AdviceToolbox
Mining towns, empty, futuristic metropolises – cities built around
a single function can make for great video game locationsPlaying with
urban functions
get forgotten, or are replaced by others. In
certain cases a function – new or old – grows
to dominate whole towns and cities, shaping
everything around it.DOMINANT FUNCTIONS
Think of a fishing village or a mining town.
These are settlements focused almost
exclusively on a specific type of production.
Fishing or mining towns need supporting
functions to ensure human survival – people
still have to eat or have a drink at a tavern – but
if the mines or the sea stopped providing, these
places would quickly wither away. Everything is
built around the main, dominant function.
Meanwhile, holy cities – say, Mecca or
medieval Rome – are focused on a totally
different type of function: publicly celebrating
the glory of God, while welcoming pilgrims from
across the world. Similarly, ancient Delphi in
Greece was a settlement built around its oracle.
Less spiritual, but equally easy to recognise
thanks to their tall chimneys, dense housing,
and smog, the industrial towns of the 19th
century grew explosively (usually from tiny
villages) around the revolutionary new function
of capitalist production.
Other examples of urban centres dominated
by a single function include fort cities at imperial
borders, transportation hubs at railroad
crossings, port towns, logging settlements, and
meticulously planned, almost utopian cities
designed to serve a population working at a
major nuclear energy production facility; the
Soviet city of Pripyat next to Chernobyl, for
example. In prehistoric times, simply being nextAUTHOR
KONSTANTINOS DIMOPOULOS
Konstantinos Dimopoulos is a game urbanist and designer, combining a PhD
in urban planning with video games. He is the author of the forthcoming Virtual
Cities atlas, designs game cities, and consults on their creation. game-cities.comcity’s functions lie at the heart of
its urban planning and geography.
They describe both what a city
does and what it needs to do in
order to provide its residents with
the absolute basics. Allowing the survival and
enabling the political and economic activities of
human societies, sheltering them from invaders
or the elements, and occasionally ensuring
that the status quo never changes are all
common civic goals. Similarly, residence, social
interaction, access to food and water, ideology,
transportation, communication, production,
consumption, reproduction, and governance
are all key urban functions, and have been
viewed as such throughout history.
Nothing is static, though. As humanity moves
forward, and economic and political systems
succeed each other, creating new needs
and new problems, urban functions evolve,28 / wfmag.cc
A
The factory created – and
completely dominated – the
booming industrial cities of
the 19th century. The human fields of
The Matrix aren’t really
settlements, despite the
density of people existing
and (in a way) interacting
close to each other.