Building a Town or City From the Ground Up: The Brutal Art of Playing God (and Surviving Your Own Creation)
Let’s start with the truth: building a town or a city for your story, comic, game, or fever dream is the closest you’ll ever get to playing God. It’s not just about drawing a pretty map and slapping a name on it. It’s about conjuring up an entire, breathing, broken, beautiful ecosystem with its own moods, scars, secrets, and stubborn realities. You want a city that feels real? You want your readers to get lost in it, to find corners even you didn’t expect? You’ve got to bleed for it. Forget SimCity. This is a job for masochists, daydreamers, obsessives, and anyone willing to crawl through the mud of history, geography, politics, plumbing, and human chaos.
And let’s be clear: you can spot a fake city a mile away. It’s got a dozen taverns but no trash, roads that never flood, and neighborhoods that never change. It’s got zero grit, zero ghosts, zero personality. You want your city to matter? You want it to be a character, not a backdrop? Get ready to build it Rusty-style: raw, unfiltered, flawed, and packed with all the weird, frustrating, wonderful detail you’d find in the real world.
1. The First Rule: Cities Are Built on Bones (And Not Just Metaphorically)
Every city is a graveyard. Don’t believe me? Pick a real place, scratch the surface, and you’ll find layer after layer of failed dreams, buried secrets, and literal dead bodies—wars, plagues, riots, migrations, burnings, rebirths. Your city needs history, and not just the “founding legend” bullshit. Real, bloody, muddy, embarrassing history. The kind that leaves stains on the cobblestones.
Start by asking:
What used to be here? Forest, marsh, old battlefield, tribal burial ground?
Who killed who for this land?
What’s buried under the fancy buildings—old wells, plague pits, collapsed tunnels?
Confession: The best cities I’ve ever written started with a disaster—a fire, a war, a flood, a massacre. Want flavor? Give your city a trauma it still hasn’t gotten over.
2. Geography is Destiny: The Land Shapes the Town
Cities don’t just sprout wherever you want. They hug rivers, straddle mountain passes, sprawl on trade routes, or fester on coastlines because that’s where food, water, and money flow.
Rivers & Water: Every major city is near water. Rivers = life, trade, sewage, disease. Think bridges, docks, ferries, flood zones, and the stench of low tide.
Hills & Elevation: The rich get the high ground (less flooding, better air, easier to defend). The poor? They get the swamp.
Natural Barriers: Cliffs, forests, swamps, ancient ruins, sacred groves. These become borders, obstacles, and the seeds of future neighborhoods.
Weather: Hot, cold, dry, humid, windy, storm-prone? It changes everything—clothes, food, shelter, even the city’s soul.
Pro tip: Draw the land before you draw the city. Every decision flows from the dirt up.
3. Survival Strategy: Streets, Sewers, and the Dirty Reality
Cities grow like tumors, not grids. Sure, the Romans liked straight roads, but most real cities are a tangled, sprawling mess built by centuries of mistakes.
a. Streets:
Oldest roads follow water or animal trails.
Rich neighborhoods get boulevards and parks. Slums get alleys and dead ends.
Markets always sit at crossroads or squares—look for the heart.
Names matter: Dead Man’s Alley, Butcher’s Row, Lover’s Lane, Cathedral Square.
b. Sewers & Infrastructure:
The rich take shit away; the poor live with it.
Where does the water come from? Where does it go?
Wells, aqueducts, rain barrels, gutters, outhouses, chamber pots dumped from windows.
Old pipes = new disasters. Collapsed tunnels, haunted catacombs, rat kings.
Ingredient hack: Make one piece of infrastructure the city’s dirty secret—a cursed well, a hidden plague pit, a sacred spring, a sewer cult.
4. People Make the Place: Social Fabric, Neighborhoods, and Tension
If you want a city that feels real, you have to fill it with real people—clashing, mingling, loving, and hating across borders both physical and social.
a. Neighborhoods:
They form by accident—immigrants, guilds, religions, outcasts.
Names change over time—Old Town, Little Daggerhook, The Hollows, Bramblegate.
Physical signs: Banners, graffiti, unique architecture, smells (spices, shit, incense, factory smoke).
b. Social Structure:
Who has power? (Money, priests, crime bosses, old families, new money.)
Who’s on the bottom? (Servants, outcasts, illegal immigrants, “undesirables.”)
Where’s the tension? (Rival neighborhoods, rich/poor divides, ethnic/religious friction.)
What do the city’s people do when trouble hits? Riot, flee, pray, fight back?
c. Daily Life:
What wakes people up? Bells, horns, sun, crows, factory whistles.
What keeps them up at night? Parties, crime, drunks, wild dogs, monsters.
Where do people meet, argue, celebrate, mourn?
Personal confession: I once spent two days figuring out the bread situation in my city—what flour they used, how breadlines worked during shortages, what street vendors yelled at sunrise. That’s the flavor nobody forgets.
5. Law, Order, and Disorder: Who Keeps the Peace (And Who Breaks It)
Cities are alive because there’s always a struggle for control. Cops, guards, vigilantes, mobsters, corrupt nobles, angry mobs—nobody’s really in charge, not for long.
How is law enforced? (Brutal, bureaucratic, absent, corrupt, fair?)
Who gets justice, who gets scapegoated?
Where do people go to hide, to fight, to buy silence?
Is there a prison? What’s it like? Is it underground, public, secret?
What’s the black market for—magic, drugs, forbidden books, stolen relics?
Survival strategy: Make the law uneven. The rich skirt it, the poor suffer under it, the clever manipulate it.
6. Power, Money, Religion, and the Weird Stuff
No city is just its streets and people. It’s what they believe in, what they fight over, and what they’re willing to die for.
Temples, churches, shrines—who’s in charge? Who’s outlawed? What’s forbidden?
Money—who mints the coins? Are there counterfeits, city taxes, bribes?
Magic? Guilds? Secret societies? Haunted spots? If you don’t have one, your city’s too normal.
Festivals and disasters—what does the city celebrate? What does it fear?
Pro tip: Give your city at least one weird tradition. Goat parades, midnight markets, the annual riot, the “Night of Ashes.”
7. The Map That Breathes: Drawing and Using Your City
Start messy. Draw in pencil, erase, redraw, spill coffee on it.
Mark the landmarks: biggest market, main temple, oldest tree, richest house, worst slum.
Add in the arteries—main roads, back alleys, bridges, city gates.
Don’t forget the empty or abandoned—ruins, collapsed buildings, “forbidden” districts.
Dirty Reality: Your map will change as you write. Cities grow, burn, rebuild. Let your story shape the city as much as the city shapes your story.
8. Confessions and Ingredient Hacks: What Makes a City Live?
Use all five senses: The city should stink, clang, pulse, shimmer, and taste of something real.
Let accidents drive evolution—floods create canals, fires create fire codes, wars create new city walls (or new slums).
“Borrow” from real cities, but remix. Take Istanbul’s hills, New Orleans’ cemeteries, Prague’s alleyways, Mumbai’s chaos.
Add history that never gets explained—statues with the faces worn off, a wall nobody builds on, a square everyone avoids after dark.
Give your city a rumor mill—people love gossip, legends, ghost stories, scandal.
9. Survival Strategies for World-Builders on the Edge
Build small first. One street, one block, one landmark. Expand only when you need to.
Use NPCs or side characters to “show” the city—let the butcher, the pickpocket, or the priest be your tour guides.
Keep a “city bible”—notes on names, shops, families, crimes, disasters. You’ll forget otherwise.
Accept imperfection. Real cities are messy, inconsistent, contradictory, and alive. Embrace it.
Personal hack: Whenever I get stuck, I make a quick news sheet or gossip rag for my city—“Madam Morrow’s Bakery Burned, Gremlin Blamed,” “Bridge Troll Strikes Again.” Makes the place feel alive overnight.
10. Final Words—A City is Never Finished (And Neither Are You)
The best cities in fiction feel like you could move in, get lost, or die in them. They’re flawed, beautiful, haunted, hungry, and absolutely unique.
If you build your city from the ground up—history, dirt, struggle, dreams—you’ll end up with a place that shapes your characters, warps your story, and maybe even outlives you.
So don’t just draw a map. Build a monster. Let it growl, let it rot, let it shine.
See Also:
“The City & The City” by China Miéville
“Perdido Street Station” by China Miéville
“Imaginary Cities” by Darran Anderson
“Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino
“Neverwhere” by Neil Gaiman
Real city maps from the 1600s–1800s (library archives)
Your own nightmares