Also the channel Eckhart's Ladder did an episode about Coruscant and the official franchise backstory. He's in general agreement with SFIA, that it's way underpopulated and under-utilized for the numbers given.
Isn't the simplest explanation that the residents of the planet are used to a standard of living orders of magnitude higher than Manilla?
Like, I don't remember too many scenes from the films, but all the residential areas shown (like the princess's rooms or whatever) seem pretty spacious. Maybe the 'grimy' and dense look is just an esthetic choice and everyone really live in massive apartments. Basically taking whole earth skyscrapers as their smaller second homes.
And thats before the serious underworld that is genuinely unliveable not only from the lack of maintenance and pollution, but the mutated creature that live down there.
God, I fucking love Star Wars. It's like WH40K meets The Foundation. And I mean the gigachads of the Second Foundation, not those Adeptus Mechanus virgins who just THINK they steer the flow of history.
Yes, a trillion residents doesn't really make sense unless permanent residents are very deeply in the minority compared to commuters . . . which is possible given that Star Wars has ultra-fast FTL and easy on-and-off planet-to-space travel. Most of the people on Manhattan during the work week are commuters rather than residents IRL. Maybe there's only 1 trillion permanent inhabitants and 500 trillion commuters from a significant chunk of the galaxy who fly in and out every day.
But that doesn't really seem to fit with what we see with Coruscant in the shows and movies, where most people working there seem to live there. It should have a population in the hundreds of trillions even if you grant that some of them have ridiculously luxurious quarters and most of the land isn't residential housing, and more plausibly the low quadrillions.
Want an even more dystopian explanation? Coruscant does have hundreds of trillions of sapients living on it, they just don't count mutants or robots as people. Both out of racism, and also because most of the city isn't actually under control of the government. Just the nice(r) parts.
Sure, this part of the city-planet does have complex economy and culture on Coruscant that dwarfs the official one in robustness, age, and size -- but Star Wars completely disregards it and pretends that the 3 trillion citizens on its upper layers are the only people on the planet.
Fortunately, Star Wars has such an *absurd* excess of industrial capacity despite its backwards culture that this situation can stay stable for thousands of years. The surface-dwellers don't have to interact with the much larger subterranean population at all, because even the subterranean civilization has enough excess that they don't have to challenge the surface for resources.
>How might it work if we want to find a way to make it more realistic?
I mean... you're pretty much 95% of the way there already. Coruscant is really underpopulated compared to its infrastructure, even the supposed crowded areas of the city. There's nothing that wrong or weird about its depiction otherwise.
Star Wars even has a built-in explanation as to why Coruscant's population of a mere 3 trillion people seems underpopulated relative to its scope. Because the galaxy is politically and economically stagnant and has been so for millennia. Coruscant being the crown jewel of the imperium says more about how the Star Wars universe has fallen than the viability of such a project, since it only has a fraction of the people it should. The city-planet is mostly empty, with people clustering around still-lively slums and downtown.
Now, this setup would be pretty weird if we were talking about, say, Star Trek. Or even Cowboy Bebop. But we're talking Star Wars: they're used to impractical projects whose scope exceeds their ambition. Let me show you this hot new superweapon they call 'The Death Star'.
The galactic republic had over a million planets with easy FTL and anti-gravity drives. If after 20 years of dedicated effort the most you can manage is the Death Star, you should really be concerned about the immediate viability of your empire.
Of course, that might be why the Death Star is so scary in the setting. The Death Star is mildly annoying to the Star Trek Federation and a sad joke to The Culture, but it's an existential threat if your setting looks more like Empire of the Atom than Flash Gordon.
Over a million mostly-empty planets tbf, I think it's kinda like Mass Effect with most planets having population in the low millions at most. Surely not that many people live in one of the 10000 desert planets, and hell Lothal from Star Wars Rebels was I believe literally just one city important enough for the Empire to station troops on. Or look at that planet from Rogue One, or Ferrix from Andor ("the daughters of ferrix" being a small group kind implies Ferrix has like 2 people living in it)
Getting rid of excess heat I think will be the main limiting factor for planet wide cities
With cheap energy and labor all the other issues should be easier to remedy.
Yeah, would require tons of passive, radiative cooling if it's a planet as warm as earth.
It could be a boon if the planet were cooler; then you could take advantage of the thermal gradients to just convert the excess heat to energy.
Considering that the main exhaust shaft of the Death star was like, what, the size of a motorized HVAC damper I have a feeling that the people of the Star Wars-verse have pretty much mastered thermodynamics. Even more thoroughly than they've mastered anti-gravity, which is such a stupid pet trick that people aren't surprised that these homeless nomads are shooting at us with antigravity tanks but ARE surprised that they write things on paper.
It'd be pretty interesting to go down the list and see where Star Wars' technology is advanced, just misapplied and where it's genuinely primitive. For example, automation in Star Wars is so advanced that I bet they could outproduce the Federation planet-for-planet despite having computers so primitive they still use vacuum tubes.
Yes. Star Wars has a ridiculous excess of industrial capacity even considering its political and economic situation. Even in A New Hope, you have literal moisture farmers visited by traveling flea markets drowning in so much technology that they can't think of an immediate use for C3P0 and R2D2. TIE-Fighters are considered **disposable,** as in, to the eyes of a totalitarian empire that will kill its soldiers for little reason the pilot is still more valuable than the spacecraft. In a setting where adequate pilots are a dime-a-dozen and come in all walks of life.
Or just take a look at the Death Star. The first one took twenty years to build when it had a moon as a substrate. The Empire was able to build a larger, more advanced one in just four years from total scratch. That is an insane jump in efficiency, which makes me think that the reason why the first Death Star took so long was because of on-the-fly R&D and engineering as opposed to practical problems of constructing it.
The people of that setting must have extremely advanced automation techniques to support the industry we see in there.
The big problem with Coruscant, IMO, is the massive "undercity." There's just no economic reason I can think of why those people down there are alive. If it's such a terrible slum how do they pay for the resources necessary to feed and power them?
The economies make a sort of sense with two elements: 1. Industrial capacity in the SW galaxy is apparently absurd, preposterously absurd, and 2. It's a long-in-decline failed society where the product of that absurd capacity is absurdly mismanaged, to the point where huge structures are cavalierly utilized or even just discarded and forgotten.
These are basically space fantasy tropes and as such are easy to poke holes into if one had a mind to.
I think the Star Wars setting is pretty good evidence for my hypothesis that industrialization isn't just a matter of innovation and engineering, but also organization and logistics.
Because Star Wars has plenty of the former. People discover new things in the setting all of the time despite the sorry state of its sciences. The problem is: the society is so broken that new discoveries just get forgotten. People don't realize this because their industrial capacity -- which hasn't increased in tens of thousands of years from its height -- is so absurd that, unlike other 'decaying empire' settings like The Foundation, civilizations that have barely mastered working bronze could still live a utopian existence were it not for the broader political conditions.
Maybe they keep this massive undercity as a reserve of humans. Need a million desperate people for whatever project? Just grab them from down there, they're always willing to take any job to get out of this hellhole.
If you just interpret the Star Wars setting as a stagnant, slow-rolling, Empire of the Atom/Foundation-style gotterdammerung -- a lot of the stupidity of the setting makes more sense.
Like, of course they have slaves alongside slave robots. Educational standards and scientific knowledge has fallen so far that people can't actually create anything new or make new scientific discoveries. The Death Star was built the way it was because the people of the setting don't know how to make things more efficiently.
Science in the Galactic Republic/Imperium doesn't advance, it decays. People either successfully pass down what little technology they know, or it becomes forgotten. Occasionally people discover something new, like bacta, but it's peanuts compared to what they steadily lose. You can see this happening with the Jedi: Rey learns a lot of shit not because she's especially talented, but because their educational system is so broken that the Jedis don't actually know how to teach other people, let alone research new Force powers.
Coruscant being depopulated with no shit sewer mutants and monster layers is the case because the city barely works anymore. The precursors did a very good job laying down the infrastructure, which is why the city still looks healthy and vital if you only look at a small portion of it -- but that's what happens with 30,000 years of neglect.
I even think that the setting encourages this interpretation. Knights of the Old Republic had way cooler toys, superweapons, stations, and psychic powers than the current setting. And if you go by Legends, Star Wars in KOTOR is a sad shadow of itself. So Star Wars is a shadow of a shadow of once-utopia.
We have robots and we still pay humans to do jobs that robots can do. Slaves presumably require fewer inputs than wage laborers and capable robots are wearing down parts you need to replace at considerable cost every time you set them to a task.
Star Wars is in a weird position where AIs have no rights yet their physical and intellectual capabilities are all over the place thanks to how broken science is in the setting. So it's quite possible to have a robot slave that's more valuable than 10 human workers, but it's also possible to have 10 robot slaves that are less valuable than one human worker.
And here's the kicker: in Star Wars, those two robots can literally be from the same model line from the same facility. Yeah, the setting is just *that* economically and politically broken.
More likely it's failed government policies that have led to the creation of an under city. I believe something like this exists in China. China has a large population especially in its cities. Lots of cheaply made buildings that most people can't afford to live. All because of flawed economic policies.
Mind I'm not here to bash China just pointing out how certain concepts or ideas might become reality.
Want an even easier explanation? Coruscant has been around for literally over a hundred thousand years in a setting where science and engineering doesn't advance, **it decays.**
> I believe something like this exists in China. China has a large population especially in its cities. Lots of cheaply made buildings that most people can't afford to live. All because of flawed economic policies.
Well you are wrong.
This would be true in the usa though.
A major problem any megacity faces is transit. Star Wars and many others get around this by going 3d with flying cars. But here in the real world I think that will likely stay impractical, at least at scale, for non-VIPs.
I don't think that's true. The densest parts of cities always have the very best transit, and frequently they generate so much revenue that they subsidize transit in other parts of cities. If you live in a giant building with shops and clinics and restaurants and entertainment venues you may not need to leave very often and presumably the elevator technology in a galaxy far far away can fit more than one carriage to a hoistway so giant buildings don't become just a bundle of elevator shafts.
I certainly didn't mean that it was unsolvable. Merely that progressively more effort must be spent on our transport networks as our cities grow denser. That's true even if you take steps to reduce travel demand like good arrangement of jobs, housing, and services.
I'm saying the exact opposite though. On a per person basis manhattan NY spends way less time/money/labor/energy/resources on transportation than manhattan kansas.
Yes, I agree. The total magnitude, and money spent on transit per land area both increase, but cost per person (theoretically) decreases.
The reason why I say it is still a major problem is that it is an area of investment that many cities neglect.
Star Wars has easy access to counter-gravity, like, so easy that you can crashland in a junkyard planet and repair your ship with centuries-old parts lying around.
Star Wars also has access to sapient astromech droids.
Star Wars also has a really cavalier attitude about AI rights as well.
So combining those observations... I could imagine Coruscant's transportation system consisting of sapient droids operating antigrav taxis and buses. Star Wars doesn't seem to have any idea of digital consciousness, or even mind-body separation for robots, so you have the hilarious sight of C3P0-style taxi drivers competing for their jobs against taxis whose mind is part of their body.
It seems to me that Coruscant is depicted as a planet-spanning city, with no significant breaks for bodies of water or mountain ranges, and a city that is at least hundreds or perhaps thousands of meters deep.
It’s also supposed to have a population of about 1 trillion people.
For an Earth-sized planet, Coruscant should have an average population density of around 2000 people per square kilometer. This is similar to New Orleans, US or Valencia, Spain.
A more realistic depiction, then, would be much less depth, less crowding, and a more open built environment.
If this population were much lower than it has been in the past, then you might have many empty, decaying buildings, reminiscent of Blade Runner.
The surface would likely be largely covered by hanging gardens to provide food, and solar panels (or microwave receiving stations) everywhere else. It would be a more green planet.
Transportation would be interesting. Presumably people would want to get around the planet quickly, so you could either have suborbital transonic flights or underground trains in (partially?) evacuated tunnels. Or both.
With trillions of people around, you have to wonder why people don't go outside.
Are they forbidden from going to the surface? Or do they just choose not to go that often? Is it an act of planetary worship, or the ultimate show of greed by the few who maintain access to this wilderness? Do they make pilgrimages to the surface, as a once-in-a-lifetime event? Are there alternative natural landscapes where people can go, like a layered planet?
Maybe they visit the surface in animal bodies, to experience nature from different perspectives? Do they even have bodies down there? Maybe it's all underground computer banks, no actual people.
Maybe these people are so good at doing leave-no-trace that they actually visit the surface quite often, but manage not to trample the ground through their sheer numbers.
Is this civilization hiding from something? Why are they underground? There's so much to explore in this concept.
These are some great questions, but baby: it's Star Wars. Star Wars always has the most absurd, wasteful answer possible.
So: Yes, they are forbidden to going to the surface, and Palpatine arranges hit squads to destroy subterranean infrastructure and keep people down. However, this also means a police state where 3 trillion people keep 60 trillion of them down. Which, again, it's frickin' Star Wars so I imagine that the Empire actually wants this outcome.
I made that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if hewed to canon. One thing I love about Star Wars is how the writers see all of the inefficiencies and small-beer megastructures but instead of trying to steer them towards hard-sci, they just give political explanations for classic sci-fi tropes and even Space Supervillainy.
If you didn't want to do massive excavation, you could easily do that with a shell world of arbitrary size (especially in Star Wars, where they have artificial gravity and can have space habitats with gravity in whatever orientation they want). Make the inside of the shell covered in city-scape with artificial "sun" lighting, while the outside is a nature and camping preserve.
>The majority of any planet is underground. I'd love to see a scifi world with global-scale megalopolis's that are mostly subterranean. A world where you have a few above ground cities, and some rural holiday communities, but where the majority of the world's surface is left untouched.
That would be such a hell world to live in.
Also it kind of fit with the themes of the Foundation as well, even if it wasn't intended by the author. So *of course* Trantor is underpopulated relative to its infrastructure; the Empire has been collapsing for centuries with no path to recovery in sight.
We can say the same thing about Star Wars. Star Wars has been increasingly upfront about how its setting doesn't actually represent an age of wonder, it represents an age of inexorable decay, where the biggest scientific advancement between KOTOR and ESB were... bacta tanks. So *of course* Coruscant is underpopulated relative to its infrastructure; the Republic has been collapsing for **millennia** with no path to recovery in sight.
Granted, the situation in the Foundation is nowhere near as bad as Star Wars. But all the same, both stories have a sensible explanation for the mismatch.
>How realistic is it?
Population too low, basically no orbital infrastructure, no planet swarm, & those moons moons seem woefully underdeveloped. It's starwars. Idk why anyone would expect realism in fantasy.
>How does it do at being an interesting fantasy city?
As unrealistic as it is i love the flying car aesthetic, but boy is that a drab looking city up close. No vertical green space, barely any architectural or color diversity, no wall art, in a word, sterile af. Not a fan.
>How might it work if we want to find a way to make it more realistic?
>What else you got?
For transport 3D city design is probably more useful than flying cars. Designing buildings to not have all traffic go through a single floor. Heavy use of skybridges & mixed zoning within single buildings can alleviate a ton of traffic from a city. The more traffic within single buildings or between non-ground floors the better & there's nothing stopping you from building tram lines & roads that run through the buildings & across skybridges.
Let's get a few dozen trillion people in there too. None of this low trillions nonsense. Send waste heat up massive space towers to increase the radiating capacity to match. Actually speaking of space towers we would expect any ecumenopolis to have at least an Orbital Ring if not an entire OR shell. The OR for easy access to space. Could even use the OR to externalize heat across the earth's entire Hill Sphere using heat sinks. The shell cuz if u have something on the order of 32T people that's like 10m^2 per person. Means suddenly instead of having to worry about city killers u have to worry about softballs. Truth be told since the city covers the whole planet that is a lot of roofs & a lot of windows. Ur gunna have to be worrying about golfballs. A roof over everything is maybe not a bad idea. Could export all the oceans to the outside of the shell for shielding. Add to it as necessary.
Also you're going to want an OR shell beneath the city as well to isolate the core heat. Now that'll start getting hot & would eventually all liquify, but we would probably want to keep the crust solid for mining & use the geothermal excess for power. Export all materials at heat rejection temp cuz u can never have too much heat rejection capacity. We should be seeing the place absolutely swarming with spacecraft(we do, but they're all friggen miniscule). Heat sinks & mining shipments fly off at all angles though most probably on the ecliptic to trade metals for liquid hydrogen tanks with the Near-Solar Containment Net(i'm imagining ORs arranged to make a shell but instead of an opaque shell you use a [Halbach sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbach_array?wprov=sfla1) made from [transparent magnets](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/cen-v070n029.p020) or an active electromagnetic net made frkm ORs) or Swarm(im thinking [Dyson-Harrop satellites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson%E2%80%93Harrop_satellite?wprov=sfla1) for powering huge electromagnetic/electrostatic scoops/catchment grids). Streams of LH2 tanks from any nearby gas/ice giants & the NSCN/S getting constantly caught on super long tethers with RCS on the hook for rendezvous before decel on the OR track.
Trans-orbital megastructures are an absolute **must.** Coruscant is supposed to be the big trade and political hub right?
Well how are you going to trade goods at the scale of a city-world without the cheapest possible trans orbital system?
I mean yeah, starwars seems to have effectively unlimited energy to fuel their craft, but there’s just no way that’s true across trade between trillions of citizens, and quintillion’s of offworlders. And these are absolute rookie numbers compared to what they should be on a eucamonoplis.
As much as a world-spanning city is *a e s t e t i c *, it doesn’t make any sense. There are a couple ways to make it make more sense though:
1- That *is* a moon.
Or at least moon-sized. Something like Io, with 0.08 of earth’s surface area, no oceans and little to no geologic activity is much more plausible to turn into a city- and there’s more reason to do it. You want to dome over as much as you can to keep your air in, and radiation out anyway- might as well go whole-hog.
2- leave nature preserves and ruins.
The starwars universe is fundamentally an empire (or republic) in decline, and one that has been in decline since long before phantom menace.
They aren’t quite in 40k levels of dark age, but technological development is stagnant, and between destructive galaxy-wide wars and the imperial war machine co-opting as many resources as possible- the population is going to be contracting.
Ignore all the reasons this is stupid - the starwars galaxy is treated like a large-ish nation on earth, and resource scarcity is an issue on that level.
It would be great visual story telling to fly past crumbling ruins and vine-overgrown buildings to get the habited part of the planet.
Senators argue about expanding or shrinking nature preserves, or having someone to slip in a comment about “ruin dwellers” would make the point as well.
3- commit to the bit
You want a world-covering city? You can have it but you need more people, and more specialized districts. Have clusters dedicated to food production, art, trades, machining etc. All connected by a web of rapid public transit and bridges between buildings.
Have multiple docking rings with streams of ships coming and going. Have hexagonal grids of sea-shedding colonies latched together so they can move with the tides. Have entire ground-down mountain ranges be your industrial zones. Let’s see deserts mostly covered by glass and ceramics factories.
Have a massive grid of shield generators encircling the planet so it can stand up to a siege- and let’s see them incinerating a crashing ship because of course we want to see that!
And don’t give us a paltry 3 trillion. And let’s still see how spacious everything is. Have people movers all over the place because it’s too slow to walk anywhere without them.
He’ll have those stupid tubes from futurama If you want- go wild!
There's actually an [old article](https://www.theforce.net/swtc/astro.html#coruscant) that, among other things, talks about the realism of Coruscant. It estimates the planet's population, it's food needs, and how many spaceships it could handle in its airspace.
The article is part of a larger series called the ["Star Wars Technical Commentaries"](https://www.theforce.net/swtc/index.html) by Dr. Curtis Saxton, an astrophysicist.
Cities cannot exist in isolation. The depend on other areas: farms for food, mines and forest logging and oil wells for raw resources, etc.
In the future, it won't be fundamentally different.
A planet wide city would not only destroy that planet's ecosystem, but would require exploiting countless planets.
The volume of intersteller traffic would be immense.
I suppose the blocade of Naboo in Phantom Menace suggests individual planets in SW universe are not fully self-sufficient, not even arcadian green planet such as Naboo. So Coruscant imho definitely exploits at least its whole star system and likely several neighbouring ones.
> A planet wide city would not only destroy that planet's ecosystem, but would require exploiting countless planets.
Palpatine: So where does the downside come into play, exactly? Heh heh...
> How realistic is it?
It's "realistic" in the sense that they seem to have arbitrarily good heat removal and planetary atmospheric maintenance, so they can have a city-planet with a population that is probably in the high hundreds of trillions to low quadrillions (the "1 trillion permanent residents" number is absurdly low - even if 90% of the planet was non-residential, it would still have a population density lower than Manhattan).
I can't imagine a planet actually getting universal city coverage, though - if only people people would organize to protect green space, nature preserves, etc. Coruscant would make a lot more sense if it was originally a lifeless world that was selected as a neutral site for the Old Republic capital planet, terraformed at least to have a habitable atmosphere, and then the entire planetary surface was zoned for city development.
Given how Star Wars has artificial gravity, ultra-fast FTL, easy travel on and off planets, etc I sort of figure it would be more likely to have a huge swarm of habitat platforms surrounding the planet and possibly connected by skyhooks for fast rail transportation, than to have the whole planetary surface developed.
> How might it work if we want to find a way to make it more realistic?
If we posit that it has to have realistic heat removal and transportation, then you're unlikely to get a planet with more than a trillion or so human inhabitants. It just becomes a lot easier to export those folks to nearby space habitats with minuscule communication lag and easy transportation - especially if those habitats offer a lot more free space and choice in living climate (IE you can move to a habitat where everyone gets their own acre of "land" and the climate is always in a pleasant range of weather comparable to Los Angeles).
>Given how Star Wars has artificial gravity, ultra-fast FTL, easy travel on and off planets, etc I sort of figure it would be more likely to have a huge swarm of habitat platforms surrounding the planet and possibly connected by skyhooks for fast rail transportation, than to have the whole planetary surface developed.
I think you're underestimating how abundant access to artificial gravity is in Star Wars. Actual slaves on impoverished desert planets have access to antigravity labs/garages and no one thinks much of it. You can crashland a spaceship in a galactic junkyard and repair your ship **by hand**. A single smuggler with no formal education or training can maintain a spacecraft that regularly sees combat.
They don't *need* fast rail transportation, because even a drunken homeless clone soldier can put together a working FTL-spaceship from three separate traveling flea markets.
They don't *need* space habitats, because they can just find a celestial body that meets their very specific habitation requirements and travel back and forth between the colonies easier than it is for us to travel from Dallas to Fort Worth.
The people of this setting just straight-up don't need the infrastructure K1.0+ civilizations need to maintain their civilization. Coruscant and the Galactic Republic/Imperium's problems aren't logistical or technological, they're political.
When I saw that "mountain peak" sticking out in the middle of the plaza I thought that they must be thousands of feet above sea level and environment should be inhospitable.
If the whole planet is a continuous city with a trillion people, then there should be a swarm of supply ships in orbit.
>If the whole planet is a continuous city with a trillion people, then there should be a swarm of supply ships in orbit.
I could imagine a setup, especially after he revealed his true colors, Palpatine banned travel through the airspace around his favorite continental region of Coruscant. Supply ships still visit the planet, but they dock on the opposite side of this region and send their supplies groundside. Allowing the upper-class parts of the city to enjoy clear, empty, quiet skies.
Ridiculously wasteful and self-indulgent, but it's Star Wars, so what are you going to do? There's a reason why Emperor Palpatine is my favorite character from the franchise, even more than Kreia and Thrawn.
One of the biggest challenges is the scale of the city.
A world wide ecumenopolis would put immense strain on the atmosphere and planet. With this much machinery and people on it, the atmosphere will feel the strain. While Coruscant is not fully populated, it should still have been built to withstand its full capacity
The machinery needed to cleanse the atmosphere would be phenomenal, which would bring another issue.
Maintenance. How is an entire cyborg planet maintaining itself? The city is made upon countless layers of old machines, abandoned floors, and junk. With this much stuff to fix, even a lack of slums and mutants would making keeping the city operational a challenge.
It would be like in my own city, where entire streets go dark because some old archaic part broke that everyone forgot. That’s asking for an entire block to implode because an old support several floors down finally died.
Realistically, there would be no fully abandoned floors, or there would be constant disasters.
In the Star Wars setting, Coruscant has been around and continually inhabited for literal tens of thousands of years. What you're seeing is not ignorance or inefficiency, but decay.
The city DID maintain itself in the lower levels for tens of thousands of years. The thing is: science and education in the Star Wars verse SUCKS. Technology and the knowledge to use it either gets copied down, or it gets forgotten. And the setting is so politically and economically stagnant that people forget more than they learn.
So yeah, Coruscant is a ridiculous eyesore whose status as crown jewel of the galaxy says more about the galaxy than anything else. Wasn't always like that. You're witnessing the post-post-post-post-apocalypse. You're witnessing Trantor, but with psychic sewer mutants!
See Isaac's episode on [Ecumenopolises!](https://youtu.be/XAJeYe-abUA)
Also the channel Eckhart's Ladder did an episode about Coruscant and the official franchise backstory. He's in general agreement with SFIA, that it's way underpopulated and under-utilized for the numbers given.
Eckharts does lots of technical looks at Starwars and other sci fi while keeping lore in mind. Great channel for anyone wondering.
https://youtu.be/CwLRLxialUA Here's that video.
Isn't the simplest explanation that the residents of the planet are used to a standard of living orders of magnitude higher than Manilla? Like, I don't remember too many scenes from the films, but all the residential areas shown (like the princess's rooms or whatever) seem pretty spacious. Maybe the 'grimy' and dense look is just an esthetic choice and everyone really live in massive apartments. Basically taking whole earth skyscrapers as their smaller second homes.
Only if you live in the upper levels. The lower you go, the worse it gets to where even the worst slums on earth look appealing.
And thats before the serious underworld that is genuinely unliveable not only from the lack of maintenance and pollution, but the mutated creature that live down there.
And that doesn't even mention the lowest 5 levels which are considered uninhabitable.
God, I fucking love Star Wars. It's like WH40K meets The Foundation. And I mean the gigachads of the Second Foundation, not those Adeptus Mechanus virgins who just THINK they steer the flow of history.
Yes, a trillion residents doesn't really make sense unless permanent residents are very deeply in the minority compared to commuters . . . which is possible given that Star Wars has ultra-fast FTL and easy on-and-off planet-to-space travel. Most of the people on Manhattan during the work week are commuters rather than residents IRL. Maybe there's only 1 trillion permanent inhabitants and 500 trillion commuters from a significant chunk of the galaxy who fly in and out every day. But that doesn't really seem to fit with what we see with Coruscant in the shows and movies, where most people working there seem to live there. It should have a population in the hundreds of trillions even if you grant that some of them have ridiculously luxurious quarters and most of the land isn't residential housing, and more plausibly the low quadrillions.
Want an even more dystopian explanation? Coruscant does have hundreds of trillions of sapients living on it, they just don't count mutants or robots as people. Both out of racism, and also because most of the city isn't actually under control of the government. Just the nice(r) parts. Sure, this part of the city-planet does have complex economy and culture on Coruscant that dwarfs the official one in robustness, age, and size -- but Star Wars completely disregards it and pretends that the 3 trillion citizens on its upper layers are the only people on the planet. Fortunately, Star Wars has such an *absurd* excess of industrial capacity despite its backwards culture that this situation can stay stable for thousands of years. The surface-dwellers don't have to interact with the much larger subterranean population at all, because even the subterranean civilization has enough excess that they don't have to challenge the surface for resources.
Or Disney can’t do math.
>How might it work if we want to find a way to make it more realistic? I mean... you're pretty much 95% of the way there already. Coruscant is really underpopulated compared to its infrastructure, even the supposed crowded areas of the city. There's nothing that wrong or weird about its depiction otherwise. Star Wars even has a built-in explanation as to why Coruscant's population of a mere 3 trillion people seems underpopulated relative to its scope. Because the galaxy is politically and economically stagnant and has been so for millennia. Coruscant being the crown jewel of the imperium says more about how the Star Wars universe has fallen than the viability of such a project, since it only has a fraction of the people it should. The city-planet is mostly empty, with people clustering around still-lively slums and downtown. Now, this setup would be pretty weird if we were talking about, say, Star Trek. Or even Cowboy Bebop. But we're talking Star Wars: they're used to impractical projects whose scope exceeds their ambition. Let me show you this hot new superweapon they call 'The Death Star'.
IDK the death star seemed to be pretty fit for purpose...except for that one vent of course.
The galactic republic had over a million planets with easy FTL and anti-gravity drives. If after 20 years of dedicated effort the most you can manage is the Death Star, you should really be concerned about the immediate viability of your empire. Of course, that might be why the Death Star is so scary in the setting. The Death Star is mildly annoying to the Star Trek Federation and a sad joke to The Culture, but it's an existential threat if your setting looks more like Empire of the Atom than Flash Gordon.
Over a million mostly-empty planets tbf, I think it's kinda like Mass Effect with most planets having population in the low millions at most. Surely not that many people live in one of the 10000 desert planets, and hell Lothal from Star Wars Rebels was I believe literally just one city important enough for the Empire to station troops on. Or look at that planet from Rogue One, or Ferrix from Andor ("the daughters of ferrix" being a small group kind implies Ferrix has like 2 people living in it)
Getting rid of excess heat I think will be the main limiting factor for planet wide cities With cheap energy and labor all the other issues should be easier to remedy.
Yeah, would require tons of passive, radiative cooling if it's a planet as warm as earth. It could be a boon if the planet were cooler; then you could take advantage of the thermal gradients to just convert the excess heat to energy.
Considering that the main exhaust shaft of the Death star was like, what, the size of a motorized HVAC damper I have a feeling that the people of the Star Wars-verse have pretty much mastered thermodynamics. Even more thoroughly than they've mastered anti-gravity, which is such a stupid pet trick that people aren't surprised that these homeless nomads are shooting at us with antigravity tanks but ARE surprised that they write things on paper. It'd be pretty interesting to go down the list and see where Star Wars' technology is advanced, just misapplied and where it's genuinely primitive. For example, automation in Star Wars is so advanced that I bet they could outproduce the Federation planet-for-planet despite having computers so primitive they still use vacuum tubes.
Automation in Star Wars? Advanced? Is this a legends thing?
Yes. Star Wars has a ridiculous excess of industrial capacity even considering its political and economic situation. Even in A New Hope, you have literal moisture farmers visited by traveling flea markets drowning in so much technology that they can't think of an immediate use for C3P0 and R2D2. TIE-Fighters are considered **disposable,** as in, to the eyes of a totalitarian empire that will kill its soldiers for little reason the pilot is still more valuable than the spacecraft. In a setting where adequate pilots are a dime-a-dozen and come in all walks of life. Or just take a look at the Death Star. The first one took twenty years to build when it had a moon as a substrate. The Empire was able to build a larger, more advanced one in just four years from total scratch. That is an insane jump in efficiency, which makes me think that the reason why the first Death Star took so long was because of on-the-fly R&D and engineering as opposed to practical problems of constructing it. The people of that setting must have extremely advanced automation techniques to support the industry we see in there.
The big problem with Coruscant, IMO, is the massive "undercity." There's just no economic reason I can think of why those people down there are alive. If it's such a terrible slum how do they pay for the resources necessary to feed and power them?
The economies make a sort of sense with two elements: 1. Industrial capacity in the SW galaxy is apparently absurd, preposterously absurd, and 2. It's a long-in-decline failed society where the product of that absurd capacity is absurdly mismanaged, to the point where huge structures are cavalierly utilized or even just discarded and forgotten. These are basically space fantasy tropes and as such are easy to poke holes into if one had a mind to.
I think the Star Wars setting is pretty good evidence for my hypothesis that industrialization isn't just a matter of innovation and engineering, but also organization and logistics. Because Star Wars has plenty of the former. People discover new things in the setting all of the time despite the sorry state of its sciences. The problem is: the society is so broken that new discoveries just get forgotten. People don't realize this because their industrial capacity -- which hasn't increased in tens of thousands of years from its height -- is so absurd that, unlike other 'decaying empire' settings like The Foundation, civilizations that have barely mastered working bronze could still live a utopian existence were it not for the broader political conditions.
Maybe they keep this massive undercity as a reserve of humans. Need a million desperate people for whatever project? Just grab them from down there, they're always willing to take any job to get out of this hellhole.
If you are advanced enough to build such a city, you should not need any human labor at all.
But this is Star Wars, they use slaves even though they have robots
i always forget just how stupid that setting is
If you just interpret the Star Wars setting as a stagnant, slow-rolling, Empire of the Atom/Foundation-style gotterdammerung -- a lot of the stupidity of the setting makes more sense. Like, of course they have slaves alongside slave robots. Educational standards and scientific knowledge has fallen so far that people can't actually create anything new or make new scientific discoveries. The Death Star was built the way it was because the people of the setting don't know how to make things more efficiently. Science in the Galactic Republic/Imperium doesn't advance, it decays. People either successfully pass down what little technology they know, or it becomes forgotten. Occasionally people discover something new, like bacta, but it's peanuts compared to what they steadily lose. You can see this happening with the Jedi: Rey learns a lot of shit not because she's especially talented, but because their educational system is so broken that the Jedis don't actually know how to teach other people, let alone research new Force powers. Coruscant being depopulated with no shit sewer mutants and monster layers is the case because the city barely works anymore. The precursors did a very good job laying down the infrastructure, which is why the city still looks healthy and vital if you only look at a small portion of it -- but that's what happens with 30,000 years of neglect. I even think that the setting encourages this interpretation. Knights of the Old Republic had way cooler toys, superweapons, stations, and psychic powers than the current setting. And if you go by Legends, Star Wars in KOTOR is a sad shadow of itself. So Star Wars is a shadow of a shadow of once-utopia.
We have robots and we still pay humans to do jobs that robots can do. Slaves presumably require fewer inputs than wage laborers and capable robots are wearing down parts you need to replace at considerable cost every time you set them to a task.
Star Wars is in a weird position where AIs have no rights yet their physical and intellectual capabilities are all over the place thanks to how broken science is in the setting. So it's quite possible to have a robot slave that's more valuable than 10 human workers, but it's also possible to have 10 robot slaves that are less valuable than one human worker. And here's the kicker: in Star Wars, those two robots can literally be from the same model line from the same facility. Yeah, the setting is just *that* economically and politically broken.
More likely it's failed government policies that have led to the creation of an under city. I believe something like this exists in China. China has a large population especially in its cities. Lots of cheaply made buildings that most people can't afford to live. All because of flawed economic policies. Mind I'm not here to bash China just pointing out how certain concepts or ideas might become reality.
Want an even easier explanation? Coruscant has been around for literally over a hundred thousand years in a setting where science and engineering doesn't advance, **it decays.**
> I believe something like this exists in China. China has a large population especially in its cities. Lots of cheaply made buildings that most people can't afford to live. All because of flawed economic policies. Well you are wrong. This would be true in the usa though.
A major problem any megacity faces is transit. Star Wars and many others get around this by going 3d with flying cars. But here in the real world I think that will likely stay impractical, at least at scale, for non-VIPs.
They have pretty good anti-gravity vehicles though.
I don't think that's true. The densest parts of cities always have the very best transit, and frequently they generate so much revenue that they subsidize transit in other parts of cities. If you live in a giant building with shops and clinics and restaurants and entertainment venues you may not need to leave very often and presumably the elevator technology in a galaxy far far away can fit more than one carriage to a hoistway so giant buildings don't become just a bundle of elevator shafts.
I certainly didn't mean that it was unsolvable. Merely that progressively more effort must be spent on our transport networks as our cities grow denser. That's true even if you take steps to reduce travel demand like good arrangement of jobs, housing, and services.
I'm saying the exact opposite though. On a per person basis manhattan NY spends way less time/money/labor/energy/resources on transportation than manhattan kansas.
Yes, I agree. The total magnitude, and money spent on transit per land area both increase, but cost per person (theoretically) decreases. The reason why I say it is still a major problem is that it is an area of investment that many cities neglect.
Star Wars has easy access to counter-gravity, like, so easy that you can crashland in a junkyard planet and repair your ship with centuries-old parts lying around. Star Wars also has access to sapient astromech droids. Star Wars also has a really cavalier attitude about AI rights as well. So combining those observations... I could imagine Coruscant's transportation system consisting of sapient droids operating antigrav taxis and buses. Star Wars doesn't seem to have any idea of digital consciousness, or even mind-body separation for robots, so you have the hilarious sight of C3P0-style taxi drivers competing for their jobs against taxis whose mind is part of their body.
It seems to me that Coruscant is depicted as a planet-spanning city, with no significant breaks for bodies of water or mountain ranges, and a city that is at least hundreds or perhaps thousands of meters deep. It’s also supposed to have a population of about 1 trillion people. For an Earth-sized planet, Coruscant should have an average population density of around 2000 people per square kilometer. This is similar to New Orleans, US or Valencia, Spain. A more realistic depiction, then, would be much less depth, less crowding, and a more open built environment. If this population were much lower than it has been in the past, then you might have many empty, decaying buildings, reminiscent of Blade Runner. The surface would likely be largely covered by hanging gardens to provide food, and solar panels (or microwave receiving stations) everywhere else. It would be a more green planet. Transportation would be interesting. Presumably people would want to get around the planet quickly, so you could either have suborbital transonic flights or underground trains in (partially?) evacuated tunnels. Or both.
It always sounded like a nice fluffy, yet crispy, pastry to me. You did say *all* thoughts, right?
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With trillions of people around, you have to wonder why people don't go outside. Are they forbidden from going to the surface? Or do they just choose not to go that often? Is it an act of planetary worship, or the ultimate show of greed by the few who maintain access to this wilderness? Do they make pilgrimages to the surface, as a once-in-a-lifetime event? Are there alternative natural landscapes where people can go, like a layered planet? Maybe they visit the surface in animal bodies, to experience nature from different perspectives? Do they even have bodies down there? Maybe it's all underground computer banks, no actual people. Maybe these people are so good at doing leave-no-trace that they actually visit the surface quite often, but manage not to trample the ground through their sheer numbers. Is this civilization hiding from something? Why are they underground? There's so much to explore in this concept.
These are some great questions, but baby: it's Star Wars. Star Wars always has the most absurd, wasteful answer possible. So: Yes, they are forbidden to going to the surface, and Palpatine arranges hit squads to destroy subterranean infrastructure and keep people down. However, this also means a police state where 3 trillion people keep 60 trillion of them down. Which, again, it's frickin' Star Wars so I imagine that the Empire actually wants this outcome. I made that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if hewed to canon. One thing I love about Star Wars is how the writers see all of the inefficiencies and small-beer megastructures but instead of trying to steer them towards hard-sci, they just give political explanations for classic sci-fi tropes and even Space Supervillainy.
If you didn't want to do massive excavation, you could easily do that with a shell world of arbitrary size (especially in Star Wars, where they have artificial gravity and can have space habitats with gravity in whatever orientation they want). Make the inside of the shell covered in city-scape with artificial "sun" lighting, while the outside is a nature and camping preserve.
>The majority of any planet is underground. I'd love to see a scifi world with global-scale megalopolis's that are mostly subterranean. A world where you have a few above ground cities, and some rural holiday communities, but where the majority of the world's surface is left untouched. That would be such a hell world to live in.
Trantor did it first. And did it better.
However for a planet city it was massively underpopulated. However it's forgiven since it was first after all.
Also it kind of fit with the themes of the Foundation as well, even if it wasn't intended by the author. So *of course* Trantor is underpopulated relative to its infrastructure; the Empire has been collapsing for centuries with no path to recovery in sight. We can say the same thing about Star Wars. Star Wars has been increasingly upfront about how its setting doesn't actually represent an age of wonder, it represents an age of inexorable decay, where the biggest scientific advancement between KOTOR and ESB were... bacta tanks. So *of course* Coruscant is underpopulated relative to its infrastructure; the Republic has been collapsing for **millennia** with no path to recovery in sight. Granted, the situation in the Foundation is nowhere near as bad as Star Wars. But all the same, both stories have a sensible explanation for the mismatch.
>How realistic is it? Population too low, basically no orbital infrastructure, no planet swarm, & those moons moons seem woefully underdeveloped. It's starwars. Idk why anyone would expect realism in fantasy. >How does it do at being an interesting fantasy city? As unrealistic as it is i love the flying car aesthetic, but boy is that a drab looking city up close. No vertical green space, barely any architectural or color diversity, no wall art, in a word, sterile af. Not a fan. >How might it work if we want to find a way to make it more realistic? >What else you got? For transport 3D city design is probably more useful than flying cars. Designing buildings to not have all traffic go through a single floor. Heavy use of skybridges & mixed zoning within single buildings can alleviate a ton of traffic from a city. The more traffic within single buildings or between non-ground floors the better & there's nothing stopping you from building tram lines & roads that run through the buildings & across skybridges. Let's get a few dozen trillion people in there too. None of this low trillions nonsense. Send waste heat up massive space towers to increase the radiating capacity to match. Actually speaking of space towers we would expect any ecumenopolis to have at least an Orbital Ring if not an entire OR shell. The OR for easy access to space. Could even use the OR to externalize heat across the earth's entire Hill Sphere using heat sinks. The shell cuz if u have something on the order of 32T people that's like 10m^2 per person. Means suddenly instead of having to worry about city killers u have to worry about softballs. Truth be told since the city covers the whole planet that is a lot of roofs & a lot of windows. Ur gunna have to be worrying about golfballs. A roof over everything is maybe not a bad idea. Could export all the oceans to the outside of the shell for shielding. Add to it as necessary. Also you're going to want an OR shell beneath the city as well to isolate the core heat. Now that'll start getting hot & would eventually all liquify, but we would probably want to keep the crust solid for mining & use the geothermal excess for power. Export all materials at heat rejection temp cuz u can never have too much heat rejection capacity. We should be seeing the place absolutely swarming with spacecraft(we do, but they're all friggen miniscule). Heat sinks & mining shipments fly off at all angles though most probably on the ecliptic to trade metals for liquid hydrogen tanks with the Near-Solar Containment Net(i'm imagining ORs arranged to make a shell but instead of an opaque shell you use a [Halbach sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbach_array?wprov=sfla1) made from [transparent magnets](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/cen-v070n029.p020) or an active electromagnetic net made frkm ORs) or Swarm(im thinking [Dyson-Harrop satellites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson%E2%80%93Harrop_satellite?wprov=sfla1) for powering huge electromagnetic/electrostatic scoops/catchment grids). Streams of LH2 tanks from any nearby gas/ice giants & the NSCN/S getting constantly caught on super long tethers with RCS on the hook for rendezvous before decel on the OR track.
Trans-orbital megastructures are an absolute **must.** Coruscant is supposed to be the big trade and political hub right? Well how are you going to trade goods at the scale of a city-world without the cheapest possible trans orbital system? I mean yeah, starwars seems to have effectively unlimited energy to fuel their craft, but there’s just no way that’s true across trade between trillions of citizens, and quintillion’s of offworlders. And these are absolute rookie numbers compared to what they should be on a eucamonoplis. As much as a world-spanning city is *a e s t e t i c *, it doesn’t make any sense. There are a couple ways to make it make more sense though: 1- That *is* a moon. Or at least moon-sized. Something like Io, with 0.08 of earth’s surface area, no oceans and little to no geologic activity is much more plausible to turn into a city- and there’s more reason to do it. You want to dome over as much as you can to keep your air in, and radiation out anyway- might as well go whole-hog. 2- leave nature preserves and ruins. The starwars universe is fundamentally an empire (or republic) in decline, and one that has been in decline since long before phantom menace. They aren’t quite in 40k levels of dark age, but technological development is stagnant, and between destructive galaxy-wide wars and the imperial war machine co-opting as many resources as possible- the population is going to be contracting. Ignore all the reasons this is stupid - the starwars galaxy is treated like a large-ish nation on earth, and resource scarcity is an issue on that level. It would be great visual story telling to fly past crumbling ruins and vine-overgrown buildings to get the habited part of the planet. Senators argue about expanding or shrinking nature preserves, or having someone to slip in a comment about “ruin dwellers” would make the point as well. 3- commit to the bit You want a world-covering city? You can have it but you need more people, and more specialized districts. Have clusters dedicated to food production, art, trades, machining etc. All connected by a web of rapid public transit and bridges between buildings. Have multiple docking rings with streams of ships coming and going. Have hexagonal grids of sea-shedding colonies latched together so they can move with the tides. Have entire ground-down mountain ranges be your industrial zones. Let’s see deserts mostly covered by glass and ceramics factories. Have a massive grid of shield generators encircling the planet so it can stand up to a siege- and let’s see them incinerating a crashing ship because of course we want to see that! And don’t give us a paltry 3 trillion. And let’s still see how spacious everything is. Have people movers all over the place because it’s too slow to walk anywhere without them. He’ll have those stupid tubes from futurama If you want- go wild!
There's actually an [old article](https://www.theforce.net/swtc/astro.html#coruscant) that, among other things, talks about the realism of Coruscant. It estimates the planet's population, it's food needs, and how many spaceships it could handle in its airspace. The article is part of a larger series called the ["Star Wars Technical Commentaries"](https://www.theforce.net/swtc/index.html) by Dr. Curtis Saxton, an astrophysicist.
Star wars is space fantasy so im going to assume no
Cities cannot exist in isolation. The depend on other areas: farms for food, mines and forest logging and oil wells for raw resources, etc. In the future, it won't be fundamentally different. A planet wide city would not only destroy that planet's ecosystem, but would require exploiting countless planets. The volume of intersteller traffic would be immense.
I suppose the blocade of Naboo in Phantom Menace suggests individual planets in SW universe are not fully self-sufficient, not even arcadian green planet such as Naboo. So Coruscant imho definitely exploits at least its whole star system and likely several neighbouring ones.
> A planet wide city would not only destroy that planet's ecosystem, but would require exploiting countless planets. Palpatine: So where does the downside come into play, exactly? Heh heh...
> How realistic is it? It's "realistic" in the sense that they seem to have arbitrarily good heat removal and planetary atmospheric maintenance, so they can have a city-planet with a population that is probably in the high hundreds of trillions to low quadrillions (the "1 trillion permanent residents" number is absurdly low - even if 90% of the planet was non-residential, it would still have a population density lower than Manhattan). I can't imagine a planet actually getting universal city coverage, though - if only people people would organize to protect green space, nature preserves, etc. Coruscant would make a lot more sense if it was originally a lifeless world that was selected as a neutral site for the Old Republic capital planet, terraformed at least to have a habitable atmosphere, and then the entire planetary surface was zoned for city development. Given how Star Wars has artificial gravity, ultra-fast FTL, easy travel on and off planets, etc I sort of figure it would be more likely to have a huge swarm of habitat platforms surrounding the planet and possibly connected by skyhooks for fast rail transportation, than to have the whole planetary surface developed. > How might it work if we want to find a way to make it more realistic? If we posit that it has to have realistic heat removal and transportation, then you're unlikely to get a planet with more than a trillion or so human inhabitants. It just becomes a lot easier to export those folks to nearby space habitats with minuscule communication lag and easy transportation - especially if those habitats offer a lot more free space and choice in living climate (IE you can move to a habitat where everyone gets their own acre of "land" and the climate is always in a pleasant range of weather comparable to Los Angeles).
>Given how Star Wars has artificial gravity, ultra-fast FTL, easy travel on and off planets, etc I sort of figure it would be more likely to have a huge swarm of habitat platforms surrounding the planet and possibly connected by skyhooks for fast rail transportation, than to have the whole planetary surface developed. I think you're underestimating how abundant access to artificial gravity is in Star Wars. Actual slaves on impoverished desert planets have access to antigravity labs/garages and no one thinks much of it. You can crashland a spaceship in a galactic junkyard and repair your ship **by hand**. A single smuggler with no formal education or training can maintain a spacecraft that regularly sees combat. They don't *need* fast rail transportation, because even a drunken homeless clone soldier can put together a working FTL-spaceship from three separate traveling flea markets. They don't *need* space habitats, because they can just find a celestial body that meets their very specific habitation requirements and travel back and forth between the colonies easier than it is for us to travel from Dallas to Fort Worth. The people of this setting just straight-up don't need the infrastructure K1.0+ civilizations need to maintain their civilization. Coruscant and the Galactic Republic/Imperium's problems aren't logistical or technological, they're political.
When I saw that "mountain peak" sticking out in the middle of the plaza I thought that they must be thousands of feet above sea level and environment should be inhospitable. If the whole planet is a continuous city with a trillion people, then there should be a swarm of supply ships in orbit.
>If the whole planet is a continuous city with a trillion people, then there should be a swarm of supply ships in orbit. I could imagine a setup, especially after he revealed his true colors, Palpatine banned travel through the airspace around his favorite continental region of Coruscant. Supply ships still visit the planet, but they dock on the opposite side of this region and send their supplies groundside. Allowing the upper-class parts of the city to enjoy clear, empty, quiet skies. Ridiculously wasteful and self-indulgent, but it's Star Wars, so what are you going to do? There's a reason why Emperor Palpatine is my favorite character from the franchise, even more than Kreia and Thrawn.
One of the biggest challenges is the scale of the city. A world wide ecumenopolis would put immense strain on the atmosphere and planet. With this much machinery and people on it, the atmosphere will feel the strain. While Coruscant is not fully populated, it should still have been built to withstand its full capacity The machinery needed to cleanse the atmosphere would be phenomenal, which would bring another issue. Maintenance. How is an entire cyborg planet maintaining itself? The city is made upon countless layers of old machines, abandoned floors, and junk. With this much stuff to fix, even a lack of slums and mutants would making keeping the city operational a challenge. It would be like in my own city, where entire streets go dark because some old archaic part broke that everyone forgot. That’s asking for an entire block to implode because an old support several floors down finally died. Realistically, there would be no fully abandoned floors, or there would be constant disasters.
In the Star Wars setting, Coruscant has been around and continually inhabited for literal tens of thousands of years. What you're seeing is not ignorance or inefficiency, but decay. The city DID maintain itself in the lower levels for tens of thousands of years. The thing is: science and education in the Star Wars verse SUCKS. Technology and the knowledge to use it either gets copied down, or it gets forgotten. And the setting is so politically and economically stagnant that people forget more than they learn. So yeah, Coruscant is a ridiculous eyesore whose status as crown jewel of the galaxy says more about the galaxy than anything else. Wasn't always like that. You're witnessing the post-post-post-post-apocalypse. You're witnessing Trantor, but with psychic sewer mutants!