>[!note] >*Personal note: I have a bit of an obsession with the aesthetics of the urban areas in the setting. I like… **really big** buildings, arcologies, sprawling conurbations and near-impossible architecture. I’m not an architect or an engineer, but I know what I like to see. I’ve been inspired by the likes of Blade Runner, anime, sci-fi mega-structures, etc.* > >*So yeah, architecture is big and over the top by design/intent.* ## Architecture In a word: *Monumentalism* When visualizing the architecture of Imperium, some basic concepts should be rooted in your mind’s eye. - In the major cities, buildings are enormous and commonplace. The average citizen will walk past a 400+ story monstrosity of a structure and not bat an eye. Those from more rural areas will probably be awestruck by what they see. - City centers will have the largest concentration of these mega-buildings. Often surrounded by smaller, but still gargantuan, arcologies. This can give some cities the appearance of artificial mountains from a distance. - The largest cities (the Aresian capitals), will have multiple massive hubs/nodes poking out of the endless sprawl. - Architectural styles vary from nation-to nation and colony-to-colony. But most buildings are very utilitarian. Some may have aesthetic styling or flair. For example, the [[United Republic Of Mercaulis]] has many buildings with Art Deco styling. Whereas buildings in the [[EBRIS]] cities are often utilitarian to the extreme, just massive slabs of [[Polycrete]]. - Corporate headquarters are often an expression of power and wealth. In the [[Corporate Park]] and other similar complexes, buildings reach to the furthest excesses. In such places, ~600 story buildings are the baseline, but they top out between 800-1000 stories. - Each story/level of a building is around 4 meters, so we are talking about buildings reaching up to or exceeding 4km tall. This is absolutely absurd and impractical, but the “rule of cool” is in place here. --- ## Street Level What you’re going to see on the street: - Depending on the nation, some places may be a little dingier than others. The [[Saigatani Federation]] keeps its urban areas immaculate. But the [[United Republic Of Mercaulis]] may be very dirty, covered in trash and graffiti (much like some typical cyberpunk settings). - The others are somewhere in the middle. Maybe some trash here and there, some graffiti, some dirty building exteriors. But they aren’t squeaky clean or outright disgusting. - Ground level in the urban centers is multi-leveled. Roadways are usually set below sidewalk level. With parking and business access from below. - There is an emphasis on “walkability” and local/regional mass transit. - The lower levels of most buildings are designated for commercial spaces. Shopping centers, restaurants and other businesses. - Some natural elements (trees and bushes), will be scattered throughout the otherwise artificial landscape. This also depends on the climate. Some cities have an abundance of flora, while others have little to none. - There is ample space for businesses to have outdoor patios. - Some buildings may have large open areas beneath them at ground level. Making room for outdoor markets or public use areas. In such cases, artificial lighting is used at all hours to counteract the gloom cast down by the massive structures above. - Within the major cities, these ground level areas are busy at all hours, with throngs of people and cars below. There are simply too many people for any designated sleep period or quiet hours to exist. #### Roadways - Roads are designed with as many continuous flow intersections as possible. - As stated elsewhere ([[SACTV (Automobile)]]), all cars (in the cities) have an automated mode for roadway travel. This prevents major traffic slowdowns in most situations. - Highways are a thing, but usually only move high volume traffic and cargo. With automated cars, travel on “surface streets” is considerably more efficient. One particular exception is a section of the A60 “Autobahn” that splits the Corporate Park into north and south sections. This highway is the primary artery for goods and materials going in and out of the Corporate Park. --- ## Arcologies - The massive structures regularly poke up out of the urban sprawl. Some appear as massive rectangular apartment blocks, others might have some architectural flair. But they are little more than places to cram the poor into and let them stew in their own self contained structures. - Each of them is built with being a self-sustaining micro-economy. With residential, commercial and public spaces. - Each of their ~400 levels can contain as many as 1000 dwelling units. Meaning each arcology may contain up to 100,000 people (including families). - Some citizens will venture out into the greater city, but most will spend their entire lives contained within the structure. - Many militaries recruit heavily from the arcologies, as much of the youth is desperate for a better life and rarely see many options to escape their social status. --- ## Design I mentioned the various building styles, but I want to add something to the general design (and sometimes requirements) of very large buildings. - “Buttresses.” Buildings over about 200 levels need to have either tapered designs or some kind of buttressing. Even with Polycrete, there is only so much weight vertical walls can support. - Many of these buttresses are worked into the architectural style of the buildings themselves. Some will be concave sloping extensions, some will be angular walls that jut out from the lower floors, while others may use a variety of techniques. - Some buildings with large open lobby areas (which may be many levels tall), will have arching or angular supports inside, which connect directly to the buttresses on the exterior. - With “3D printing” via extruded Polycrete, designs can be anywhere from utilitarian boxes (like many government and military structures) to sweeping, twisting and warped designs. Almost anything architects can dream up is possible to build. - Some vaguely Roman styles have survived through the ages and various stylized columns often exist on government administration and religious buildings. --- City notes moved to: [[A Note On - Cities]] %%**Cities**: //I was a dummy at 4am last night. I set that scale to around 1/3rd of what it should be 625px is 3125km, not 1000km. I need to fix the low section’s commentary.// Edit: so (with some quick math) San Reales is almost 1200km across, not 140km. Woof. That’s ~1.2milllion square km. That gives me about 40 people per sqkm. NY is 160. If if SR has the same, it should have 192 milllion people living there. That’s a few more than 49m or even 72m.// //What did I saw about arcologies? 100k people in a 0.5sqkm building… yeah, this is gonna be problematic. I’m either going to have to accept that having a low overall pop density is reasonable (lots of suburbs and non-living areas in the cities?) or multiply everything by at least 3.// //However, this does solve the problem of SR being smaller than grater LA, that makes me feel a lot better, also the distances in the novel are closer now… but dumb ass was like no, it’s only like 1500km from Jamestown to Morngen. 🤣 Imperium cities are supposed to be ***huge***.// //Let me check one more thing… ok, maybe they’re too big. SR itself is 3 times the size of California. Fuck me, that’s not just big, it’s monstrous.// //I can fix this by spreading out the continents again, so they’re more realistic on the globe, but… I really like the way they look on the current map.// //Im actually on par with Mega City One, so people are clearly willing to accept a city of that size, though my population would be somewhat smaller (than 800 million). I’ll look at some other population densities.// //Oh, I’m also perfectly fine with San Reales not being “destroyed” by the flux bomb, but rather a portion of it ~100km in diameter. Math says ~3 million dead, which is plenty horrifying.// //Ok more math. SR is 44 times the size of the bay area. If you convert that to population, I get 431 million people or ~360 people/sqkm. I was guesstimating around 380/sqkm. But SFBA has almost 1000/sqkm, which would become 1.14billion. So we’re gonna have to say somewhere that the cities are *not* homogeneously dense. There are large areas of factories, warehouses, ports, business districts, or whatever that have effectively 0 density. I don’t want a bunch of parks and things, but maybe I should include those. I don’t know. All in all, the city clumps really would look like, and be the same height as, the Catalina mountains.// Also, holy shit, with Tokyo’s density, SR would have 5.6 billion people. Thats like… too many.%% %%~~After going back over my world map and the absolutely ridiculous sizes of the cities. It turns out that I may have actually underestimated the size of conurbations here on Earth in the 20th century.~~ ~~Greater Los Angeles (San Fernando Valley-Riverside-Laguna Beach) is around 50% larger than [[San Reales]] by land area. However it contains around 1/3 of the population of the fictional city.~~ ~~Modern sprawl is much less dense. Cities in Imperium overwhelm the landscape itself. Paving over hills, forests, deserts and even some water. Creating a gray urban surface, stretching for more than 100km across in the capitals.~~ ~~[[Casiguay]] Is by far the largest city on Ares, both in population and land area, stretching over 200km across.~~ ~~[[Calcinam]] on the other hand, is about half the size of San Reales and boasts a slightly larger population. The density of arcologies in the city center accounts for much of this.~~ ~~[[Kumuro]] has a physical footprint similar to Casiguay, but less than half of the total population. This is partly due to the massive factories and commercial sectors that extend far to the south of the city center.~~ ~~Much like our own world, the cities in Imperium reach far beyond their defined borders, with tens of millions more living within the unincorporated outskirts of the greater unofficial conurbations. Many of these more sparse communities are not clearly visible from space (on the Ares map).~~%%