#NA was colonised pretty rapidly so the trends supposedly more uniform

[communistkenobi-archive]

You got it with gravitational reasons! Unknown Regions are full of weird hyperspace gravity anomalies and stuff. Also the Chiss empire is out leftward, maybe quietly discouraging their neighbors. But the thing about the wind blowing east is way more interesting

Oh sick that’s super cool actually!! 

And yeah! A really great wordlbuilding tip I would give to people wanting to create cities, whether in DnD campaigns, original fiction, etc, is to think of cities as historical artifacts, not just things that spring up when you create them. 

Like I mentioned in my tags, the reason a lot of North American cities have rich west sides and poor east sides is “because of” the wind. When industrialization occurred in North America, a lot of the factories were built in the centre of cities, since public transportation was mostly just trains and the centre was the most well-connected part of those settlements. I can’t remember the exact reason why winds blow west -> east on the continent, but I think it has something to do with the Rocky Mountains. But because of that W -> E direction, the fumes from factories blew eastward, so the ruling class tended to build their homes on the other side of the factories so they could avoid the health hazards factories presented, imposing them instead on workers. And because wealth is so intergenerational, a lot of the times it stayed in the west side, even though factories are now largely absent because of deindustrialization in the 90s/early 2000s. Physical architecture is obviously extremely difficult and disruptive to rebuild or replace, so often times the policies and practices of a governing state from 50-100 years ago are still readily apparent in city infrastructure. It’s one of the many reasons why moving past private transit (ie cars) is so difficult, despite them being a massive waste of space, causing untold environmental and societal damage, and generally being extremely inefficient and detrimental to human movement.

(This is a super simplified version of the history of city building and it’s been a while since I interacted with the material, but if anyone is interested I’m sure I can find some of my old readings on the topic.)

ANYWAY, for worldbuilding - something as simple as the direction of the wind can shape the spatial arrangement of cities. Same with altitude, proximity to waterbodies, and other environmental factors. They themselves aren’t the cause, but their presence is expressed in social and cultural terms in human settlements. The spatial arrangement of cities is obviously not random, but it is often hidden from public view, because sometimes the catalyst for a particular trend to occur happened generations ago and is potentially not even a factor in city life today.

#sw.txt #misc.txt #i don't have a city planning degree or anything so my knowledge is limited #but im familiar with critical social science texts about the arrangement of cities #so i am always down to chat about that #i also know virtually nothing outside a north american context either #like asia and europe and africa and south america all have vastly different histories obv #and are far more complex and variable #NA was colonised pretty rapidly so the trends supposedly more uniform #anyway #eri-223