Creating a fictional city or fictional town is a thrilling and often meticulous endeavor that allows writers, game developers, and storytellers to craft immersive and believable worlds. Whether your narrative is set in a sprawling cyberpunk megacity, a quiet fantasy town, or a superhero metropolis, the key to engaging your audience lies in the authenticity of your setting. In this guide, we will explore the essential elements of designing realistic fictional city and town layouts.

Envision the natural landscape that will house your city or town. Rivers, mountains, coasts, and other terrain features all significantly impact the layout of a settlement. In addition, these terrain features can be used to create distinct and flavorful locations. Fictional towns and cities are often intricately tied to their surrounding environments, giving rise to places like cliffside settlements, mesa towns, and fishing villages. These terrain features, as well as the general region in which a settlement exists, will determine in large part where everything else in the city or town is located.

The location of some places and structures within a settlement will depend entirely on the local geography and topography. For others the local terrain will be less important. Ports need to be located on the coast, wells need to be above an aquifer or other underground water source, while houses can be erected pretty much anywhere. Castles, important religious sites, or town halls are often located on hills or other prominent or defensive locations. Roads, paths, streets, and highways all must reflect the contours of the land and will snake around mountains, cliffs, and coasts. After determining the local geography, place sites that need to be in certain locations within your town or city. Then connect these sites using routes that respect the terrain. If the church and the marketplace are the most important places in a town, likely a major road connects them directly. Likewise if the most important places are an archology and a hyperspace gate.

Older settlements, those that have gradually and naturally developed over longer periods of time, generally have more intricate layouts than cities that have been planned from their establishment. Newer cities are often grid based, with streets and avenues running exactly perpendicular to one another. These newer cities are often designed with vehicular transport as a central governing aspect in their creation. Small streets will feed into larger streets, which in turn feed into highway systems. By contrast, older settlements will have seen a natural progression from a densely laid network conducive to foot traffic to one that can support modern vehicles (albeit often poorly). This may mean that the layout of older settlements or older districts within a settlement are a denser meshwork of routes and places that follows the natural routes taken by inhabitants instead of a planned grid.

In older settlements wells, marketplaces, and churches were important sites with major roads leading to these areas.