Alien City UEA
Feb. 9th, 2012 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethOn the google map the bit of the UEA I like the look of is about 1km long, maybe 1.2, there was a dent in the route. Wiki has a lot of numbers, like 320 acres or 1.29 km squared. It also says there's nearly 20K students. I don't know how many live there, or indeed how many turn up all at once. Even just counting the undergrads, that's as many people as live in Dereham. So the UEA is, on its own, a fair sized market town. It'd be a sight more densely packed if they all tried to stand there at once though. You'd need a lot of vertical to put them all in.
So now I'm wondering if something with the population of Dereham could fairly be called a Lost City.
The wiki article on cities gives an ancient city with a population of 40K. So, a few UEAs could be a city, if you go back to when there weren't so many billions of us. Also, the wiki on Towns says "many 'small towns' in the United States would be regarded as villages in the United Kingdom, while many British 'small towns' would qualify as cities in the United States." Also, the City of London is 2.9 square km, and has 11K people, but it's still The City. So on the whole it doesn't take many UEAs to be a lost city. It just wouldn't necessarily be a very impressive lost city once you got there.
I was thinking though that I like the snowflake pattern of Atlantis because it's tidy and looks like someone planned it. So I could make a snowflake UEA by just saying that there's lots of branches, looking pretty much the same. They'd join together where the library and lecture theatres are, and then the long bit with the lessons buildings and the ziggurats on would be repeated half a dozen times. Though rotated around the library like that you chop off half the campus, it's only 650m along Chancellors Drive, and all the buildings are either the blocky concrete sort or the big Sainsbury Centre made of glass one at the end. Which is what I wanted really, buildings that I can reckon another culture might invent if they happened to have concrete, glass, and square frames. And then something fancy to frame the transport circles at the pointy ends, let the light in on them, and look a bit like an airport terminal.
Of course that leaves out a lot of the bits people live in and just has ziggurats and a ton of classrooms and labs and offices and stuff, and it's anyone's guess how many people could live in there, but it'll be visually distinctive and have a tall bit in the middle. And sort of continue the Atlantis on a British budget theme.
Plus it certainly sounds alien, up in the library with the wind going.
The view from the windows would have to be carefully managed though. Possibly a cross instead of a star, so every side of windows has the same view. Hmmm, even then might not quite work. *thinks*
So now I'm wondering if something with the population of Dereham could fairly be called a Lost City.
The wiki article on cities gives an ancient city with a population of 40K. So, a few UEAs could be a city, if you go back to when there weren't so many billions of us. Also, the wiki on Towns says "many 'small towns' in the United States would be regarded as villages in the United Kingdom, while many British 'small towns' would qualify as cities in the United States." Also, the City of London is 2.9 square km, and has 11K people, but it's still The City. So on the whole it doesn't take many UEAs to be a lost city. It just wouldn't necessarily be a very impressive lost city once you got there.
I was thinking though that I like the snowflake pattern of Atlantis because it's tidy and looks like someone planned it. So I could make a snowflake UEA by just saying that there's lots of branches, looking pretty much the same. They'd join together where the library and lecture theatres are, and then the long bit with the lessons buildings and the ziggurats on would be repeated half a dozen times. Though rotated around the library like that you chop off half the campus, it's only 650m along Chancellors Drive, and all the buildings are either the blocky concrete sort or the big Sainsbury Centre made of glass one at the end. Which is what I wanted really, buildings that I can reckon another culture might invent if they happened to have concrete, glass, and square frames. And then something fancy to frame the transport circles at the pointy ends, let the light in on them, and look a bit like an airport terminal.
Of course that leaves out a lot of the bits people live in and just has ziggurats and a ton of classrooms and labs and offices and stuff, and it's anyone's guess how many people could live in there, but it'll be visually distinctive and have a tall bit in the middle. And sort of continue the Atlantis on a British budget theme.
Plus it certainly sounds alien, up in the library with the wind going.
The view from the windows would have to be carefully managed though. Possibly a cross instead of a star, so every side of windows has the same view. Hmmm, even then might not quite work. *thinks*