caillech Maeve#WroughtWorlds #Writing 2024 03-16 : World Building : Cultures and People : Cities
What thoughts do you put into cities/large cities?
This was touched on a bit in hashtag yesterday where I started talking about Twux people in #WytchFork.
Much like with real world cities, places such as Koruu are fairly metropolitan. They’re a mixing point of different cultures. Now given the abridged version of individual culture building I talked about a bit back, there’s a similar framework of questions.
The condensed list:
Geographic location
Methods of ingress and egress - where are people coming from
Physical layout
How the city is laid out & what materials+style buildings are fashioned in, set the tempo.
A bit like writing within a particular musical time signature.
Geographic location determines weather, which loosely functions to accent building styles, and social events + gathering places.
How people arrive in the city interlinks with where they might come from, and is influenced by geographical location. Ships lend to migrants from various far off lands. Landlocked cities conversely filter and slant towards more immediate lines of ingress.
Sculla Guna , coastal city, built partly into a dead volcanic ridge and field.
The city is shaped like a guitar pick with a few roots to underground neighborhoods.
80% of everything above ground is built with bricks cut from the grey/dark grey lava left behind (most of these bricks were once what is now the underground neighborhoods or ‘The Warrens’)
Off the coast a set of small finger shaped islands from a chunk of the continent fracturing and fanning away. This gives a natural break against incoming storm surges, and the islands closest to land have ship docs built on them for trade. There’s also an emergency dry dock for quick patches & the like, else ships go up to KotB where wood is more accessible to repair.
Because of the grey rock & buildings, when some families from more vibrant cultures settle there, so did their colour pallets. And their artistic sensibility spread. So the buildings in time ended up with an amalgamated style of sharp and bright colours and murals that I’d describe as a bit like a Nagal Print crossed with Oaxacan folk art. They’re colourful, play with negative space provided by the dark rock, and contrasted with vibrant colour.
This colour inturn ended up in the canopies that stretch between buildings to keep direct sun off the streets. If you hovered over the top of the city, the different colours of canopies for the districts combined with the dark rock buildings would look like an abstract stained glass window/sculpture.
Because Sculla Guna is an very busy port city, a certain amount of the population is constantly in flux. Some people are long term residents. Notable the Twux-Squam families who generally have 3-4 generations of family living in proximity, have their own quasi apartment buildinding or ‘Gen-house’ in local slang. They stay pretty much in the same building unless the whole family decides to move. The other longer term residents tend to be ship captains how used Sculla Guna as base port. They as well tend to have a ‘Gen-house’ but usually smaller and set up more like a barracks or dormitory for their crews to stay when not on ‘sea-shift’.
Feel free to ask me anything, I need to tapper off here for the night.
What thoughts do you put into cities/large cities?
This was touched on a bit in hashtag yesterday where I started talking about Twux people in #WytchFork.
Much like with real world cities, places such as Koruu are fairly metropolitan. They’re a mixing point of different cultures. Now given the abridged version of individual culture building I talked about a bit back, there’s a similar framework of questions.
The condensed list:
Geographic location
Methods of ingress and egress - where are people coming from
Physical layout
How the city is laid out & what materials+style buildings are fashioned in, set the tempo.
A bit like writing within a particular musical time signature.
Geographic location determines weather, which loosely functions to accent building styles, and social events + gathering places.
How people arrive in the city interlinks with where they might come from, and is influenced by geographical location. Ships lend to migrants from various far off lands. Landlocked cities conversely filter and slant towards more immediate lines of ingress.
Sculla Guna , coastal city, built partly into a dead volcanic ridge and field.
The city is shaped like a guitar pick with a few roots to underground neighborhoods.
80% of everything above ground is built with bricks cut from the grey/dark grey lava left behind (most of these bricks were once what is now the underground neighborhoods or ‘The Warrens’)
Off the coast a set of small finger shaped islands from a chunk of the continent fracturing and fanning away. This gives a natural break against incoming storm surges, and the islands closest to land have ship docs built on them for trade. There’s also an emergency dry dock for quick patches & the like, else ships go up to KotB where wood is more accessible to repair.
Because of the grey rock & buildings, when some families from more vibrant cultures settle there, so did their colour pallets. And their artistic sensibility spread. So the buildings in time ended up with an amalgamated style of sharp and bright colours and murals that I’d describe as a bit like a Nagal Print crossed with Oaxacan folk art. They’re colourful, play with negative space provided by the dark rock, and contrasted with vibrant colour.
This colour inturn ended up in the canopies that stretch between buildings to keep direct sun off the streets. If you hovered over the top of the city, the different colours of canopies for the districts combined with the dark rock buildings would look like an abstract stained glass window/sculpture.
Because Sculla Guna is an very busy port city, a certain amount of the population is constantly in flux. Some people are long term residents. Notable the Twux-Squam families who generally have 3-4 generations of family living in proximity, have their own quasi apartment buildinding or ‘Gen-house’ in local slang. They stay pretty much in the same building unless the whole family decides to move. The other longer term residents tend to be ship captains how used Sculla Guna as base port. They as well tend to have a ‘Gen-house’ but usually smaller and set up more like a barracks or dormitory for their crews to stay when not on ‘sea-shift’.
Feel free to ask me anything, I need to tapper off here for the night.