Downtown Nenova

Many Midwestern cities were planned at an interesting transitional point in American urban history. Along the East Coast, planned areas such as Manhattan, Back Bay (Boston), and Newport News included standardized rectangular grid patterns, Philadelphia including a large square grid pattern that was broken down over time, while Savannah and Washington developed under the Oglethorpe Plan and the L'Enfant Plan respectively. Many cities were planned as a sort of greenfield project with few constraints on development, but most (especially in the North) worked around older city centers. Some areas given over to especially rapid development, such as Brooklyn, allowed individual property owners to develop their own grids, which resulted in a rather unique discordant layout of grids crashing into each other, sometimes at sharp angles.

West of the Mississippi, and specifically west of the Missouri, many of these characteristics give way to cities dominated by railroads and the Plot Land Survery System (PLSS), as well as new ideas of what a neighborhood is and should be. Often, the grid at the city center is "tilted" to align with a river, as in Des Moines, Kansas City, Denver, and Topeka, sometimes it is tilted to align with a railway, as in Fresno, Cheyenne, and Idaho Falls, and just as often it is not, as in Omaha, Wichita, and Salt Lake City. This means that from a downtown perspective, these cities are often distinct. Often, industrial areas, whether yards, manufacturing, or both will dominate the city center (ex. Emporia, North Platte). In major cities, interchanges often invite malls and large retail areas, sometimes including office parks (ex. Boise, Spokane) However, they are unified by their use of the PLSS (best examples being Pheonix, Boise, and Omaha), by their orthogonalized North-South orientation outside of the city center, and by their use of a hierarchical road system (living, collector, arterial). Some unique examples that deviate from this include Redding, California and Las Cruses, New Mexico.

Defining my recent efforts in developing the downtown of my Western-styled city Nenova in these terms, I have a river-aligned city with some unique grid variations in the city center. The city is relatively small, with a metro area not breaking 300,000 people, and so the downtown is limited in size, especially because larger retail areas will be present outside of the downtown and even outside of the city limits.There is ample space between the riparian railway for a park, and a dam is present to provide hydroelectric power to the neighborhood. Here's a zoomed-out screenshot:

Within the downtown area is present many different kinds of landuse and zoning. The majority of the area is likely zoned as commercial, medium-density, while some medium and low density housing is also present. There is also lots of public space, with five museums present as well as two blocks dedicated to a library and the town hall. There are several open lots, and many parking spaces available, given that a city in this style is likely to be dominated by cars, regardless of the existence of a simple public transport option. Many statues and public arts works are present along the sidewalks, the most prominent example being the monumental town hall park. There are places for assisted and senior living, as well as a YMCA-esque fitness institution. A major rugby stadium is present, though it is also up to gridiron standards. There are fire, police, and volunteer ambulance services in the downtown, as well as a courthouse and a county administrative annex. Many of the shops are aligned towards main street, although the town hall is also a focal point of the downtown.

Service roads, present here as they are in many similar downtowns, provide access for parking or for trucks that need access to the shops facing the street. In general, the street importance is shown by the color and thickness of the street. Primary streets are orange and wide, secondary streets are yellow and wide, tertiary streets are white and wide, residential streets (not necessarily living streets) and white and medium-wide, service roads are white and medium-thin, and parking aisles are white and thin. Sidewalks are red dashed lines while cycleways and blue dashed lines. Can you find the main cycling route? 

Other interesting features include an arcade, a jazz cafe, an old paper mill, and a demolished road converted into a sidewalk. Also interesting are the three blocks of mixed-zoning semi-residential, semi-commercial development. There are no greenfield projects to speak of.

As I continue the development of this city, I will provide updates regarding each neighborhood.

Arecales Volcano

While I'm still very actively working on my maps, I don't quite have a new finished project to write about at the moment. I do have this very active stratovolcano that I mapped a while ago to share, however:

The area around the volcano has an extremely diverse array of landuses. The rough gray that covers most of the island is bare rock, essentially places where plant life has not returned since the last eruption. Upon eruption, the lahar or mudflow destroys plant life, leaving the trails of bare rock behind that I have mapped. The fact that there is so much of it signifies that the volcano is extremely active, and is perhaps in a state of perpetual activity though fumaroles along the rocky sides of the volcanoes. There are no notable examples of mudpots, and the volcano is less muddy in nature than many volcanoes in Yellowstone or the volcano by Huckleberry Springs discussed in that blog post. Since there's no limnic activity, or CO2-burdened air waves caused by trapped CO2 deposits, the entirety of the activity, and therefore the danger, is volcanic in nature.

Since there are no moraines in this environment, smoother paths carved by glacial retreat, every side of the volcano is rocky and sharp with landuses that are rough and unpredictable. Another good tag to map much of this bare rock under would be scree, the loose rock debris that often surrounds volcanoes as well as many other types of mountains. The coast is rocky, and is tagged as shingles since the rocks are not small enough to be a pebble beach and not fine enough (sand) to be a beach. Many riverbanks are also tagged as shingles. The soil is somewhat rocky, but is very well fertilized by the volcano, so plant life can easily take a hold on it. Since the map will change rather rapidly in geologic terms, think about this as a snapshot in time (though I'm not planning on updating it).

The five types of vegetation presented in this snapshot are grassland, forest, scrub, heath, and marsh. While there are high-growing grasses, they are not present on these islands, and the grassland is limited to the lowest tier of the volcano. Since trees usually don't neighbor the ocean, being susceptible to tidal variation, they are limited to 500-2000 feet away from the shore. Since the scale is so small, I avoided small bunches of forest even when it would be theoretically plausible. A thin layer of scrub is next, which consists of the smaller woody vegetation that typically seperates the forest from heath or upper grassland. The treeline is never reached on this island, as the volcano is too short even for the tropical climate, so the areas of heath and scrub represent areas where the forest was destroyed and has not yet regrown, or areas that are too steep for trees, as mentioned in the Huckleberry Springs blog. Finally, marshes are present where water collects with no outflow, often by or in places carved out by lahar or neighboring streams and lakes.

Seven streams are present on the island, occurring in valleys and all intermittent. The lack of any major rivers or notable hydrological systems can be attributed to the small scale of a volcanic island. Streams form in valleys, however, and are useful on a map for pointing out where the valleys and ridges are. Streams also facilitate grassland better than forest, so on many of them a small retreat of the forest is present. The nearest point of land is an uninhabited atoll 30 miles away, the nearest human settlement is 50 miles away, and the nearest continental point of land is over 950 miles away.

Given that the volcano is continually active, there is no permanent human settlement on the island. However, there is a small dock and a research center, with a path (no stairs, only switchbacks) up the volcano leading to a monitoring center. Other than this, the island is completely untouched.

Zooming in on the island, you can see the extreme fractalized nature of the volcano's edges, and the unpredictable ways in which the lahar spread. Disconnected areas of forest and heath represent some flatter areas where plants could grow back quicker and bands of bare rock signify places where they couldn't. You can also see cave entrances, of which there are many because of newly created lava tunnels as you approach the shore.

Thanks for reading, explore the slippy map here: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=13/9.7333/177.7619

Terrace

Small towns are uniquely interesting. Sure, they might not have a Hears Tower or a Seagram Building, but their careful residential-commercial balance, streets sided with filled and empty lots, and impact on the surrounding area gives someone replicating them very little room for error. I have developed many small towns, but my newest town, Terrace, is mapped down to every building, shop, tree, and shed. While I already had a hydrology and topography drawn out before making the town, I began it with a strictly gridded layout, adding detail and alleyways until I had a fairly realistic final layout. I first added buildings, going out from the downtown, and then added other important features. Here's the result:

 Explore: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=15/-39.3636/142.0608

Most of the elements that I used in this map should be fairly easily recognizable. A lot of thought went into the density and size of buildings and the types of shops necessary to serve the area.

Terrace, Aquilia has 604 buildings, about 30 of which are non-residential and 3 of which are apartments (countable as 5 houses each). Using the US' small town vacancy percentage (~18%), 102 houses are uninhabited and 469 are. In South Dakota, there are 2.46 people per household, meaning about 1,154 people live in the town. Adding some normal variation, I say that the town's population is 1,099 (and declining). Outside of the town proper, there is a general aviation airport, a meadow for visitors including its neighboring non-rendering apiary, and a laboratory with the purpose of creating a domesticated perennial grain. Terrace gets its electricity from a coal-fired power plant in nearby Simons, which I'll cover in a later blog post. Other than that, fields and farmland stretch out for many miles, and I'll also cover those in a later blog post.

 

Explore: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=18/-39.36291/142.05273

Here is the downtown part of Terrace. The image shows 20 shops, 7 of which are restaurants, which are usually the most common shop. Other than that, there are only duplicates of banks, barber shops, and cafes. Not pictured here is the Pinpoint department store to the right, by which you can find Dennison's Dentist, Bakdep Subs & Pho, and a Camille's clothing store. Also not pictured is the green grocer to the north, named "John's Oasis" in reference to food deserts and a regular grocery store. Scattered around the town are a pet groomer, another dentist, two more restaurants, a community center, a synagogue, and many churches. Noticeably missing is a bar or a liquor store, because Old County, in which Terrace is the county seat, is very traditional and is a dry county. 

Thanks for reading