So you have a city with multiple buildings that are not only super tall but contain numerous shops, housing areas...

In my super-hero Cyberpunk setting metropolis is made up of massive super skyscrapers that surround a space elevator. The highest levels of the innermost buildings are all slums, the repairs to the buildings are out of scrap. Nobody in those buildings are rich enough to buy their way out of the city or to lower levels. Sometimes water and electricity stop working for the highest levels and you have to wait for a few days.

Take and combine it with something like a Ravnica like plane where the entire plane is a city so you have vast forests in the form of super parks with pathways and lamps and a vast sewer system with various ocean ecologies ranging from fresh water lakes to sea water with creatures in them.

I'd imagine they'd want some serious sea walls and preservation efforts - maybe to the point of lifting the historic bits of city up - rather than replacing it.

Could create serious tensions over all this effort spent to preserve "scenic and historic New Orleans" while the regular city has flooding problems, crime problems, police problems and infrastructure problems.

Access to large roads with big on-ramps - be it passing through the base of the tower and connecting to an internal car park and loading docks, or small ring road, but there needs to be serious methods of getting goods and people in and out from the city's main road system

"FUCK THOSE RICH ASSHOLES AND THEIR MAGIC MOUNTAIN CASTLES!"

The shantytowns should be colorful. Cobbled-together and dirty, but not a squalid living situation - the people there are for the most part merely the poor, not the truly desperate. There should be a decent amount of open space, since the towers are likely spaced relatively far apart - rich people like their views, and you want a substantial elevated transit system to be more worthwhile than just walking twenty yards.

I'm just a little tired of the shantytowns at the base of tightly-packed spires that permit no sunlight. Let's give them some sun, let them have some basic happiness from time to time. Maybe no grassy fields, but certainly a few vacant lots full of dirt and weeds.

Given the scale (I imagine) we're going for I could see that, massive fields inbetween the tower cities that havn't been taken over by housing of some sort and is probably used for subsistance farming and makes used of hobbled together filtration system to irregate them from the cities run off.

The tower cities abide their presence because there is a market for old style farm produce rather than the vertical farms that take up several layers of the tower cities.

Obviously multi-layered mega farms where miles and miles of farmable land is stacked on top of each other lot by specialized hot lamps and cooled by artificial "moon" lamps that simulate days.

>and cooled by artificial "moon" lamps that simulate days.
Nah, they just have really pink light for optimum growing
inhabitat.com/futuristic-japanese-indoor-vertical-farm-produces-12000-heads-of-lettuce-a-day-with-led-lighting/

Kek

gonna use this, thanks user

No one knows!
For generations, everyone that has gone to find out has never returned.

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What this guy said makes me think of the Undercity area of Taris, a planet from Knights of the Old Republic.

All the poor bastards live in the Undercity. There's barely even lights and shit down there. It's shanty towns and plagues and shittiness all around. Everything from the surface is a luxury, because the Undercity people aren't allowed to leave the Undercity. Shit sucks.

If there's no reason to really go down there, then there'd be lobbies buried under a few hundred feet of topsoil.
The topsoil will be whatever's lost from the upper levels that rots down. Mostly decayed paperwork bird shit, dead birds, and dead homeless people on top of the rotted remnants thereof.

Further out, there will be communities of homeless people, farming in the soil created by the crap washed off the buildings.

In the base of each Tower City you'll find towns where the workers tend to live who maintain the various facilities such as the vertical farms and power/sewage facilities.

People outside of the Base can come and go depending upon the policies of the particular tower city as they have created an economy the Tower inhabitants take advantage of. That being said you need a special clearance to go up the massive freight elevators to get into the lowest levels of the tower even and it's rumoured at the very peak is where the city government is headquartered.

Military personnel live and are headquartered above the base and most fighting tends to at close quarters with small arms and melee weapons such as hand to hand, knives/short swords, and axes.

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I mean...

aren't these basically 40ks Hive Cities?

kind of, i guess. but i always imagined them more sci-fi like, these pictures are clearly slums

I guess but that doesn't mean we can't make something of it.

Mega City One

This guy has it mostly right. The bottom would be where all the supplies and menial workers come from.

I saw a documentary about a mega-hotel in Singapore. The amount of shit going on beneath the surface was insane.

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Just sewage.

Heavy industry. Loading terminals, storage tanks, container yards, warehouses, rail networks to transport goods between buildings, etc. Everything's well lit and properly maintained by the government/hypercorps because you need a big-ass arcology to run like a well-oiled machine.

Big buildings need big infrastructure to support them. Don't fall for this "all the poor people live at the base of the buildings because witty commentary about stratified societies" meme.

Its a nest of rodents building a city into cliff faces along the sea. Tunnels run into the vast forest to the west but the ship yards along the coast are the fastest way to transport materials from outpost to outpost.

Alternatively its controlled by fucking seagulls.

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A car park, I imagine.

A sea of endless ash. The windows are actually 3D monitors displaying greenery and hills to fool the populace.

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youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54
youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA

Everything you need to know about how you can fit trillions of people in comfortable living on the planet earth.

But why not put that on the level of the elevated roads and railways instead?
Leave the surface to the homeless, and the flooding you caused to wipe them out.

youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54

Nah, infrastructure is underground, with sections (notably the long-distance stuff and the sea ports) above ground. Or we could go with idea and have that on an elevated layer above the surface.
Hell, it could be layers. Original was underground, with what was supposed to be large parks between the buildings. Over time, people started living there, the view got ruined, so they built a new park layer, and so on and so on, with various infrastructure layers added in at various points.

>Fellow Isaac Arthur fan

whats up fellow wascally wabbits?

I was unaware that there was anyone on Veeky Forums that didn't watch these.

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bumping a cool thread

But who will keep order in these mega-cities?

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I kinda like the idea of a plane of existence for Magic where it was like Ravnica except more industrial tones.

Or I suppose an entire moon converted into a giant city planet .

What the fuck kind of accent is this?

Megacity One, Dredd.

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The Towers were built on the coast of a flooded out city so there are not many roads in the Base. The way most people tend to get around is via boat taxis of varying sophistication and sleezyness depending on where you are.

Prime realestate is getting above the various rooftops to surprisngly well furnished apartments as well as buildings close to the primary enterances into the Towers themselves

Not precisely. Hive cities are giant cluster fuck walled cities. Think Kowloon before it got demolished. Whats being described here are arcologies, internally self sufficient and designed. It's the outside that's a clusterfuck. Arcologies are actually very interesting and you can find them in most any near future or far future dystopia as many fiction authors see them as the next evolution of urban decay and clustering, though in reality by their nature Arcologies would have to be thoroughly designed and planned, rather than being the tangled sprawl we associate with inner city America today.

thanks for the elaboration user.
do you see arcologies being made anytime soon?

Can someone post the copypasta of that guys trip to Africa? I forget what city, I think Johannesburg. /pol/ aside it very interestingly describes something similar if darker, connected office buildings by sky walkway and private agencies for driving homeless out of office buildings.

Not the guy you're responding to but where would we build them? You can't just demolish a city and then start building a city in a tower. Hell the land probably wouldn't even be able to take the weight of such a massive structure never mind the infrastructure that has to go into it.

I'm far from any expert but it's not likely as the west generally has a fuckload of space still, though environmentalism and the drive towards efficiency may see elements of the arcology concept spring up. Things like vertical farming to feed growing populations without needing huge swaths of land, interconnected railways and utilities to be more efficient and save power.

Interestingly enough the very earliest prototype of the arcology already exists and is all over America - the shopping mall was originally envisioned as something similar by it's designer. Of course this is an old idea and goes all the way back to Rome with the Forum.

If we ever see something like a arcology it will almost certainly be born out of the shopping mall, probably as a way to house and provide amenities for employees.

There are some fairly reasonable ideas out there engineering wise, it's really the huge cost and lack of a need for it

Almost the entirety of the movie Dredd takes place inside of an arcology that functions as a borough inside Mega City One

The Towers are built on a Mars sized planet that has a breathable atmosphere if you have a re-breather of sorts.

The Towers are part of an even massive structure that encompasses numerous industrial facilities engaged in multiple efforts from mining to terraforming and was built in anticipation of the certain geological changes that are expected to happen (raising the planet's water level for example.

The Shanty town came into excistence as people have modified their bodies to breath in the atmosphere without assistance