see the Boutique District just east of the main drag, and the historic Theatre Row to the north, approaching a neighborhood that has gone downhill in the last twenty years or so. Just a couple of blocks past the edge of the picture, you would have to start looking out for street gangs and crack dealers. For some reason, the area just east of Theatre Row is mostly taken up by travel agencies. Here's a shot of the area in between the two high-density business districts: Almost everyone in the two islands to the north commute on the ferry every day into Downtown or the rest of the main island. Arrowhead Island, to the south, is also mostly a bedroom city, but it has a bit of its own commerce and industry on the western shore. The two districts between the north shore of the main island and the northernmost highway are North Beach (to the left) and Marina Drive, the luxury hotel area. Continuing south across the highway from Marina Drive is Maple Hill, with the Marina Bluffs Medical Research Center (overlooking the T interchange). Farther south (past the central highway) is Maple Valley, and the Maple Valley Industrial Area and the John C. Bender Memorial Bridge (named after the man who designed the bridge but died before the controversial environmental-impact statement was approved). The majority of the MVI Area was filled in; it used to be a beautiful beach. So it goes. The MVI brings in lots of crucial tax money to a city budget that is frequently in the red, and the Bender Bridge spreads the congestion of almost 40,000 people crossing daily into twice as many lanes as the old bridge. I'd do the third, smaller downtown area in the northeast of the main island, or another of the satellite islands, but they're kind of boring. I haven't done a CJ for Neu Cita because I'm kind of lazy, but if enough people express interest, I might make one. Hopefully it would be better written than this post since it's now 3:34 AM.
