Varos

[Ares96]

I'm back again, with another hand-drawn map, this time of the city one of my current writing projects is set in. I'll quote myself in lieu of describing the city again:

The valley of the Folyam River was home to about ninety percent of all the humans on the planet. It might not have been the best place to live on its surface, but it was by far the easiest place to land. The first colony towns had been planted there, near the mouth of the river, and all subsequent expeditions had ended up in various parts of the valley. When other regions were settled, they were settled overland. That was both slow and expensive, so it mostly happened where there was something worth exploiting, and mostly around the Tenger Sea, which the Folyam ran into. But the Folyam silted up near its mouth, so the most common connection between the sea and the valley was an overland route north of the river that met the sea at Varos. The capital, the biggest city on the Planet by far, was also one of the few towns on it that weren’t near the Folyam or one of its branches.

The Red City and Government Quarter were in a narrow corridor of flat land hemmed in by a ridge along the seashore. Nearly all industry grew up along the rail lines between the city and Weston, as did the poorer districts. The smog from the factories shrouded the city and turned the sky orange at dawn and dusk. Everyone who could afford it lived in the hills to the north and south, where they had to look at the smog but might not have to breathe it in. The South Hills were relatively affordable in places, and orchards and small farms grew more common the further you got from the city, but the taller North Hills were the reserve of the capital’s richest.

Varos was the oldest city on the Planet, and dated from a time before the Government had quite got its foothold. When the entire world was one bad harvest away from extinction and no industrial goods of any kind were available outside supply drops, planning and construction engineering were low priorities. So the Government had contented themselves to draw a round-ish demarcation line around the original settlement, build a road around it, and let the town inside develop freely. When the railways came, the Central Station was built on the west side, and the docks were by the seashore a mile or two to the east. The Palace, northwest of the town, and the Governor’s Road that connected them were the only well-planned parts of the city, and the government quarter would rise out of the open parklands on either side of the Road.

The earliest and easiest paint that could be made on the Planet was bright red, and most of the buildings in the original town were painted with it. White, brown, yellow and a host of other shades (most of which defaulted to orange-brown in the smog) were also there now, but they still called it the Red City. The Corporation Building, the tallest inside the line, kept its traditional colour, as did many of the other major buildings. The space in front of it was kept clear of construction, as was an area at the end of the Governor’s Road, and for want of better names they became known as East Square and West Square respectively.

The tram terminus took up the western third of West Square, and fruit, vegetable and flower stalls dominated the rest of it. It had been the obvious place to sell produce when the nearest farm was half a kilometre away and retained the function out of tradition. The equestrian statue of Governor Essen stood in between – to ensure it was properly seen, market stalls weren’t allowed west of it. There were no administrative buildings on West Square, so the most prominent one was the Bank – t h e Bank, regardless of how many others might be in operation at any given time – which took up the entire north side. The other three sides had various small shops, all busy on a Monday afternoon.

On the map, dark blue is Government buildings, light blue is Corporation (city council) buildings, brown is the railway station and red are the five (so far) tram lines. There will be more marked buildings, as well as outlying districts, eventually. Might even try to digitalise this and make it into something more legible.