knarfmo

TC 13 - This Newcastle is indeed named for yours. Nearly all of my ancestors were European, but the only branch of my family that we have traced to Europe came from northeastern England. I've named several communities in Ainkien after towns were my ancestors came from. In addition to Newcastle, you may recognize Hetton, Teesdale and Durham later on in my city jounral.

Paris, France 1969 Andrew McAllister moved quietly around the table filling water glasses with ease and grace. The customers could not tell that he was a relatively new waiter, and they would be surprised to learn that he would not spend the rest of his career serving diners at Paris' prestigious Cafe Remoulade. McAllister had just finished his undergraduate work in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University, and would return home to Boston in the fall to study international law at Harvard. He was spending his summer working in the Paris restaurant to improve his French and to see how the international elite conducted business over lunch. Occasionally he would serve a group of customers who seemed to be working intently on a business deal or venting their feelings about things were messed up by their current government. Today he had one of these groups, which consisted of three men and two women. They were conversing in English. What caught his attention was a comment from one of the women, a British woman with reddish blonde hair. He heard her say: You'll never find a place to establish an independent nation on this continent, no matter how small that country may be - at least on this side of the Iron Curtain. I suggest you speak with the Canadians or Australians. McAllister was dumbfounded by this statement. These people didn't seem like Basque separatists or Communists looking for a breakaway province to start a revolution. Why are they trying to find a place for a new country? he thought to himself. Curiosity made it was hard for McAllister to not be an imposition on the customers, but like all good waiters he successfully stayed in the background. Unfortunately he never heard anything more that would clarify exactly what these people were up to. By the end of the summer, he had forgotten the conversation. Ten years later Andrew McAllister, this time an attorney working for the United Nations, would be actively involved in framing a constitution for a new nation carved from a large farm in the central United States. One evening while he was in the thick of this project, he looked up from his papers to watch a television news story announcing Margaret Thatcher as the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She looked vaguely familiar to him. Andrew McAllister was a very intelligent man, but he never made the connection to the Cafe Remoulade in 1969. *** I am taking you on a tour through Newcastle's West End today while we discuss the history of Ainkien. You will see that there are some ties between our simultaneous visual city tour and the written historical account, but I'm afraid that I will require your patience while I ask you to focus on two diverging subjects at once. In fact, I hope that you become accustomed to it, as it will be the general structure of this journal. Historians often credit the Ainkien's beginning to a think tank of social scientists whose enthusiasm sold the concept to key political leaders. Eventually known as the Ainkien Experiment, it would be among other things, a testing ground for reformist policies in the western democracies. The advantage to politicians would be that they could test the policy and use Ainkien as an example for how the policy would work in their own land. If the policy failed, they could ignore it without any political cost at home. More importantly, the think tank said that private donors had formed an organization called the Ainkien Foundation to fund the entire project. By late 1971, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development established a founding committee for the new microstate that would be responsible for implementing the project. The founding committee consisted of representatives from the participating nations of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Sweden and Denmark and representatives of the private donors to the Ainkien Foundation. Today these nations, along with several others, all maintain their own embassies to Ainkien on Newcastle's West End. It was the source of Ainkien's funding that makes its beginning so mysterious. The private donors wished to remain anonymous - and they have successfully remained anonymous to this date. While it is known that there were 11 donors to the foundation, the more critical fact is that only 3 of them provided 97% of the project funding. These three major donors became known as the Triumvirate, and it was clear that they controlled the 11 Foundation votes on the founding committee. It is unclear as to whether the members of the triumvirate were individuals, corporations, or combination of the two. The representatives on Founding Committee who represented the Ainkien Foundation came from a variety of academic and non-profit organization backgrounds, and they were all loyal to the secrecy of their patrons. It was known that three of them represented the Triumvirate, but no one has ever been successful in concluding which of the eleven these representatives were. It was the Triumvirate who, through their representatives on the Founding Committee, insisted on the name Ainkien for the new country. The Triumvirate also specified a generous amount of funding for Ainkien's educational system. Three of the founding nations suggested sites for possible development of Ainkien. All of the sites were of sufficient size and suitability, and, based on preliminary discussions with the property owners, were for sale for the right price. Canada had a small island off the coast of British Columbia it could offer. Australia had small group of islands 400 miles due east of Tasmania (in this case the Australian government was the willing seller). The United States had two possible sites: a ranch in Wyoming, and a large farm in Missouri on the Kansas border. The Triumvirate favored a situation where Ainkien would have some cross border interaction with a neighbouring country and thus preferred one of the United States locations. The United States also favored one of its locations, presumably to retain some control over the project. Australia was upset that its site wasn't chosen, but when the Wyoming rancher backed out of discussions, the Ainkien Foundation bought all three remaining sites. In the "Surf and Turf" Compromise, all three sites would be available for the Ainkien Foundation's use. For the moment, however, the Founding Committee selected the Missouri farm to be the home of the undiscovered country. Negotiations between the United States and the Founding Committee were underway by 1976, and the idea of a new independent nation being carved out of the belly of their nation was not sitting well with the American public. Andrew McAllister, a young attorney with the United Nations who moderated the negotations, suggested a series of terms that would ease the concerns of the American people and seal the deal with the US government: 1) Ainkien would join NATO, thus entering into a mutual defense pact with the United States. 2) If Ainkien ever established a military, it would submit to the command of a US military general 3) The United States would reabsorb Ainkien 100 years after the signing of an independence treaty unless it chose to extend or remove this requirement in the meantime. As an additional incentive, the Ainkien Foundation offer $100 million for public improvements in southwest Missouri to compensate the local governments for lost their tax revenue. On May 25th, 1977, the United States and the Founding Committee signed an independence agreement in Saint Louis, Missouri. The Treaty of St. Louis was drafted by Andrew McAllister with input from all concerned parties, and followed the conditions he had worked out in the negotiation process. Construction of Ainkien would begin immediately, with the date of Ainkien's independence set for November 13th, 1981. Because independence would coincide with joining the NATO alliance on this date, Ainkien's national holiday, Alliance Day, is celebrated every year on November 13th. =========================================== Reality Check The name Ainkien is derived from two sources. The first is C.S. Lewis' Narnia, spelled backwards, which is Ainran. The second is the last name of J.R.R. Tolkien. When you combine the first syllable of the former and the last syllable of the latter, you get Ainkien. If you could query on one of the skyscrapers in the financial district, you would also find the corporate headquarters of Ainran Electronics. The Triumvirate and Ainkien Foundation comprise a plot device to simply say that money is no object in Ainkien's story. It's my fantasy, and I'll spend all that I want (thanks to Raphaelninja's mod). I deal with lack of funds enough as it is in my real job. Some of you who are really paying attention may have noticed that the signing of the Treaty of St. Louis occurred while most of the world was preoccupied with the theatrical release of Star Wars. Most of the people in the story of Ainkien are fictional. Occasionally there will be a real person (i.e. Margaret Thatcher) doing fictitious things. I'm only going to include famous people in the story when you'll know better than to believe what you read about them. Don't worry - Arnold Schwarzenegger won't become prime minister or anything.

Thank you everyone for your support as I begin this city journal! Dsrwhat316: thanks for the info on the snapshot shortcut. I tried querying the Simtroplis forums to see if anyone had mentioned this in the past but came up with nothing. I've misplaced my SC4 manual, and the one I downloaded from www.simcity.com didn't have the shortcut keys. You've cured my frustration in trying to find this. Mayormommy: I've had fun recreating Ainkien in SC4, although I can't do everything I did in my paper version. I did make a version of only Newcastle in SimCity 2000 and was able to fly through it in Simcopter. That was a cool experience to really see it in 3D at eye level. It's funny that you mention the pictures being pretty - I'm afraid that my two teaser shots contain most of the greenspace in Newcastle, so I guess this is the city making its best first impression. As my next entry will show, Newcastle is the inner city, and it's densely populated (actually all of the settlement in Ainkien is quite compact). Ericenders: I had planned to use Adobe Photoshop Elements for my graphics, but I'm using my laptop and have limited software. I'v found that I could do some easy graphics in Microsoft Powerpoint! I import a screenshot and send it to the back of the slide. I then export the slide as a .jpg, and use Microsoft picture manager to shrink the file to the acceptible size. For the very first picture, I used Crayola Colored Pencils and Mead Art Paper I'm hoping to post another entry this weekend. Maybe even tonight if I can get it written.

This is an excellent, well-presented and well-written city journal. This is an innovative way to present the principles of new urbanism. Good job.

Nice work on the picture with the lens flare - of course, they all look great!

Frogface, I want you to know that I've really enjoyed Thames and it has gotten me back into SimCity. I may even do a city journal of my own. I've seen some great cities on the web, but you have wonderful rural areas as well. I think Polegate is my favorite Thamesian place, with the stream winding through a village of shops with the church overlooking it all. I developed a small country of my own called Ainkien in SimCity, and it also has its own colony, the Nalsa Islands. I'm really enjoying the fact that you have done the same thing here. Once again, thanks for the inspiration.