City Geomorphs (Part 5)

We've reached that part whe most of the photographed work-in-progress images are pencil sketches, and probably don't show up too well on a screen. These are the last of the geomorphs I found in my pile of paperwork, so they are being posted for the purposes of completeness.


This second "Edge of Town" is a general suburban sprawl. They call it a sleeper suburb, because most people spends their nights here in relative safety and quiet away from the rest of the city, while they spend their mornings communting to factories, skyscrapers and other workplaces in other parts of town. This is the home of the dwindling middle class, the lower level managers, the well paid tradesmen, the small business owners. It's a very vanilla part of town, nothing particularly good, and nothing particularly bad. It's just quiet... But underneath the quiet, who knows?


The "CBD" is the commercial hub of the city, unlike the capital where the laws of the land are maintained, this part of town is where big business makes it home in crystalline towers of glass, concrete and steel. Like the old parts of town, the streets are laid out on a grid dating back to the 19th and early 20th century, unlike those other old parts business has thrived here. The motorway connects to the CBD bringing business from all over the city, and further abroad. There has even been a push to beautify the area and maintain high property values by installing parkland on one side of the grid. From afar, this is one of the areas of the city that marks the horizon.


Sprawled over two geomorph hexes, the "Airport" is one of the main connections between the city and the outside world. With a pair of parallel runways that stretch the length of entire suburbs or sectors of the city, the airport is a symbol of modernity and globalisation. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Guide to Geomorphs (Part 7)

Image
A working computer and scanner...that means it is time to get back to work on the geomorph sequence. A lot of the discussion in this set of tutorials has been focused around square geomorphs. They're the easiest for most people to wrap their heads around.  But my preferred form of geomorph is based around the hexagon, these tend to produce more organic and interesting shapes. This is true for natural environments, but it's no less true for urban environments. The example set of geomorphs above as a simple two-phase system. One edge type is plain, the other edge type has a road piercing the centre. There could be dozens of combinations and permutations for each of the two phases around the hexagonal edges, but a quick look at the variety of buildings and road shapes shows that there could literally be hundreds of possible options when drawing these map fragments. But you certainly don't need to create hundreds of designs for the system to be effective. Usin
Read more

A Guide to Geomorphs (Part 1)

Image
After numerous requests to get back to map tutorials, it's time to start our new series. This time focusing on the concept of geomorphs, modular map fragments that can be mixed and matched. We'll start with a couple of theoretical tutorials before sinking into a few more practical posts. I'm predicting a dozen or so posts in this sequence, but let's see how long it lasts.
Read more