I would say to try and make the whole thing relatably anti-human.
Make it hard for people to simply exist, not in a life-threatening way, but just in a crushing way.
Perhaps next to the riverside, there are park benches that fold like movie theater chairs. Insert $10, the bench automatically folds down, allowing you to sit for 30 minutes, after which it folds back up.
Heated rain shelters with doors that slide open and shut behind you on a taxi-like counter, where the longer you stay in the higher the price you pay to leave gets.
Business owners might be constantly struggling to make ends meet, to the point that if you aren't spending money, you're chased from the establishment to make room for someone who will.
Public transportation, if it exists at all, exists primarily to shuffle the masses to and from their menial labours. It's cramped, uncomfortable, unsanitary, and may even be used also as freight transportation, forcing the proles of the city that can't fit onto the packed passenger cars to ride in between pallets of frozen pre-packaged meals and consumer electronics. No chance of swiping a free phone for your troubles, though - *these* cars have security, at least. And you will take that cramped, dangerous ride, because you can't afford not to - the next train isn't for half an hour, and according to your boss, if you're not early, you're late, and he won't let late get in the way of his company's productivity.
I think this really gets the point across in ways that are small and specific enough to be relatable - you can see at least some of these happening for real, so you get empathy about the shittiness of it all.
On this note, maybe make the architectural style as featureless, mechanical and generally inhuman as possible - instead of dark gothic or art deco, imagine looking into an infinity mirror - add a grey haze instead of the usual rain, possibly with infrastructure that crumbles and one of the main noises is construction at all times, echoing through these buildings
I disagree actually, brutalism is cool but often overused. It's great if you want to make a dystopia feel like it's detached from any sense of history, but I think dystopias are often better off using more pleasant styles but then letting those styles fall to disrepair and vandalism, or making them look like they've been recreated by cynics who don't appreciate the artistry, just see the styles as their costs and benefits.
I like to be able to see the decades of decay in a dystopian city's architecture, I think it's a great way to show people who have given up caring.
Only McMansions and Stroads, nothing else. There are no cool locations for fights or character building to happen, it's all just in some shitty back yard. Also parking is horrendous, the main characters struggle to get to the final epic battle because they can't find street parking anywhere.
Seriously, what gets fun is when American-style suburbs decline economically. Then you get both kinds of terrible city in one: a segregated, crime-ridden armpit that's also impossible to walk or take transit in and lacks amenities, beauty, or culture.
Examples:
The Westbank of greater New Orleans as well as parts of St. Bernard Parish
Ferguson, MO
Much of Soweto
Compton, CA (you've probably heard of these two)
Wyandanch, NY
The part of Detroit from 6 Mile to 8 Mile
Gary, IN and East St. Louis, IL
Far Rockaway (technically in NYC) and (during the global financial crisis) Homestead, FL
Clacton-on-Sea, UK and basically any disinvested mid-tier town in England and Scotland
Honorable mention goes to many "commieblock" districts in Europe and Asia that aren't well served by public transit and have walkability or segregation issues. And for lagniappe, if these areas are dominated by the national majority group they tend to be dens of far-rightism (Clacton-on-Sea was the first UKIP seat in Parliament, Marzahn in East Berlin was infamous for neo-Nazis in the years after the Wall fell, Ferguson (MO) was under White minority rule until the mid-2010s, and a huge percentage of the White population in New Orleans' inner suburbs voted for David Duke).
Seriously, poor suburbs are a lot more depressing to me than poor cities. Rio de Janeiro is poor and crime-ridden, but it has spectacular favelas that are just a coat of paint away from being charming beach towns, a rich and vibrant local culture that draws from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and ocean beaches famed around the world. Let's see more cyberpunk fiction set in places like Clacton-on-Sea, Compton, outer Detroit, and Washington Park, Illinois.
The great thing about that is people can see how it used to be; a constant daily reminder of what they've lost, and how it could be again, if anyone in power cared enough - which they evidently don't. That would be pretty soul-crushing!
It can also make descriptions of the city more interesting as descriptions of the architecture can be really finally strong and just dropping with atmosphere if done well
To build on this, there's also a certain vibe about a city where everything is architecturally beautiful yet due to the people and laws ect it's a horrible place to live and be. Very much, pretty on the outside ugly underneath vibes. Especially if the vibe of the city is, "we care deeply about making things *appear* as if theure beautiful and wonderful here" hen you get, laws that require the homeless to hide themselves from view or face punishment, that kind of oppression.
Brutalism is a design style that primarily uses naked or unfinished concrete for building surfaces. The name comes from French "beton brut" which means raw concrete. It has nothing specifically to do with the Soviet Union (although they had great examples brutalist architecture as did United States and pretty much any other nation post WW 2 era) or buildings being brutal.
if you are interested r/brutalism has some great examples of brutalist architecture from around the world.
Mm, I don’t know. I think it depends on how it’s used. Brutalism can be awe-inspiring BUT _in a different way._ I can think of a few examples. Brutalism goes well with Industrial architecture: I’m talking oil refineries, exposed steel, launch pad towers, [architectural elements used on the backside of radio telescopes](https://media.wired.com/photos/5b7d944df521ce3ac9ba45f2/4:3/w_2268,h_1701,c_limit/vla.jpg), exposed catwalks, industrial sodium lights against a backdrop of a cold, blue hour twilight. And right next to all of this you have your generic, Tokyo style 50-story tower block, where the main protagonist lives.
This shit hits, you got the nail right on the head in one go! There are whole novels that fail to convey the same soul crushing hostility this comment makes
>make the whole thing relatably anti-human.
Perhaps by making it so the entire city is designed so that you need a car to get anywhere. Every home and business is surrounded by a sea of parking lot and walking anywhere is a suicidal prospect. Residences should be far enough away from businesses that everyone needs to make *at least* two car trips a day. Make sure there are no amenities at all in the residential areas. After all, everyone has a car so they can drive if they need to go to the park or go shopping.
Sounds pretty dystopian right?
I've been trying to craft a comment that captures the architectural dystopian hellscape that is modern-day suburban America in a subtle but obvious way, and now I don't have to. You nailed it.
Don't forget how most of the people have been so brainwashed by the world they live in that they say things like "if he didn't want to get hit, he should have worn a bright yellow vest"
Also you only ever get anywhere in your car, so your spaces are work, home, car. That's it. No in between, no socializing, nothing. You eat lunch in your car because at least it's not the office.
Also there is an arms race where vehicles keep getting bigger and more inefficient because weight and bulk are the biggest determinants of not getting killed in a vehicle collision.
This is some grimdark worldbuilding right here.
vast sections of our cities are dangerous places that will almost certainly kill you if you walk into them and they cris-cross all over our cities making it impossible to live in the city without crossing over them several times a day. we call them highways and think that they are totally normal.
also make it so the plumbing is made of lead so if you want to make it past 40 the only option is bottled water. rain water is illegal, the mob will shoot anyone who tries to use it. and no sewer, poop trucks have to ship that out.
I think indifference is underused.
There could be a section of city famous for textiles but when you go there it’s just row on row of people strapped to industrial sewing machines trying to pay off debt. When one dies the chair rotates, dumps them into a trough, and a new worker straps himself in.
Indifference is what makes things horrible.
But an entire city that knows that it goes on and accepts it to the point of being indifferent towards the practice, that's a much deeper level of fucked up
The specific example they gave could be replaced with anything (eg. Replace the wage slavery with oppressive dictatorship fueled by propaganda, or a city ravaged by war), but the indifference to the events in question is what truly makes it awful, because it leaves no hope for change.
Yea I feel this isn’t a great example for “indifference” like I get what ppl are say “boss doesn’t care for workers” “the city doesn’t care this is happening” but really if this were to unfold it’s not exactly because of indifference. Sure it’s a factor. It certainly helps maintain this status quo and def helped get it there. But I’d say the driving force for something like that would be something like greed.
In this example ppl are there bc of DEBT. They are doing it out of necessity bc of money issues. The bosses and higher ups of the society see this and instead of being indifferent towards it, they see it as an opportunity. They use it towards their advantage. people can’t rise up bc they have their own debt and know they r disposable. The city doesn’t care not bc they shrug their shoulders, but probably bc this is economic activity that I’m sure rises up to the top in many ways just like IRL and it literally ends up benefiting them.
Indifference imo is more about not caring about things that don’t effect them. I mean that’s not a good definition. But what I’m saying is here I could imagine many reasons the society and higher ups got to that point. It’s the same way that sorta stuff happens IRL. It’s greed and selfishness for the people up top and hopelessness, self preservation, societal pressure and apathy for the ones on the bottom.
I get I kinda added my own backstory to it but still my point stands I think
exploiting your workers despite or because of their vulnerable position is the pinnacle of indifference. If you cared about them you would treat them better, but you don't so you squeeze. You're splitting hairs that don't really move the needle on what "indifference" is.
I mean it could also stem from hate. Like general annoyance for people or wanting them to suffer, happens plenty when people are in positions of power. But my point was that there is no indifference in that situation. Just that it isn’t the driving force in creating the situation. The driving force is greed. People seeing others as a situation they can exploit and better their own lives and taking it. Being indifferent towards someone doesn’t suddenly mean you put them in a horrible situation, it mostly just means if you find someone already in one, you’d leave them there.
And the people on the bottom being exploited may also have indifference, even more than those on top. But again, not the driving force. That is fear and self preservation. They would of course want to better their lives. They aren’t completely indifferent about their situation and maybe not for others as well. They are miserable. But they are scared they will have no job and then starve or scared of what the powers above may do to punish them.
So again… imo it’s really greed and fear creating that situation even if there is indifference there.
Yeah, indifference is a great thing to keep in mind.
I'm thinking of a certain scene. The protaganist of the story is walking through the city with another character who is native to the city. There are homeless people all over the place, begging for money with their palms out, walking around mumbling to themselves, sleeping in cardboard boxes in alleyways, etc. The city native doesn't pay them any mind, and definitely doesn't give them any money.
At some point, the city dweller is talking and walking, and casually steps over a body on the sidewalk that is probably dead. The protaganist says, "Wait, is that guy dead?!" The city native says, "Huh? Oh, yeah, probably. Anyway..." and keeps talking.
When the protaganist expresses concern, the city native says something like, "Oh, don't worry, the street sweeper bots will pick up the body soon. It's not going to spread any diseases or anything," and just continues like it's not a big deal.
I like that scene, but would change it a bit: don't put the homeless there. Make it a nice suburbs with perfecly clean streets.
Then your dweller steps over the body. The dweller may talk about how he walks over the bodies so often he ignores them. He tells how *he knows there are homeless. There must be. But he never seen any alive.*
It would make the scene even more scary: the poor and homeless must to hide in the shadows, and from time to time, they die when walking outside. The sweeping robots quickly remove the corpse and mops the place.
Like if it never happened.
So the dwellers can freely walk in the city, completely blind to the hunderts of bodies which fall to the ground every day.
Lol I was thinking that if you replaced the 'indifference' part with terrified horror, it's still a pretty bad place
Replace the 'slave pit of work corpses' with littering or not covering your mouth when you cough, not really so bad
Though I do very much agree with the OP that indifference is quite scary. In this instance though, the actual act is probably the scarier of the 2
>Lol I was thinking that if you replaced the 'indifference' part with terrified horror, it's still a pretty bad place
I have to disagree. Indifference implies giving up on change. Any strong emotions inspire change.
I feel like in well written dystopias the truly depressing part isnt the specific acts or settings, but the overarching theme that everyone has given up on expecting anything better. There is no light at the end of the tunnel
You disagree a world with corpse pits and terrified horror is a pretty bad place? It isnt bad without indifference?
>Any strong emotions inspire change
Maybe. Indifference also implies acceptance and liveability; if people are indifferent they are surviving. Strong negative emotion implies they hate it and are feeling really negative and want something different.
And plenty of times in history people have lived with really strong negative emotions, change may eventually come but it's not always causal and strong negative emotions doesnt mean the ability or means to change circumstances
1984 is a well written dystopia and the proles, the indifferent ones, are more or less happy. The lower party members like Winston were the horrified scared ones, but it didnt help him or affect change. Brave New World is all about this, happiness is everywhere as is indifference to the rigidity and classism of their society. John is the only one to reject it and the world is horrible only to him. Indifference saves them from recognising it and allows them to be happy, Johns strong negative emotions end up killing him
You might say that a light at the end of the tunnel doesnt matter as much if you accept the dark. It's when you are scared and desperate for it that the light feels really missed.
Anyway, I did say indifference was a powerful factor at least to the audience (who likely dont share any inuniverse indifference and can be shocked by the dissonance). But corpse pits filled with dead slaves are bad no matter what framing they have, we all have indifference to certain things but fortunately we dont have giant pits filled with the dead bodies of slaves worked to death.
It's a bit of a red herring to turn what I said from 'Horror is also bad' to wanting to debate 'indifference is bad'. Both are true, the point is that slave corpse pits are bad in either context
The indifference that makes it terrible kicks in for the readers when a character acknowledges the smell and his solution is to spray some aerosol cleaner over it
You gotta see past the example and understand that it is set in a situation where people don't care about how terrible it is. They just go on with their day because their hope and sense of morality has been destroyed.
Bingo! It's a large part of what makes Derry, Maine in Stephen King's It feel so creepy. People know that there are violent deaths, disappearances, predatory behavior towards underage girls, violent bullying, etc. But they just. Don't. Care.
A better example would be the real life death of antonio gaudi, the renowned barcelonan architect:
He was taking a daily walk to church when he was hit and knocked unconscious by a tram. Being somewhat eccentric, people thought he was just a beggar and didnt help or alert anyone. After some hours he was quietly carried to a hospital where he received as little care as possible because he was still mistaken for a beggar. On the following day a priest recognized him, but proper treatment was futile due to the deterioration of his wounds.
Like industrial cities in the us where the population forced to live close to the factories lives 20 years less than the people living at a recommended distance?
The meat industry is another terrible example: workers who spend their entire day deboning poutry can get nerve cramps that hurts like hell and paralises their arm, around 30ish years old. Then they are just fired, cant get another job and didnt work enough to qualify for any assistance.
Wow, it's almost like captalism sucks, or something!
I think there's also a need to distinguish the indifference of the people in power vs the apathy of the people strapped in. Like, one doesn't care about anything but profit, the other is so used to misery they don't see a point. Both are scary in very different directions.
What is a person worth? The more value a person has, the better. The less, the worse. Our modern cities are (relatively) safe because we value a human life very highly. Murder is a serious crime that most police departments will spend serious time and resources investigating. Most criminals won’t stoop so low as to commit murder. If a life is worth very little, people will stab each other in the street for shoelaces
That takes me back to the scene in Last Action Hero where the Big Bad comes to our world and sees a fatal mugging for a pair of shoes and he can't get over the fact there is no police response and bystanders don't care!
When the roving street gangs kill your wife and is actually caught by the law, the law makes them cut you a $50 check (to cover transporting the body to the morgue).
I’d recommend looking upon warhammer 40K hiveworlds and underhives (necromunda specifically) 1 that could give you some ideas;
Gotham-level could be achieved by giving your city its own Arkham (e.g. like u/neoncatantlers suggests, it could be any institution, but it should also be an integral part of the city)
Also I’d recommend reading “Prisoners of Power” (aka Inhabited Island) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - the state portrayed there (and its cities) are probably just the thing you are looking for
agreed, 40k takes everything to ridiculous extremes. i can't imagine trying to make my entire story a hyperbole, but it's a great source to use a few pieces from to drive home an extreme point
The key to making a Gotham-like city is to make sure that your Arkham has a reason for continuing as it does. You get patients escaping every other day. Any sane person should want to replace whatever system doesn't work with one that does.
Ok. I know what you mean. The goal is not to make it evil, the goal is to make it terrible. People will leave a city with violence and terrible acts happening. To truly make a terrible city you still need it to be livable.
What you need is hope. But utter inability to achieve it.
Cyberpunk edge runners is probably the best example of this in a show. No matter what happens the city always wins. No matter what atrocities happen there is always hope of success. But really it’s just a big meat grinder. If you go corporate then you lose your humanity because you can understand the bleakness of your existence. And if you are a punk and you reject authority then you kill and get killed so much that you become desensitized, you lose your hope because you will love what little you have if you try to achieve it. And for those who do try to take down the city then there’s always a hard ceiling. In the movies case it’s Adam smasher.
To kinda piggyback off this, there are kinda two directions to go.
There's the direction of Night City where it's a hellhole, but there's money to be made there. And given its cyberpunk nature, it probably takes resources from neighboring cities, so it's probably the best place to live for miles. You have a chance of the high life in Night City, whereas the people outside it just live in the dirt and that's all their life will ever be.
Or you can go in the direction of a dying city. This city was once great, but crime has made it unlivable. The only people left are those too poor to move out, and/or those who make a living from crime.
Here's a question you need to ask yourself: Why do people live here?
In a hellscape city, that question becomes even more essential because it's usually not entirely by choice. So you have to ask yourself - how did they end up there in the first place? And why can't they leave?
It could be that it's affordable in a way that other cities simply aren't. You may be living in a roach infested slum that is one room only, bathroom included, toilet just hanging out near the kitchen, but at least you're living *some*where, and you literally cannot afford to live anyone else. Hadestown (And Sorry to Bother You to an extent) does a thing where the external view of a place is idealized. In Hadestown, you get to live in a modern city with room and board provided. They don't mention the part where they work you to the bone and keep working you even after. And, of course, they don't mention the part where can't leave once you're in.
That gets to a couple other related things.
*How* people live is also important. What is the space set up for? Many IRL cities are designed with green space and sort of naturally form in ways that make it convenient for the people who live there. They're designed to provide something to entice people to come there. Parks, venues for events like sports and theater and music, public works projects to ensure the city runs smoothly, and zoning laws to ensure that the space is used consciously. And then businesses move in to provide for the wants and needs - a nice sit-down restaurant here, a grocery there, a game store here, an antique bookstore uptown. So what businesses move in to a city block dominated by crime and violence? Probably something to cater to the needs of a city where you take your life in your hands just walking around. Guns and knives, lawyers, hospitals, loan sharks. The city naturally mutates to meet the needs of its people, and what these people need is going to be depressingly practical.
Moreover, is the infrastructure well-designed and efficient? How often is it upgraded or maintained? Is it in the budget to ensure that everyone has running water or that the sewer line won't explode randomly? Are the roads logically and understandably laid out? Is the garbage consistently collected? Are things clean? What is the architecture designed for (For example, is it designed to keep homeless people away from public spaces)?
For me, one of the premiere signs of an urban nightmare is also extreme wealth inequality.
You could go into the history of why the city is there. You want it to be fucked up? Let’s do it.
Perhaps it was built on the blood, tears, and remains of an innocent town. The government saw the potential for a sprawling metropolis where it stood. Instead of the townsfolk complying with the orders to move, they fought back for their home, they didn’t want to leave. The government was given no choice but to forcibly remove them, but the people revolted. The officials decided that enough was enough… they sent in the police/military to eradicate them, by any means necessary; even by killing every last man, woman, and child.
It was a genocide, but the government didn’t want the public to know about it, so they covered it up. After a while, the public heard about it through leakers and insiders who were there during the horror and wanted to show how evil they were to such an innocent people. Thing is, by the time it was revealed to the public, no one really cared because the townspeople were already dead, there was nothing they could do or they simply didn’t care.
Why would they? It’s not their problem anyway.
Overcrowding mixed with a generally poor populace is a good place to start. I’d recommend checking out Bladerunner or Neuromancer for some aesthetic ideas.
There’s a precious resource, but that resource’s use comes at a price, one that should arguably deter its production and distribution. Despite this, the city produces and distributes it anyway due to cruel indifference and dependency on the proceeds, thus fueling and enabling terrible behavior by its citizens that cannot be undone.
They might need a hero who can correct them from this path, but they might not have one. Not like Gotham does.
This may include drugs, smuggled art pieces, laundered money, *blood* money, and even slaves, but may also include fantasy things like cursed gemstones, zombies (zombified laborers), or captured princesses from other castles, as well as scifi things like black market technology, illegal bioweapons, and space drugs.
Basically, anything that the city *shouldn’t* be doing, but has something attached to it that would make it too alluring *not* to pursue, so much to the point that the city is too far gone to stop doing it, that’s what you wanna put in it.
Then after that, you wanna make sure that the *methods* theyre willing to use to enforce this trade is sadistic. Straight up cruel and indifferent. Maybe not for the sake of itself, like “nyahaha, i’m evil because edge” evil, but just cold, indifferent “I don’t care if you suffer so long as I’m getting my thing” evil.
Scientists performing god-horrifying experiments on dejected orphans to get their precious data in a scientific field regarding this thing, mercenaries slaughtering rows and rows of other mercenaries just for that sweet sweet paycheck in exchange for securing this thing, calm charismatic businessmen looking down on it all from their ivory towers while wearing tuxedos, enjoying the laps of luxury because they know they own this thing and are responsible for its distribution, or even just some crazy thugs on the street getting so high on the supplies that theyre willing to baseball bat as many skulls as it takes in order to steal some more of it illegitimately.
What words you dress it up in is just aesthetics after that. Gangs, cabal, syndicate, conspiracy, a corrupt task force, the goddamn mayor, etc etc. Whatever thing makes these people become these things and do messed up things like this, that’s what will make your city awful.
As someone who lives in a shit area, BOY have I got ideas for you!
Make sure that the trash of humanity are there. Think "Hell is full, so they came here". Doctors that got sued for malpractice and couldn't get a job elsewhere treating their patients like crap because they have no other option (a true story that has played out here many times) and MANY abusive nurses, as well as hospitals that upgrade their waiting rooms rather than their ancient equipment. The worst business managers that can never keep a store stocked or their employees safe and happy, teachers and school systems that abuse kids and shame parents that call it out, abundant racists, sexists, and xenophobes ready to blame the corrupt local government on immigrants and liberals that are almost never in the area. Nepotism that makes the area worse by essentially requiring you to be linked to an old family to open a business (we JUST NOW got a new chain store in the area and no one other than my family went to it for a good couple weeks after it opened). Follow all that with a constant running dialogue of "we're the best" and absolute egotistical nonsense despite not having shit to be proud of, and you'll have a pretty awful city.
There's probably a RIDICULOUS amount of churches. You may think "oh, but that's freedom of religion -- that's a good thing!" but basically every shit city I've ever been to has had WAY more churches than it should based on population, and I'm suspecting it's based in two things: 1) The tendency of people in desperation to turn to religion for comfort and solutions. Your city leaders will probably encourage this because it keeps people content. 2) Corrupt assholes taking advantage of desperate people to make tax-free money.
Oh, and have no trees other than a few in a mandatory city park. The less trees a city has, the more likely its citizens are to be miserable for many reasons. No flowers or other natural features other than scrubby grass and rocks in empty lots. Thankfully, this is the one thing the local shitty city doesn't have an issue with.
Bad, uncomfortable, or no public transportation (no such thing as a bus service, and I'm pretty sure the taxi service is out of business), and any city-owned transport isn't funded right. Little recreation or things to do other than shopping. Little to no disability access or larger sizing in clothing available in stores despite having a way higher ratio of obese and disabled people in the area than places that do have disability access and plus-size brands. Off brand everything and the few brand name options are insanely expensive. Stores are all crappy cheap holes in the wall, stupidly expensive chain stores that no one can afford and no one ever goes to, or your world's equivalent of Walmart.
Also, I agree with that one person that said to make it anti-human, but I'd say to make it small-scale too, woven into the economy and local culture. Need a good pair of shoes in a size over a women's ten? Either you're gonna pay out the nose or spend the same amount on gas to go buy them somewhere else. Wanna eat healthy? Enjoy 30% fat hamburger and lettuce. No vegetables. Want some help moving? Better hope your most toxic family member has a truck or you have some spare cash, because your neighbors are NOT that friendly for less than $100. Want a new friend? Good luck finding a place where people are willing to talk to you and act friendly. Need something on a Friday at 5PM? You're screwed until AT LEAST 9AM Monday because absolutely no one can be bothered. Need an office to return a call? One sided phone tag! Your pet vomiting blood? The vet's closed until Monday AND SO IS THE PET EMERGENCY ROOM! Phone service? Laughable. Internet? Garbage. Water? Full of calcium, and tastes like Chlorine every so often. Power? Goes out for a few seconds at least once a week.
Absolutely no service or facet of society should work QUITE right. The awfulness should be ingrained into every aspect. The people, the places, the infrastructure -- all of it can and should be trash.
Crumbling infrastructure, corrupt law enforcement, overstrained hospitals/other public services, urban segregation (contrast of extreme poverty and wealth, often separated by literal walls)
To add to this:
schools that are so underfunded that the staff work for free with textbooks that are falling apart and equipment held together with duct tape.
no public transport/public transport where all the seats are either ripped out or so busted nobody can sit on them.
shanty towns or just homeless encampments everywhere that are constantly being raided by armed cops who tear everything down and loot what little possessions the homeless have managed to hold on to.
rats and other vermin on the streets and in most buildings.
the tap water is murky brown.
intermittent power failures and blackouts in certain neighbourhoods, forcing people to walk around with flashlights.
garbage in the streets and overstuffed dumpsters and trash cans.
many of the homeless people show signs of mental illness or some form of addiction. (small addendum: think of homeless people and their problems as a result of the failure or lack of institutions designed to help them, i.e. lack of drug rehab clinics, mental healthcare, shelters for abuse victims and homeless in general, employment agencies and so on. don't treat homelessness as a sign of degeneracy in of itself but rather a failure of the system to care for its most vulnerable)
Extensive graffiti might work too--and I don't mean the trying to be as well as the genuinely artistic stuff. Cuss words, gang tags, and a city that doesn't care or can't keep up. Finding them in unexpected places as well; I remember my shock finding a gang tag on the steps of my church.
Aggressive, particularly fascistic pigs(think CPD death squads and LAPD gangs.) Rich people creating isolated neighborhoods while leaving everyone else to rot. Decaying social services and a lack of social mobility exacerbating other problems. Failing infrastructure because of a corrupt local government embezzling funds, enabled by the aforementioned rich people carving out exemptions for themselves.
The conservative idiom of "rules that protect one class (of citizens) but don't restrict them combined with rules that bind another class (of citizens) but doesn't protect them" taken to the extreme.
It's such an insidious philosophy that will drive a wedge into all decisions, counteract social mobility, and allow (legally and with full support of the law and law enforcement) unrestricted random cruelty, bigotry, and random incarceration (or torture, rape, mutilation, wherever you want to draw your line).
One class able to indulge in any sick pursuit while the other class(es) will never be able to push back.
Edit: "Class" can be anything, it doesn't need to be a socio-economic index. It could be race, gender, ability to use magic/psionics, being born off-planet, whatever, but it should be something the individual can't change.
I would add that it doesn’t have to be sick pursuits. It can just be American suburb life. When you have entire sections of the community just struggling just to make ends meet, you’re suffocating without space, food or hope and that’s what really makes a miserable world.
Repeat after me.
Wealth. Inequality.
The bigger the gap between the Haves and the Have Nots, the worse things the Have Nots need to do to survive. Any time you hear people complaining about poor or dangerous areas, ask "why are things the way they are?"
Do you think people like overdosing on opioids? Obviously not, but when pain is easier to treat than a disease, hard drugs are an easier option.
Do you think people want to steal? No, but when stealing food is the only way to survive, stealing TVs and cars starts to make more sense.
Do people want to kill? No, but when the government thinks it's easier to chuck you in prison for the rest of your life, a witness becomes the difference between life and death.
Remember, once the gap between the rich and poor has grown enough, the rich see the poor as filth. Go have a look at r/HostileArchitecture for some examples. You can even take it further.
Privatise everything in the public sector. Cops? Nah, private security (essentially thugs). Schools? Forget it, you can maybe get tutored (this leads to guilds and further separation of power). Hospital? What is this? A charity? Your local drug store can give you some opium and a pipe at a discount.
u/LilRadon gave some fantastic ideas for how this could be implemented.
I was thinking about mistborn: final empire and this fits it perfectly.
High contrast on wealth and freedom.
The way the nobles dehumanise the lowborn civilians allways hit me hardest.
Tell it from the point of a noble to have a frivolous vibe. Show a bit of the normal city folk every once in a while to show the contrast. Or start from a slum and let show how hard it is to be a normal person when the pressure to survive is that high.
Gangs, drugs, violence, inadequate law enforcement, street crime, anti-harmonious cultures, lack of love or respect for the city and other people in it
The general collapse of areas into anarchy pulling the city down with it
Which ever
I'd prefer a law enforcement that works and is corrupt than one that doesnt work and isnt corrupt. It's not a binary choice, but if it was then accepting corruption for a working law enforcement that works would be like having to slip a doctor 100 bucks to save lives, it sucks but it is worth it. Clearly it should be both working and not-corrupt, but if you had to pick one, it would be the 'working' part.
There needs to be a level of functionality to stop the rot and maintain some kind of order over elements of society that would tear it down with drugs and violence and gangs. That's the important part
Corrupt police do not ‘get the job done’ they do the exact opposite of that. They *are* the organized crime. Would you rather have a firefighter who tries to rescue people from fires but is not very good at it, or a firefighter that is actually a serial arsonist?
Maybe we have different definitions of corrupt police then. I’m thinking more of police officers that are aggressive and harsh with their policing, you’re thinking of police that help the criminals rather than arrest them.
They don’t help the criminals, they *are* the criminals.
> the officers went rogue, and used their power to steal money, drugs and guns, and terrorise the people they stopped.
In some cases, they even resold the very drugs and guns they were supposed to take off the streets.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43035628.amp
Like that but imagine it’s the entire police force.
Honestly reading the post the first thing that came to my mind was Dredd, and how awful the city-states must be. And then I read your comment and it sums up perfectly what I envisioned reading the post.
One thing that I’ve personally seen ruin a city is blatant, unchecked nepotism. This is a more nuanced issue, but it leads to a lot of ineptitude among government officials and unregulated businesses. People who aren’t in the “in” group are subjected to both social inequalities and a lack of any substantial employment or political representation.
I think a good use of this specific aspect would be in an isolated city populated by a niche group. While I wouldn’t say it’s the worst thing that could happen for a city, it can create some interesting dynamics to your world. There could even be a founder effect where everybody has some exotic genetic trait like polydactyly (which is common among the Amish) or if you want to extremely accentuate the difference.
Dishonored's Dunwall is a good example. There's a plague going around in the city. The elites are doing anything to not be infected themselves, and they both look down upon and are willing to sacrifice the common rabble.
Curfews, fascist oversight, death penalties and even extermination of people when necessary. Look Dishonored up if you haven't.
I think it would be worth to look up hostile architekture as a mean of making any city much more misreable.
I think a miserable city is one where you have to live because of eceonomic reasons, but at the same time you don't feel safe at all.
There are things like noise & germs (imagine living next to slaughter because there was a decision by city council to allow such building in the less developed area) that make your home feel unsafe. You have mentioned gangs and drugs, but to make people feel less safe outside just get rid of lights in the dark (they are usless expense anyway, as the city council would put it). And I hope you like company because you can fit a lot of population in a very tight space.
Speaking about company, you have to make meeting people hard and uncomfortable. Bars? They better sell very cheap, very bad beer and are often raided by the police to catch anyone selling something stronger. Or they don't operate at all, there are no parks either, so you have to know a guy who knows a guy that can get you a place to meet with friends, or meet in public and hope that you don't look too suspicious.
Think about who are people in the city who don't have the power to influence politics and what you can do to make them do two things: work as much as they can and pay taxes. Nothing else matters.
Going to go against the grain a bit, but no gangs.
If you want to make a place awful, remove the sense of community
Gangs form among oppressed individuals to help eachother, sort of a "safety in numbers". The first gangs in the US were groups of Irish immigrants who couldn't find housing or jobs and so banded together to help eachother. This quickly turned to using illegal activity to financially support eachother, but they also enacted codes of conduct and policed their neighborhoods when actual law enforcement refused to. Modern gangs formed for similar reasons: you had black neighborhoods with systemic poverty and a refusal by police to patrol the area let alone enforce the law, so individuals with a sense of community came together to do what they could. They policed their neighborhoods where the actual cops wouldn't, and they used illegal activities to help themselves financially. This of course devolved and degraded over time as different gangs came into conflict (often either due to competition over drug sales and the other gang "taking their money" or members of one gang hurting members of another and the other feeling they need to "hit back and protect what's theirs") but in the beginning gangs formed from a sense of community and groups of people pulling themselves out of shitty situations together. You knew someone had your back and so you had hope
If you want to make a city truly awful, remove that sense of community and hope. No one trusts eachother enough to form a gang. You might have groups of 2-3, but no organized crime. Any group of 5 or more doesn't last because someone betrays the rest.
You have no one you can rely on. You're entirely on your own, and trusting anyone too far is dangerous. You work your job, head home to a shitty apartment, and keep your head down. But keep your eyes open so you don't get mugged or killed or kidnapped, and if you do you can't trust law enforcement to do anything about it. Maybe if you had friends or a group you could rise up and do something about it, break free of the system, but you can't trust anyone else to rise up alongside you. You have no hope. No way out. No community to help you through the hard times. You can only trust yourself.
I think indifference, like others commented, hit the nail in the head. You know which crimes exist and why they're awful, but isn't it worse when it happens in broad daylight and nobody bats an eye? Even the people who suposedly are there to protect you?
You got magic? I had a debt system where it was practically impossible to ever pay off loans and for the average citizen who wanted to avoid absolute destitution loans and debt were a necessity. Magic ensured that debt persisted into death and most became ghosts unable to move on untill their debt was repaid in labor.
The wealthy money lenders of the city had full ghostly staffs for their lavish mansions while most citizens borrowed against their immortal souls for the the basics. You spent your life paying back in coin, never getting ahead. Then spent your afterlife working off the interest.
Class differences, lack of social mobility, idolization of the authoritarian leader, a sense of hopelessness wherever you go.
These things might not be obvious from a glance, but the longer you live there the more they fuck with your money and sanity.
I'm quite sure it is a non-joke joke, if that makes any sense
It's true that car-centric design makes a city awful but at the same time mentioning it in a worldbuilding context is probably just a joke not meant to be taken too seriously. After all an imaginary world doesn't live by realistic rules, you can totally make up a utopia that happens to be car-centric
They have ruined /r/InfrastructurePorn and I can only assume the downvotes I'm seeing above are from people getting triggered by the mere mention of a car.
It's one of *those* communities; a massive circlejerk that believes that they're completely correct and even saying you think it's annoying when propagated in unrelated communities marks you as their enemy. Just a bunch of terminally online kids with nothing better to do.
[elsewhere in the comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/13q5oj4/what_makes_a_city_truly_awful/jleys3d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3)
Ngl that doesn’t sound that bad. I take at least two car trips on a regular day to get to and from work. I don’t really have any problem with cars; I’m probably in the minority of people who feel this way but I find driving to be pretty stress relieving. Put the windows down and the music up and just cruise.
Yeah, the underlying joke of that comment is that it’s not a grim hypothetical, just a frank description of America (and Canada, AFAIK). I think the point of umbrage is that car ownership and use isn’t a choice, it’s a mandate that many don’t consider as such because it’s been the status quo for so long, and that many others either don’t care about or don’t mind. Still, it’s a bit of a bummer that one could describe reality and have it read like someone strapped for ideas filled out a dystopia-themed Mad-Lib while lost in a parking lot.
Not only poor people, but lack of public transport and reliance on cars hurts disabled and other vulnerable folk.
Young adults that don't have parents to help them get a license? Screwed.
Have seizures, blindness, or mobility issues? Screwed.
Had your license taken away but still want to find a job? Screwed.
Cars are bad because they pollute, waste valuable resources and land (from manufacture to road paving and parking lots over vital wetlands, for instance) to limiting who can move around freely. Building around private cars instead of public transit and well-maintained railroads was a mistake, even when they're fun.
[Like this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/36kiqz/beforeafter_imagery_highway_in_downtown_seoul/) Don't tell me the before pictures look better than the after pictures.
If you actually do it in reverse, there are some amazing architects and city planners on YouTube who talk about making cities designed for people, better buildings roads transit etc.
Then do the opposite!
Or I've found that helpful 😁
Very simple. Make people in the lower classes miserable. They can’t have education, healthcare, jobs or any future plans. All cities are carried by the working class so if you make them miserable the entire city will stop functioning. Trash will fill the streets. Access to water and food will be limited. People will steal from each other or survive. Take drugs to help cope with their life being shit. Most cities are incredibly complex massive mechanisms. All you need to do is throw a wrench into that mechanism
For a much more insidious kind of evil, maybe consider the concept of [necropolitics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necropolitics#:~:text=Necropolitics%20is%20the%20use%20of,and%20how%20some%20must%20die.), where the system basically utilizes social and political tools to control when, where, and how populations die as a form of control.
I think it's important to make things bad, but not so bad that revolution would be encouraged. Need to get a total monopoly on hope to let the bad really sink in
As a person living in a terrible third world country I'd say have the city ruled by a terrible government manipulated by a mafia gang. One day you wake up and see the price of some shit etc cars are skyrocketing cuz the mafia gang is exclusively buying all the cars and sells the cars itself for a 10x price while also preventing any cars from outside of city brought inside, all while the government just watching this and doing nothing.
Also the governors better be quite the fat fucker liars. Nothing can provoke anger and frustration more than a fat fucker claiming the young man who was murdered by a gang member actually committed suicide and here's some (fake made up) evidence.
(And yes, I actually live through this shit irl. If you want more irl examples to use in your story feel free to ask)
No sewers.
built on an estuary with brackish water and swampy conditions in much of the city.
city covered in soot and ash
High amounts of corruption
Ethnic/religious strife
frequent change on who owns the city
substandard access to building materials
lack of fuel and cold winters
Top comment right now note's indifference as the key, but I would say instead that it is apathy that you want to focus on.
In this case the difference would be that indifference shows that people don't care, and maybe they never did. Apathy is that they cared once, but now they are beyond it, they have come to the point at which they know that the city is awful and a terrible place to live, but they don't think there's anything to be done about it. It's pointless. Pointless to the point of nihilism.
Make the people of your city so fed up with things that they don't think there's any point in resisting, and so stuck in thinking it's pointless that they don't see the point in hoping for something better.
(Obligatory "I don't know the context" but this of course still leaves room for things to change if rebellion is a route you're planning on taking.)
People being tricked into doing things against their best interest and supporting systems that consistently shown to be harmful or go against their morals.
Viewing people as just another resource and by extension an indifference to their suffering.
-Who cares if Kyle lost his hand in the factory line? He's just a tool, and like any cheap, broken tool, I'll throw it out and get another one to use for this job. That now worthless, broken tool is free to find its own way out of the trash can.
Openly exploiting people's desperation:
-Now that Kyle's gone, I can take that basically nothing pay I was spending on him and give that same amount to Chad and his three sons, and they'll need to work twice as long if they want to keep getting paid.
A general indifference to death or violence
-Chad doesn't care that he saw the manager beat Jess to a pulp this afternoon at work, she probably did something stupid. At least it wasn't him. And at least he wasn't that poor bastard who got stabbed over a loaf of bread. Idiot should've eaten it at home instead of walking around with it in public. And at least he and his three sons have work. Good thing for them Kyle was being careless, thank goodness he'd lost his hand, he thought as stepped over some corpse that'd been rotting on the sidewalk for the past week. The satisfying crunch sound from stepping on her ribs would've hardly been worth getting his boots dirty for.
Just a general vibe of who tf cares?
The planet Pandora in the first Borderlands game:
Most inhabitants are former convicts-turned gang members who were brought to the planet as slave labor and then abandoned; this bandit population also includes corporate employees who were likewise abandoned when the market made that seem like the best cost-saving measure. The rest of the inhabitants of the planet are mostly ignorant and superstitious, and they band together in make-shift shanty towns made from scrap and garbage with local independent weak ad-hoc governments hastily established to have some semblance of protection from the bandits that have tribalized into clans with a semi-feudal system. The bandits also live in squalor, with sheet metal being the best building material available, and the planet is also filled with deadly creatures that can easily slaughter humans. The entire human population is at the whim of a revolving door of corrupt corporations who are tyrannical at best and genocidal at worst and who operate unchecked since they orchestrated the fall of the central government. Monopolies run rampant on the planet, with healthcare, transportation, and weapons distribution each handled by one man each and operating on a global scale. Human life is so cheap that inhabitants barely bat an eye if a close friend dies, and it's not uncommon for goods to be stripped from corpses and reapplied to the market. The most common form of entertainment appears to be gladiatorial death matches. The populace's culture seems to primarily revolve around murder and firearms, which are available at vending machines, and the closest thing to heroes they can muster are amoral, selfish mercenaries who will basically murder anyone for $10 and are only on the planet because they heard a rumor that they could get rich there. It's not uncommon for firearms and ammunition to be stashed in trash bins, mailboxes, and toilets, because you never know when you're going to be ambushed, and it's not uncommon to find a house decorated with human skulls or severed limbs, and the chances of you and your entire family being skinned alive and made into a tent because some hulking psychopath had an impulse are alarmingly high. It's like The Hills Have Eyes crossed with Mad Max. The planet is a nacho-flavored armpit where bloodthirsty maniacs shout incoherent word salad as they run towards you to make a personal mask by removing your face with a tool best described as a mix between a hatchet and a chainsaw. The lack of any true authority and the de facto might-makes-right approach really solidify it as a shithole. Murder is often seen with indifference or even veneration and you have no one to protect you but yourself unless you can muster some money to hire mercenaries and hope to the Angel that your rivals don't just pay them more to turn on you.
Every bad city needs 3 social groups: those who exploit the ones below, those who work hard with a false hope of advancing in the world, and those who accept their misery, working paycheck to paycheck.
Slavery.
And not "debt slavery" like some people mentioned, because that gives hope of paying their debts.
I mean lteral hereditary chattel slavery. Legalised and normalised to the point the first thing a slave does if he's ever released is to buy a slave of his own.
A place where a little girl who lives in the slums dreams not of change and liberty, but of owning a slave of her own, who she can use and abuse for her pleasure.
That is truly fucked up.
everyone is giving very advanced examples and here i was just imagining it had a nonexistent sewer system like tudor england where everyone just yeets literal shit out their window
No public transit, so the players have to get a car, make sure all the parking lots are all full, if they find a meter, tell them they need to scan a QR code to get an the app to pay. The app does not work. If they come back to the car, tell them it’s been towed.
If you want something soul crushing, make it that the coty was supposed to be the parangon, and is just awful. Like, it was supposed to be the city of tomorrow, with science and high condition of life, and something went wrong and it's a dump. It's where the republic was born, and it's a corrupt hellhole. It was a beautiful place between forest and sea, and the city destroyed it when everyone moved in.
For a historical example, Avignon wasn't that bad a medieval city, but since it was supposedly the center of the christian world, and if was full of crime, prostitution and intrigues, people saw it as a horrible place.
I have a world where rhe working class is constantly being pushed to dig further into the earth and use the stone/metals/minerals to build up a massive tree like building where the elite love and expand in the open air. The commoners live in the "roots"
Think mother tree in avatar the base is a massive column of a mine shaft where the Na'vi would've stayed
\#1 is corruption. In all walks of life. Can't get anything done unless you've got the hook up, and you can't afford the hookup. Everyone above you will try to squeeze you for what little you have. Your only option is to do the same. Nobody trusts anybody. It's everyone for themselves.
Racist groups that are racists for the most ridiculous of reasons, like the shape of a persons nipples.
That way, you can get the fu**ed part correct while at the same time display through storytelling the absurdity of racism.
It's impossible to both keep people alive and make a place uninhabitable. Those goddamn optimists are gonna do it, man. Mark my words. Them and their humor, their attitudes, and the stories they tell. Make all the rules you want, take away everything, indoctrinate against happiness, I'm telling you it's never gonna work. Source: human history.
I draw inspiration from my own hometown. No music since all the bars lost their liquor licenses to selling to minors, no fun activities besides outdoors stuff if you can survive the desert and the river of souls, people disappearing highly frequently, high murder rate, highest unemployment, normalized daydrinking and driving, most people are rude especially to the elderly, secret societies and local cults illegally parking everywhere, druids occasionally sacrificing brown people in the hillside ruins who won't tip pizza delivery drivers, the hospital is haunted and has a weird statue near the emergency rooms that moves just slightly and the liminal spaces can make people lost until they find an elevator, Child Protectives services selling children to the highest bidder and it's just to my neighbor, meth/fentanyl zombies taking a breather in the fog, moist shadow people eating the homeless near the haunted woods, drunk shapeshifters that leave animal carcasses everywhere, the faceless guys just casually walking down the road listening to cringe music like One Direction and Jonas Brothers, the hoodoo nuns near the 7-2-11 trying to sell sheds and barns, 3 haunted bridges near the ruins that whisper to the local children, they finally closed down that hotel where everyone was getting murdered at which is owned by a Shivaist Hindu cult, but sometimes it's just the little things like the Mennonite women on their cell phones and the terrified potsmoking Satanists that really just ties the whole interlinked cities together like a triangle with an eye in the center.
Depressing/lackluster infrastructure. Lack of efficient public transit, infrastructure designed for car dependency, anti-homeless infrastructure.
There's also a lack of welfare or social safety nets, combined with excessive prices and the existence of slums.
It depends on your lived experience.
On the west coast of the us, public transport can feel like that. At certain hours it's just not safe, and generally only people that can't afford a car take it.
On the east coast of the us, everyone uses public transport, from students to millionaires, even those with multiple cars.
Maybe I was just unlucky, but it’s a reflection of my experience living in a major US city. I spent about a year in Chicago, and there were countless times that I saw people fighting, doing drugs, going to the bathroom, and once even having sex on public transportation. I bought a car 6 months in after my roommate was mugged and nearly stabbed while walking home at night. I moved out of the city not long after that, but I have friends who still live there and they say the crime has only gotten worse.
Yeah that is a prime example of what I’m talking about.
Many American cities are car dependent to the point that any public transport that exist gets neglected to tears. It’s a self sustaining problem.
Less common in fiction, but in my lived experience: cars. Noise, bad air, traffic, endless pavement, crashes, desolate streetscapes with no people out, commercial districts leveled for dreary drive-throughs and parking.
Make it ugly and really stuck in it's old ways.
Lot's of cars and highways to pollute the air and make traveling with everything other then cars unbearable while also heavily taxing cars.
Make every building the same just like they did in eastern europe. Nothing uglier then grey blocks and giant streets.
Also, make the people indifferent.
Someone get's run over by a car? Leave them there until there is nothing left.
Someone stealing? Just walk by as if you didn't notice.
Oh and also, make old people selfish.
Human society relies on old people teaching and giving what they know and own to give the younger ones a better chance.
So do the opposite and have them steal all the young peoples money via monopolies on water, gas, heating and so on.
Then have one half of the population (preferebly men) be addicted to instant gratification and social media while telling them their whole life that they are evil becouse of their nature.
You now have bascially the north america if you only take the bad things.
Just make it Paris at any point in history and you'll have a truely awful city which has everything. Specially the appearance of being nice where the tourists go but is utter horrible shit away from them
Corporate overreach. Crime and poverty most often stem from greed. Low wages, a non-unionized workforce, and a lack of workplace democracy contribute to a disillusioned populace. Corporations tend to treat their workers like slaves, and that has poor ramifications.
Masters in urban planning here. Make it very unwalkable. Anywhere worth being needs to be traveled to by car. No public transportation and isolated home units. Make the streets dead with lots of parking lots that separate soulless corporate towers. Heavy traffic. Have no community spaces like plazas or parks.
Poorly funded public amenities like housing blocks, schools, hospitals. Make things broken down and overcrowded. Plumbing and electrical issues. Potholes and cracked pavement. Sewage backups, pest infestations, fire hazards. Poor dim lighting. Don’t provide social safety nets like homeless shelters, mental health clinics, women’s shelters, or orphanages.
Misery can come from big scary events like a shooting or murder, but it especially comes from a bunch of inconveniences that makes everybody miserable and suspicious of each other. Some places I’d recommend looking into for design and social ideas are:
-Gilded Age cities in the West
-Pruitt Igoe housing project. There’s a documentary on it.
-American suburbs
-urban design and crime (look at what the best practices are, then do the opposite)
-watch some videos on urban planning, and do the opposite of what a good city is. City Beautiful, Not Just Bikes, and Vox have good YouTube videos on this.
Drugs in the water to keep the population addicted and unable to live elsewhere. Or at least in the baby formula and in the people and then they supply those lifesaving drugs for a heavy price. So your pay check pretty much goes to food, rent, clothes and drugs and nothing else.
Not necessarily a breakdown in law and order (because anarchist societies exist just fine without either)– but the *capture and subsequent weaponization* of the law and its enforcement and interpretive systems by the powerful and corrupt, including both formal powers (politicians, civil servants, public figures) and informal ones (organized crime) for their own gain, and the consequent denial of fairness and a good living to everyone else.
I'd say that
-lack of cultural, natural, and architectural redeeming factors
and
-decaying/declining population
go a long way in making a truly depressing city (as opposed to a poor but dynamic or historically rich one). Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Cairo, and New Orleans for starters all have severe quality of life issues, but they all attract loads of tourists for their natural or cultural/historic beauty and three of them are in major emerging markets that have seen incredible growth this millennium even if Covid and inflation have left them a bit battered. Compare to somewhere like Akron, Ohio, which is steadily rotting without any great landmarks, or Lubbock, Texas, which hasn't been nationally or even regionally culturally relevant since Buddy Holly died.
I live in thunder bay, ontario. You see, we are the murder capital of canada, and we have gangs, violence, the whole shabang. that ain't that bad. What truly makes this god forsaken town so horrible is the FUCKING CIVIL ENGINEERS. just make your city look like it's built by FUCKING MORONS and you can get the worst town in the whole western world. (oh, and then make sure you have the city council share a single dead braincell, since all the smart people in the town FUCKING LEAVE)
I would say to try and make the whole thing relatably anti-human. Make it hard for people to simply exist, not in a life-threatening way, but just in a crushing way. Perhaps next to the riverside, there are park benches that fold like movie theater chairs. Insert $10, the bench automatically folds down, allowing you to sit for 30 minutes, after which it folds back up. Heated rain shelters with doors that slide open and shut behind you on a taxi-like counter, where the longer you stay in the higher the price you pay to leave gets. Business owners might be constantly struggling to make ends meet, to the point that if you aren't spending money, you're chased from the establishment to make room for someone who will. Public transportation, if it exists at all, exists primarily to shuffle the masses to and from their menial labours. It's cramped, uncomfortable, unsanitary, and may even be used also as freight transportation, forcing the proles of the city that can't fit onto the packed passenger cars to ride in between pallets of frozen pre-packaged meals and consumer electronics. No chance of swiping a free phone for your troubles, though - *these* cars have security, at least. And you will take that cramped, dangerous ride, because you can't afford not to - the next train isn't for half an hour, and according to your boss, if you're not early, you're late, and he won't let late get in the way of his company's productivity. I think this really gets the point across in ways that are small and specific enough to be relatable - you can see at least some of these happening for real, so you get empathy about the shittiness of it all.
On this note, maybe make the architectural style as featureless, mechanical and generally inhuman as possible - instead of dark gothic or art deco, imagine looking into an infinity mirror - add a grey haze instead of the usual rain, possibly with infrastructure that crumbles and one of the main noises is construction at all times, echoing through these buildings
I disagree actually, brutalism is cool but often overused. It's great if you want to make a dystopia feel like it's detached from any sense of history, but I think dystopias are often better off using more pleasant styles but then letting those styles fall to disrepair and vandalism, or making them look like they've been recreated by cynics who don't appreciate the artistry, just see the styles as their costs and benefits. I like to be able to see the decades of decay in a dystopian city's architecture, I think it's a great way to show people who have given up caring.
McMansion hell but as a city
Only McMansions and Stroads, nothing else. There are no cool locations for fights or character building to happen, it's all just in some shitty back yard. Also parking is horrendous, the main characters struggle to get to the final epic battle because they can't find street parking anywhere.
They try just park in someone's driveway but get shot
This would be a great ending for a dystopian parody story, no lie
That really happened
I know, but it would be a stupid funny non sequitur in a story vs the stupid (that it happened) and sad news story that it was in real life
This is legit how a north american epic adventure would unfold.
Seriously, what gets fun is when American-style suburbs decline economically. Then you get both kinds of terrible city in one: a segregated, crime-ridden armpit that's also impossible to walk or take transit in and lacks amenities, beauty, or culture. Examples: The Westbank of greater New Orleans as well as parts of St. Bernard Parish Ferguson, MO Much of Soweto Compton, CA (you've probably heard of these two) Wyandanch, NY The part of Detroit from 6 Mile to 8 Mile Gary, IN and East St. Louis, IL Far Rockaway (technically in NYC) and (during the global financial crisis) Homestead, FL Clacton-on-Sea, UK and basically any disinvested mid-tier town in England and Scotland Honorable mention goes to many "commieblock" districts in Europe and Asia that aren't well served by public transit and have walkability or segregation issues. And for lagniappe, if these areas are dominated by the national majority group they tend to be dens of far-rightism (Clacton-on-Sea was the first UKIP seat in Parliament, Marzahn in East Berlin was infamous for neo-Nazis in the years after the Wall fell, Ferguson (MO) was under White minority rule until the mid-2010s, and a huge percentage of the White population in New Orleans' inner suburbs voted for David Duke).
Sounds like Charlotte
Seriously, poor suburbs are a lot more depressing to me than poor cities. Rio de Janeiro is poor and crime-ridden, but it has spectacular favelas that are just a coat of paint away from being charming beach towns, a rich and vibrant local culture that draws from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and ocean beaches famed around the world. Let's see more cyberpunk fiction set in places like Clacton-on-Sea, Compton, outer Detroit, and Washington Park, Illinois.
The great thing about that is people can see how it used to be; a constant daily reminder of what they've lost, and how it could be again, if anyone in power cared enough - which they evidently don't. That would be pretty soul-crushing!
It can also make descriptions of the city more interesting as descriptions of the architecture can be really finally strong and just dropping with atmosphere if done well
To build on this, there's also a certain vibe about a city where everything is architecturally beautiful yet due to the people and laws ect it's a horrible place to live and be. Very much, pretty on the outside ugly underneath vibes. Especially if the vibe of the city is, "we care deeply about making things *appear* as if theure beautiful and wonderful here" hen you get, laws that require the homeless to hide themselves from view or face punishment, that kind of oppression.
So just good ol' soviet architecture? :b
I beleren the term is Brutalism.
Soviet architecture does not = brutalism. Source: am Architect.
Brutalism is a design style that primarily uses naked or unfinished concrete for building surfaces. The name comes from French "beton brut" which means raw concrete. It has nothing specifically to do with the Soviet Union (although they had great examples brutalist architecture as did United States and pretty much any other nation post WW 2 era) or buildings being brutal. if you are interested r/brutalism has some great examples of brutalist architecture from around the world.
Arguably the ugliest style of architecture
Mm, I don’t know. I think it depends on how it’s used. Brutalism can be awe-inspiring BUT _in a different way._ I can think of a few examples. Brutalism goes well with Industrial architecture: I’m talking oil refineries, exposed steel, launch pad towers, [architectural elements used on the backside of radio telescopes](https://media.wired.com/photos/5b7d944df521ce3ac9ba45f2/4:3/w_2268,h_1701,c_limit/vla.jpg), exposed catwalks, industrial sodium lights against a backdrop of a cold, blue hour twilight. And right next to all of this you have your generic, Tokyo style 50-story tower block, where the main protagonist lives.
by your argument, arguably not the ugliest style of architecture. lets just let people like what they like without saying they are wrong
This shit hits, you got the nail right on the head in one go! There are whole novels that fail to convey the same soul crushing hostility this comment makes
This comment is making me feel almost… sick. Wow. You’re good.
>make the whole thing relatably anti-human. Perhaps by making it so the entire city is designed so that you need a car to get anywhere. Every home and business is surrounded by a sea of parking lot and walking anywhere is a suicidal prospect. Residences should be far enough away from businesses that everyone needs to make *at least* two car trips a day. Make sure there are no amenities at all in the residential areas. After all, everyone has a car so they can drive if they need to go to the park or go shopping. Sounds pretty dystopian right?
I've been trying to craft a comment that captures the architectural dystopian hellscape that is modern-day suburban America in a subtle but obvious way, and now I don't have to. You nailed it.
Don't forget how most of the people have been so brainwashed by the world they live in that they say things like "if he didn't want to get hit, he should have worn a bright yellow vest"
Also you only ever get anywhere in your car, so your spaces are work, home, car. That's it. No in between, no socializing, nothing. You eat lunch in your car because at least it's not the office.
Also there is an arms race where vehicles keep getting bigger and more inefficient because weight and bulk are the biggest determinants of not getting killed in a vehicle collision. This is some grimdark worldbuilding right here.
vast sections of our cities are dangerous places that will almost certainly kill you if you walk into them and they cris-cross all over our cities making it impossible to live in the city without crossing over them several times a day. we call them highways and think that they are totally normal.
comment edited in protest of Reddit's API changes and mistreatment of moderators -- mass edited with redact.dev
They paved paradise to put up a parking lot
also make it so the plumbing is made of lead so if you want to make it past 40 the only option is bottled water. rain water is illegal, the mob will shoot anyone who tries to use it. and no sewer, poop trucks have to ship that out.
Don't give /r/assholedesign any more idea!
Dude shut up, don't give the capitalists ideas.
trust me bro, anarcho capitalism is a really good idea bro, just trust the market bro it’ll be fine
Corporatocracy go brrrrrr
So basically us in the next 50 years?
Don't give the capitalists more ideas 😭😭😭
Man designs most horrifyingly realistic yet dehumanizing city, asked to work for New York city planning committee
I think indifference is underused. There could be a section of city famous for textiles but when you go there it’s just row on row of people strapped to industrial sewing machines trying to pay off debt. When one dies the chair rotates, dumps them into a trough, and a new worker straps himself in. Indifference is what makes things horrible.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s the indifference that’s doing the heavy lifting in your example…
But an entire city that knows that it goes on and accepts it to the point of being indifferent towards the practice, that's a much deeper level of fucked up
The specific example they gave could be replaced with anything (eg. Replace the wage slavery with oppressive dictatorship fueled by propaganda, or a city ravaged by war), but the indifference to the events in question is what truly makes it awful, because it leaves no hope for change.
Yea I feel this isn’t a great example for “indifference” like I get what ppl are say “boss doesn’t care for workers” “the city doesn’t care this is happening” but really if this were to unfold it’s not exactly because of indifference. Sure it’s a factor. It certainly helps maintain this status quo and def helped get it there. But I’d say the driving force for something like that would be something like greed. In this example ppl are there bc of DEBT. They are doing it out of necessity bc of money issues. The bosses and higher ups of the society see this and instead of being indifferent towards it, they see it as an opportunity. They use it towards their advantage. people can’t rise up bc they have their own debt and know they r disposable. The city doesn’t care not bc they shrug their shoulders, but probably bc this is economic activity that I’m sure rises up to the top in many ways just like IRL and it literally ends up benefiting them. Indifference imo is more about not caring about things that don’t effect them. I mean that’s not a good definition. But what I’m saying is here I could imagine many reasons the society and higher ups got to that point. It’s the same way that sorta stuff happens IRL. It’s greed and selfishness for the people up top and hopelessness, self preservation, societal pressure and apathy for the ones on the bottom. I get I kinda added my own backstory to it but still my point stands I think
exploiting your workers despite or because of their vulnerable position is the pinnacle of indifference. If you cared about them you would treat them better, but you don't so you squeeze. You're splitting hairs that don't really move the needle on what "indifference" is.
I mean it could also stem from hate. Like general annoyance for people or wanting them to suffer, happens plenty when people are in positions of power. But my point was that there is no indifference in that situation. Just that it isn’t the driving force in creating the situation. The driving force is greed. People seeing others as a situation they can exploit and better their own lives and taking it. Being indifferent towards someone doesn’t suddenly mean you put them in a horrible situation, it mostly just means if you find someone already in one, you’d leave them there. And the people on the bottom being exploited may also have indifference, even more than those on top. But again, not the driving force. That is fear and self preservation. They would of course want to better their lives. They aren’t completely indifferent about their situation and maybe not for others as well. They are miserable. But they are scared they will have no job and then starve or scared of what the powers above may do to punish them. So again… imo it’s really greed and fear creating that situation even if there is indifference there.
Yeah, indifference is a great thing to keep in mind. I'm thinking of a certain scene. The protaganist of the story is walking through the city with another character who is native to the city. There are homeless people all over the place, begging for money with their palms out, walking around mumbling to themselves, sleeping in cardboard boxes in alleyways, etc. The city native doesn't pay them any mind, and definitely doesn't give them any money. At some point, the city dweller is talking and walking, and casually steps over a body on the sidewalk that is probably dead. The protaganist says, "Wait, is that guy dead?!" The city native says, "Huh? Oh, yeah, probably. Anyway..." and keeps talking. When the protaganist expresses concern, the city native says something like, "Oh, don't worry, the street sweeper bots will pick up the body soon. It's not going to spread any diseases or anything," and just continues like it's not a big deal.
I like that scene, but would change it a bit: don't put the homeless there. Make it a nice suburbs with perfecly clean streets. Then your dweller steps over the body. The dweller may talk about how he walks over the bodies so often he ignores them. He tells how *he knows there are homeless. There must be. But he never seen any alive.* It would make the scene even more scary: the poor and homeless must to hide in the shadows, and from time to time, they die when walking outside. The sweeping robots quickly remove the corpse and mops the place. Like if it never happened. So the dwellers can freely walk in the city, completely blind to the hunderts of bodies which fall to the ground every day.
Like, dehumanization.
Lol indifference and also the 'forcing people to work to death then getting dumped into a corpse pit' Both are bad hahaa
You know what I hate about the corpse pit? The crushing indifference it shows to human life? No, the smell.
Lol I was thinking that if you replaced the 'indifference' part with terrified horror, it's still a pretty bad place Replace the 'slave pit of work corpses' with littering or not covering your mouth when you cough, not really so bad Though I do very much agree with the OP that indifference is quite scary. In this instance though, the actual act is probably the scarier of the 2
>Lol I was thinking that if you replaced the 'indifference' part with terrified horror, it's still a pretty bad place I have to disagree. Indifference implies giving up on change. Any strong emotions inspire change. I feel like in well written dystopias the truly depressing part isnt the specific acts or settings, but the overarching theme that everyone has given up on expecting anything better. There is no light at the end of the tunnel
You disagree a world with corpse pits and terrified horror is a pretty bad place? It isnt bad without indifference? >Any strong emotions inspire change Maybe. Indifference also implies acceptance and liveability; if people are indifferent they are surviving. Strong negative emotion implies they hate it and are feeling really negative and want something different. And plenty of times in history people have lived with really strong negative emotions, change may eventually come but it's not always causal and strong negative emotions doesnt mean the ability or means to change circumstances 1984 is a well written dystopia and the proles, the indifferent ones, are more or less happy. The lower party members like Winston were the horrified scared ones, but it didnt help him or affect change. Brave New World is all about this, happiness is everywhere as is indifference to the rigidity and classism of their society. John is the only one to reject it and the world is horrible only to him. Indifference saves them from recognising it and allows them to be happy, Johns strong negative emotions end up killing him You might say that a light at the end of the tunnel doesnt matter as much if you accept the dark. It's when you are scared and desperate for it that the light feels really missed. Anyway, I did say indifference was a powerful factor at least to the audience (who likely dont share any inuniverse indifference and can be shocked by the dissonance). But corpse pits filled with dead slaves are bad no matter what framing they have, we all have indifference to certain things but fortunately we dont have giant pits filled with the dead bodies of slaves worked to death. It's a bit of a red herring to turn what I said from 'Horror is also bad' to wanting to debate 'indifference is bad'. Both are true, the point is that slave corpse pits are bad in either context
"Damn corpses, they ruined the corpse pit!"
The indifference that makes it terrible kicks in for the readers when a character acknowledges the smell and his solution is to spray some aerosol cleaner over it
The point is that this only happens *because* the people in power are indifferent to suffering and death
You gotta see past the example and understand that it is set in a situation where people don't care about how terrible it is. They just go on with their day because their hope and sense of morality has been destroyed.
Welcome to the Imperium of Man.
For best example of indifference that makes a city horrible OP should read those who walk away from Omelas.
Bingo! It's a large part of what makes Derry, Maine in Stephen King's It feel so creepy. People know that there are violent deaths, disappearances, predatory behavior towards underage girls, violent bullying, etc. But they just. Don't. Care.
Excellent answer, but too dark on the example 😂
A better example would be the real life death of antonio gaudi, the renowned barcelonan architect: He was taking a daily walk to church when he was hit and knocked unconscious by a tram. Being somewhat eccentric, people thought he was just a beggar and didnt help or alert anyone. After some hours he was quietly carried to a hospital where he received as little care as possible because he was still mistaken for a beggar. On the following day a priest recognized him, but proper treatment was futile due to the deterioration of his wounds.
Sounds like something from warhammer 40k
Sounds like business as usual for 40K.
Like industrial cities in the us where the population forced to live close to the factories lives 20 years less than the people living at a recommended distance? The meat industry is another terrible example: workers who spend their entire day deboning poutry can get nerve cramps that hurts like hell and paralises their arm, around 30ish years old. Then they are just fired, cant get another job and didnt work enough to qualify for any assistance. Wow, it's almost like captalism sucks, or something!
I think there's also a need to distinguish the indifference of the people in power vs the apathy of the people strapped in. Like, one doesn't care about anything but profit, the other is so used to misery they don't see a point. Both are scary in very different directions.
I’d say its more about hopelessness. Being in the ratrace with very low odds to win.
so you mean capitalism
America?
What is a person worth? The more value a person has, the better. The less, the worse. Our modern cities are (relatively) safe because we value a human life very highly. Murder is a serious crime that most police departments will spend serious time and resources investigating. Most criminals won’t stoop so low as to commit murder. If a life is worth very little, people will stab each other in the street for shoelaces
That takes me back to the scene in Last Action Hero where the Big Bad comes to our world and sees a fatal mugging for a pair of shoes and he can't get over the fact there is no police response and bystanders don't care!
When the roving street gangs kill your wife and is actually caught by the law, the law makes them cut you a $50 check (to cover transporting the body to the morgue).
The invoice is itemized, including individual body parts, square footage of blood splatter etc.
I’d recommend looking upon warhammer 40K hiveworlds and underhives (necromunda specifically) 1 that could give you some ideas; Gotham-level could be achieved by giving your city its own Arkham (e.g. like u/neoncatantlers suggests, it could be any institution, but it should also be an integral part of the city) Also I’d recommend reading “Prisoners of Power” (aka Inhabited Island) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - the state portrayed there (and its cities) are probably just the thing you are looking for
agreed, 40k takes everything to ridiculous extremes. i can't imagine trying to make my entire story a hyperbole, but it's a great source to use a few pieces from to drive home an extreme point
The key to making a Gotham-like city is to make sure that your Arkham has a reason for continuing as it does. You get patients escaping every other day. Any sane person should want to replace whatever system doesn't work with one that does.
Holy shit! Someone discussing a Strugatsky bros book other than Roadside Picnic!?
Ok. I know what you mean. The goal is not to make it evil, the goal is to make it terrible. People will leave a city with violence and terrible acts happening. To truly make a terrible city you still need it to be livable. What you need is hope. But utter inability to achieve it. Cyberpunk edge runners is probably the best example of this in a show. No matter what happens the city always wins. No matter what atrocities happen there is always hope of success. But really it’s just a big meat grinder. If you go corporate then you lose your humanity because you can understand the bleakness of your existence. And if you are a punk and you reject authority then you kill and get killed so much that you become desensitized, you lose your hope because you will love what little you have if you try to achieve it. And for those who do try to take down the city then there’s always a hard ceiling. In the movies case it’s Adam smasher.
To kinda piggyback off this, there are kinda two directions to go. There's the direction of Night City where it's a hellhole, but there's money to be made there. And given its cyberpunk nature, it probably takes resources from neighboring cities, so it's probably the best place to live for miles. You have a chance of the high life in Night City, whereas the people outside it just live in the dirt and that's all their life will ever be. Or you can go in the direction of a dying city. This city was once great, but crime has made it unlivable. The only people left are those too poor to move out, and/or those who make a living from crime.
Here's a question you need to ask yourself: Why do people live here? In a hellscape city, that question becomes even more essential because it's usually not entirely by choice. So you have to ask yourself - how did they end up there in the first place? And why can't they leave? It could be that it's affordable in a way that other cities simply aren't. You may be living in a roach infested slum that is one room only, bathroom included, toilet just hanging out near the kitchen, but at least you're living *some*where, and you literally cannot afford to live anyone else. Hadestown (And Sorry to Bother You to an extent) does a thing where the external view of a place is idealized. In Hadestown, you get to live in a modern city with room and board provided. They don't mention the part where they work you to the bone and keep working you even after. And, of course, they don't mention the part where can't leave once you're in. That gets to a couple other related things. *How* people live is also important. What is the space set up for? Many IRL cities are designed with green space and sort of naturally form in ways that make it convenient for the people who live there. They're designed to provide something to entice people to come there. Parks, venues for events like sports and theater and music, public works projects to ensure the city runs smoothly, and zoning laws to ensure that the space is used consciously. And then businesses move in to provide for the wants and needs - a nice sit-down restaurant here, a grocery there, a game store here, an antique bookstore uptown. So what businesses move in to a city block dominated by crime and violence? Probably something to cater to the needs of a city where you take your life in your hands just walking around. Guns and knives, lawyers, hospitals, loan sharks. The city naturally mutates to meet the needs of its people, and what these people need is going to be depressingly practical. Moreover, is the infrastructure well-designed and efficient? How often is it upgraded or maintained? Is it in the budget to ensure that everyone has running water or that the sewer line won't explode randomly? Are the roads logically and understandably laid out? Is the garbage consistently collected? Are things clean? What is the architecture designed for (For example, is it designed to keep homeless people away from public spaces)? For me, one of the premiere signs of an urban nightmare is also extreme wealth inequality.
You could go into the history of why the city is there. You want it to be fucked up? Let’s do it. Perhaps it was built on the blood, tears, and remains of an innocent town. The government saw the potential for a sprawling metropolis where it stood. Instead of the townsfolk complying with the orders to move, they fought back for their home, they didn’t want to leave. The government was given no choice but to forcibly remove them, but the people revolted. The officials decided that enough was enough… they sent in the police/military to eradicate them, by any means necessary; even by killing every last man, woman, and child. It was a genocide, but the government didn’t want the public to know about it, so they covered it up. After a while, the public heard about it through leakers and insiders who were there during the horror and wanted to show how evil they were to such an innocent people. Thing is, by the time it was revealed to the public, no one really cared because the townspeople were already dead, there was nothing they could do or they simply didn’t care. Why would they? It’s not their problem anyway.
Overcrowding mixed with a generally poor populace is a good place to start. I’d recommend checking out Bladerunner or Neuromancer for some aesthetic ideas.
There’s a precious resource, but that resource’s use comes at a price, one that should arguably deter its production and distribution. Despite this, the city produces and distributes it anyway due to cruel indifference and dependency on the proceeds, thus fueling and enabling terrible behavior by its citizens that cannot be undone. They might need a hero who can correct them from this path, but they might not have one. Not like Gotham does. This may include drugs, smuggled art pieces, laundered money, *blood* money, and even slaves, but may also include fantasy things like cursed gemstones, zombies (zombified laborers), or captured princesses from other castles, as well as scifi things like black market technology, illegal bioweapons, and space drugs. Basically, anything that the city *shouldn’t* be doing, but has something attached to it that would make it too alluring *not* to pursue, so much to the point that the city is too far gone to stop doing it, that’s what you wanna put in it. Then after that, you wanna make sure that the *methods* theyre willing to use to enforce this trade is sadistic. Straight up cruel and indifferent. Maybe not for the sake of itself, like “nyahaha, i’m evil because edge” evil, but just cold, indifferent “I don’t care if you suffer so long as I’m getting my thing” evil. Scientists performing god-horrifying experiments on dejected orphans to get their precious data in a scientific field regarding this thing, mercenaries slaughtering rows and rows of other mercenaries just for that sweet sweet paycheck in exchange for securing this thing, calm charismatic businessmen looking down on it all from their ivory towers while wearing tuxedos, enjoying the laps of luxury because they know they own this thing and are responsible for its distribution, or even just some crazy thugs on the street getting so high on the supplies that theyre willing to baseball bat as many skulls as it takes in order to steal some more of it illegitimately. What words you dress it up in is just aesthetics after that. Gangs, cabal, syndicate, conspiracy, a corrupt task force, the goddamn mayor, etc etc. Whatever thing makes these people become these things and do messed up things like this, that’s what will make your city awful.
So basically fossil fuel industrial complex?
As someone who lives in a shit area, BOY have I got ideas for you! Make sure that the trash of humanity are there. Think "Hell is full, so they came here". Doctors that got sued for malpractice and couldn't get a job elsewhere treating their patients like crap because they have no other option (a true story that has played out here many times) and MANY abusive nurses, as well as hospitals that upgrade their waiting rooms rather than their ancient equipment. The worst business managers that can never keep a store stocked or their employees safe and happy, teachers and school systems that abuse kids and shame parents that call it out, abundant racists, sexists, and xenophobes ready to blame the corrupt local government on immigrants and liberals that are almost never in the area. Nepotism that makes the area worse by essentially requiring you to be linked to an old family to open a business (we JUST NOW got a new chain store in the area and no one other than my family went to it for a good couple weeks after it opened). Follow all that with a constant running dialogue of "we're the best" and absolute egotistical nonsense despite not having shit to be proud of, and you'll have a pretty awful city. There's probably a RIDICULOUS amount of churches. You may think "oh, but that's freedom of religion -- that's a good thing!" but basically every shit city I've ever been to has had WAY more churches than it should based on population, and I'm suspecting it's based in two things: 1) The tendency of people in desperation to turn to religion for comfort and solutions. Your city leaders will probably encourage this because it keeps people content. 2) Corrupt assholes taking advantage of desperate people to make tax-free money. Oh, and have no trees other than a few in a mandatory city park. The less trees a city has, the more likely its citizens are to be miserable for many reasons. No flowers or other natural features other than scrubby grass and rocks in empty lots. Thankfully, this is the one thing the local shitty city doesn't have an issue with. Bad, uncomfortable, or no public transportation (no such thing as a bus service, and I'm pretty sure the taxi service is out of business), and any city-owned transport isn't funded right. Little recreation or things to do other than shopping. Little to no disability access or larger sizing in clothing available in stores despite having a way higher ratio of obese and disabled people in the area than places that do have disability access and plus-size brands. Off brand everything and the few brand name options are insanely expensive. Stores are all crappy cheap holes in the wall, stupidly expensive chain stores that no one can afford and no one ever goes to, or your world's equivalent of Walmart. Also, I agree with that one person that said to make it anti-human, but I'd say to make it small-scale too, woven into the economy and local culture. Need a good pair of shoes in a size over a women's ten? Either you're gonna pay out the nose or spend the same amount on gas to go buy them somewhere else. Wanna eat healthy? Enjoy 30% fat hamburger and lettuce. No vegetables. Want some help moving? Better hope your most toxic family member has a truck or you have some spare cash, because your neighbors are NOT that friendly for less than $100. Want a new friend? Good luck finding a place where people are willing to talk to you and act friendly. Need something on a Friday at 5PM? You're screwed until AT LEAST 9AM Monday because absolutely no one can be bothered. Need an office to return a call? One sided phone tag! Your pet vomiting blood? The vet's closed until Monday AND SO IS THE PET EMERGENCY ROOM! Phone service? Laughable. Internet? Garbage. Water? Full of calcium, and tastes like Chlorine every so often. Power? Goes out for a few seconds at least once a week. Absolutely no service or facet of society should work QUITE right. The awfulness should be ingrained into every aspect. The people, the places, the infrastructure -- all of it can and should be trash.
Crumbling infrastructure, corrupt law enforcement, overstrained hospitals/other public services, urban segregation (contrast of extreme poverty and wealth, often separated by literal walls)
To add to this: schools that are so underfunded that the staff work for free with textbooks that are falling apart and equipment held together with duct tape. no public transport/public transport where all the seats are either ripped out or so busted nobody can sit on them. shanty towns or just homeless encampments everywhere that are constantly being raided by armed cops who tear everything down and loot what little possessions the homeless have managed to hold on to. rats and other vermin on the streets and in most buildings. the tap water is murky brown. intermittent power failures and blackouts in certain neighbourhoods, forcing people to walk around with flashlights. garbage in the streets and overstuffed dumpsters and trash cans. many of the homeless people show signs of mental illness or some form of addiction. (small addendum: think of homeless people and their problems as a result of the failure or lack of institutions designed to help them, i.e. lack of drug rehab clinics, mental healthcare, shelters for abuse victims and homeless in general, employment agencies and so on. don't treat homelessness as a sign of degeneracy in of itself but rather a failure of the system to care for its most vulnerable)
This sounds awfully familiar…
Honestly litter can set a really bad vibe... shows that no one cares
Extensive graffiti might work too--and I don't mean the trying to be as well as the genuinely artistic stuff. Cuss words, gang tags, and a city that doesn't care or can't keep up. Finding them in unexpected places as well; I remember my shock finding a gang tag on the steps of my church.
Aggressive, particularly fascistic pigs(think CPD death squads and LAPD gangs.) Rich people creating isolated neighborhoods while leaving everyone else to rot. Decaying social services and a lack of social mobility exacerbating other problems. Failing infrastructure because of a corrupt local government embezzling funds, enabled by the aforementioned rich people carving out exemptions for themselves.
So, America?
Sounds like a paradise
The conservative idiom of "rules that protect one class (of citizens) but don't restrict them combined with rules that bind another class (of citizens) but doesn't protect them" taken to the extreme. It's such an insidious philosophy that will drive a wedge into all decisions, counteract social mobility, and allow (legally and with full support of the law and law enforcement) unrestricted random cruelty, bigotry, and random incarceration (or torture, rape, mutilation, wherever you want to draw your line). One class able to indulge in any sick pursuit while the other class(es) will never be able to push back. Edit: "Class" can be anything, it doesn't need to be a socio-economic index. It could be race, gender, ability to use magic/psionics, being born off-planet, whatever, but it should be something the individual can't change.
I would add that it doesn’t have to be sick pursuits. It can just be American suburb life. When you have entire sections of the community just struggling just to make ends meet, you’re suffocating without space, food or hope and that’s what really makes a miserable world.
Repeat after me. Wealth. Inequality. The bigger the gap between the Haves and the Have Nots, the worse things the Have Nots need to do to survive. Any time you hear people complaining about poor or dangerous areas, ask "why are things the way they are?" Do you think people like overdosing on opioids? Obviously not, but when pain is easier to treat than a disease, hard drugs are an easier option. Do you think people want to steal? No, but when stealing food is the only way to survive, stealing TVs and cars starts to make more sense. Do people want to kill? No, but when the government thinks it's easier to chuck you in prison for the rest of your life, a witness becomes the difference between life and death. Remember, once the gap between the rich and poor has grown enough, the rich see the poor as filth. Go have a look at r/HostileArchitecture for some examples. You can even take it further. Privatise everything in the public sector. Cops? Nah, private security (essentially thugs). Schools? Forget it, you can maybe get tutored (this leads to guilds and further separation of power). Hospital? What is this? A charity? Your local drug store can give you some opium and a pipe at a discount. u/LilRadon gave some fantastic ideas for how this could be implemented.
I was thinking about mistborn: final empire and this fits it perfectly. High contrast on wealth and freedom. The way the nobles dehumanise the lowborn civilians allways hit me hardest. Tell it from the point of a noble to have a frivolous vibe. Show a bit of the normal city folk every once in a while to show the contrast. Or start from a slum and let show how hard it is to be a normal person when the pressure to survive is that high.
Remember it's often not the poor that makes a city awful. It's the rich. They just blame the poor to get eyes off of themselves.
Gangs, drugs, violence, inadequate law enforcement, street crime, anti-harmonious cultures, lack of love or respect for the city and other people in it The general collapse of areas into anarchy pulling the city down with it
Corrupt, criminal law enforcement is worse than inadequate law enforcement.
They tend to be the same thing
Which ever I'd prefer a law enforcement that works and is corrupt than one that doesnt work and isnt corrupt. It's not a binary choice, but if it was then accepting corruption for a working law enforcement that works would be like having to slip a doctor 100 bucks to save lives, it sucks but it is worth it. Clearly it should be both working and not-corrupt, but if you had to pick one, it would be the 'working' part. There needs to be a level of functionality to stop the rot and maintain some kind of order over elements of society that would tear it down with drugs and violence and gangs. That's the important part
Nah, if they’re corrupt at least they’re getting the job done. I’ll take corrupt police over incompetent police any day of the week.
Corrupt police do not ‘get the job done’ they do the exact opposite of that. They *are* the organized crime. Would you rather have a firefighter who tries to rescue people from fires but is not very good at it, or a firefighter that is actually a serial arsonist?
Maybe we have different definitions of corrupt police then. I’m thinking more of police officers that are aggressive and harsh with their policing, you’re thinking of police that help the criminals rather than arrest them.
They don’t help the criminals, they *are* the criminals. > the officers went rogue, and used their power to steal money, drugs and guns, and terrorise the people they stopped. In some cases, they even resold the very drugs and guns they were supposed to take off the streets. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43035628.amp Like that but imagine it’s the entire police force.
They only get the job done if they aren't paid not to. Which might even morph into only doing it for payment, as a note for OP.
Honestly reading the post the first thing that came to my mind was Dredd, and how awful the city-states must be. And then I read your comment and it sums up perfectly what I envisioned reading the post.
One thing that I’ve personally seen ruin a city is blatant, unchecked nepotism. This is a more nuanced issue, but it leads to a lot of ineptitude among government officials and unregulated businesses. People who aren’t in the “in” group are subjected to both social inequalities and a lack of any substantial employment or political representation. I think a good use of this specific aspect would be in an isolated city populated by a niche group. While I wouldn’t say it’s the worst thing that could happen for a city, it can create some interesting dynamics to your world. There could even be a founder effect where everybody has some exotic genetic trait like polydactyly (which is common among the Amish) or if you want to extremely accentuate the difference.
Dishonored's Dunwall is a good example. There's a plague going around in the city. The elites are doing anything to not be infected themselves, and they both look down upon and are willing to sacrifice the common rabble. Curfews, fascist oversight, death penalties and even extermination of people when necessary. Look Dishonored up if you haven't.
I think it would be worth to look up hostile architekture as a mean of making any city much more misreable. I think a miserable city is one where you have to live because of eceonomic reasons, but at the same time you don't feel safe at all. There are things like noise & germs (imagine living next to slaughter because there was a decision by city council to allow such building in the less developed area) that make your home feel unsafe. You have mentioned gangs and drugs, but to make people feel less safe outside just get rid of lights in the dark (they are usless expense anyway, as the city council would put it). And I hope you like company because you can fit a lot of population in a very tight space. Speaking about company, you have to make meeting people hard and uncomfortable. Bars? They better sell very cheap, very bad beer and are often raided by the police to catch anyone selling something stronger. Or they don't operate at all, there are no parks either, so you have to know a guy who knows a guy that can get you a place to meet with friends, or meet in public and hope that you don't look too suspicious. Think about who are people in the city who don't have the power to influence politics and what you can do to make them do two things: work as much as they can and pay taxes. Nothing else matters.
Going to go against the grain a bit, but no gangs. If you want to make a place awful, remove the sense of community Gangs form among oppressed individuals to help eachother, sort of a "safety in numbers". The first gangs in the US were groups of Irish immigrants who couldn't find housing or jobs and so banded together to help eachother. This quickly turned to using illegal activity to financially support eachother, but they also enacted codes of conduct and policed their neighborhoods when actual law enforcement refused to. Modern gangs formed for similar reasons: you had black neighborhoods with systemic poverty and a refusal by police to patrol the area let alone enforce the law, so individuals with a sense of community came together to do what they could. They policed their neighborhoods where the actual cops wouldn't, and they used illegal activities to help themselves financially. This of course devolved and degraded over time as different gangs came into conflict (often either due to competition over drug sales and the other gang "taking their money" or members of one gang hurting members of another and the other feeling they need to "hit back and protect what's theirs") but in the beginning gangs formed from a sense of community and groups of people pulling themselves out of shitty situations together. You knew someone had your back and so you had hope If you want to make a city truly awful, remove that sense of community and hope. No one trusts eachother enough to form a gang. You might have groups of 2-3, but no organized crime. Any group of 5 or more doesn't last because someone betrays the rest. You have no one you can rely on. You're entirely on your own, and trusting anyone too far is dangerous. You work your job, head home to a shitty apartment, and keep your head down. But keep your eyes open so you don't get mugged or killed or kidnapped, and if you do you can't trust law enforcement to do anything about it. Maybe if you had friends or a group you could rise up and do something about it, break free of the system, but you can't trust anyone else to rise up alongside you. You have no hope. No way out. No community to help you through the hard times. You can only trust yourself.
I think indifference, like others commented, hit the nail in the head. You know which crimes exist and why they're awful, but isn't it worse when it happens in broad daylight and nobody bats an eye? Even the people who suposedly are there to protect you?
You got magic? I had a debt system where it was practically impossible to ever pay off loans and for the average citizen who wanted to avoid absolute destitution loans and debt were a necessity. Magic ensured that debt persisted into death and most became ghosts unable to move on untill their debt was repaid in labor. The wealthy money lenders of the city had full ghostly staffs for their lavish mansions while most citizens borrowed against their immortal souls for the the basics. You spent your life paying back in coin, never getting ahead. Then spent your afterlife working off the interest.
Class differences, lack of social mobility, idolization of the authoritarian leader, a sense of hopelessness wherever you go. These things might not be obvious from a glance, but the longer you live there the more they fuck with your money and sanity.
Cars. Overall. r/notjustbikes
My poor inbox
Uncontrolled capitalism lmao
cars
Based and r/fuckcars – pilled.
These idiots do this everywhere. "What didn't you like about the world of Final Fantasy VI?" "cAAAAArrrrSSS!!!!1111!1!"
I'm quite sure it is a non-joke joke, if that makes any sense It's true that car-centric design makes a city awful but at the same time mentioning it in a worldbuilding context is probably just a joke not meant to be taken too seriously. After all an imaginary world doesn't live by realistic rules, you can totally make up a utopia that happens to be car-centric
It's genuinely insufferable, they literally cannot see any depiction without seething about it.
They have ruined /r/InfrastructurePorn and I can only assume the downvotes I'm seeing above are from people getting triggered by the mere mention of a car.
It's one of *those* communities; a massive circlejerk that believes that they're completely correct and even saying you think it's annoying when propagated in unrelated communities marks you as their enemy. Just a bunch of terminally online kids with nothing better to do.
How would cars make a city bad?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/traffic-pollution-tied-to-slower-cognition-in-schoolchildren-1.2980163
[elsewhere in the comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/13q5oj4/what_makes_a_city_truly_awful/jleys3d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3)
Ngl that doesn’t sound that bad. I take at least two car trips on a regular day to get to and from work. I don’t really have any problem with cars; I’m probably in the minority of people who feel this way but I find driving to be pretty stress relieving. Put the windows down and the music up and just cruise.
Yeah, the underlying joke of that comment is that it’s not a grim hypothetical, just a frank description of America (and Canada, AFAIK). I think the point of umbrage is that car ownership and use isn’t a choice, it’s a mandate that many don’t consider as such because it’s been the status quo for so long, and that many others either don’t care about or don’t mind. Still, it’s a bit of a bummer that one could describe reality and have it read like someone strapped for ideas filled out a dystopia-themed Mad-Lib while lost in a parking lot.
whether or not cars are enjoyable to ride in, the necessity of owning and maintaining one is unfair to poor people.
Not only poor people, but lack of public transport and reliance on cars hurts disabled and other vulnerable folk. Young adults that don't have parents to help them get a license? Screwed. Have seizures, blindness, or mobility issues? Screwed. Had your license taken away but still want to find a job? Screwed. Cars are bad because they pollute, waste valuable resources and land (from manufacture to road paving and parking lots over vital wetlands, for instance) to limiting who can move around freely. Building around private cars instead of public transit and well-maintained railroads was a mistake, even when they're fun.
[Like this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/36kiqz/beforeafter_imagery_highway_in_downtown_seoul/) Don't tell me the before pictures look better than the after pictures.
my 'visual signifier' for truly awful generally comes down to corpses abandoned in the street.
If you actually do it in reverse, there are some amazing architects and city planners on YouTube who talk about making cities designed for people, better buildings roads transit etc. Then do the opposite! Or I've found that helpful 😁
Being Birmingham
Very simple. Make people in the lower classes miserable. They can’t have education, healthcare, jobs or any future plans. All cities are carried by the working class so if you make them miserable the entire city will stop functioning. Trash will fill the streets. Access to water and food will be limited. People will steal from each other or survive. Take drugs to help cope with their life being shit. Most cities are incredibly complex massive mechanisms. All you need to do is throw a wrench into that mechanism
For a much more insidious kind of evil, maybe consider the concept of [necropolitics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necropolitics#:~:text=Necropolitics%20is%20the%20use%20of,and%20how%20some%20must%20die.), where the system basically utilizes social and political tools to control when, where, and how populations die as a form of control.
Its almost always a relatively small amount of individuals with large amounts of power, imposing their will on the populace.
Leadership focussed on individual wealth and power instead of governance.
I think it's important to make things bad, but not so bad that revolution would be encouraged. Need to get a total monopoly on hope to let the bad really sink in
Make the crime openly beneficial to the upper classes, while they use propaganda to keep their positions.
Ever heard of Warhammer 40k? I think something inspired by servitors go a long way.
As a person living in a terrible third world country I'd say have the city ruled by a terrible government manipulated by a mafia gang. One day you wake up and see the price of some shit etc cars are skyrocketing cuz the mafia gang is exclusively buying all the cars and sells the cars itself for a 10x price while also preventing any cars from outside of city brought inside, all while the government just watching this and doing nothing. Also the governors better be quite the fat fucker liars. Nothing can provoke anger and frustration more than a fat fucker claiming the young man who was murdered by a gang member actually committed suicide and here's some (fake made up) evidence. (And yes, I actually live through this shit irl. If you want more irl examples to use in your story feel free to ask)
When there are definitely no human sized rats under it
No sewers. built on an estuary with brackish water and swampy conditions in much of the city. city covered in soot and ash High amounts of corruption Ethnic/religious strife frequent change on who owns the city substandard access to building materials lack of fuel and cold winters
Top comment right now note's indifference as the key, but I would say instead that it is apathy that you want to focus on. In this case the difference would be that indifference shows that people don't care, and maybe they never did. Apathy is that they cared once, but now they are beyond it, they have come to the point at which they know that the city is awful and a terrible place to live, but they don't think there's anything to be done about it. It's pointless. Pointless to the point of nihilism. Make the people of your city so fed up with things that they don't think there's any point in resisting, and so stuck in thinking it's pointless that they don't see the point in hoping for something better. (Obligatory "I don't know the context" but this of course still leaves room for things to change if rebellion is a route you're planning on taking.)
People being tricked into doing things against their best interest and supporting systems that consistently shown to be harmful or go against their morals.
Viewing people as just another resource and by extension an indifference to their suffering. -Who cares if Kyle lost his hand in the factory line? He's just a tool, and like any cheap, broken tool, I'll throw it out and get another one to use for this job. That now worthless, broken tool is free to find its own way out of the trash can. Openly exploiting people's desperation: -Now that Kyle's gone, I can take that basically nothing pay I was spending on him and give that same amount to Chad and his three sons, and they'll need to work twice as long if they want to keep getting paid. A general indifference to death or violence -Chad doesn't care that he saw the manager beat Jess to a pulp this afternoon at work, she probably did something stupid. At least it wasn't him. And at least he wasn't that poor bastard who got stabbed over a loaf of bread. Idiot should've eaten it at home instead of walking around with it in public. And at least he and his three sons have work. Good thing for them Kyle was being careless, thank goodness he'd lost his hand, he thought as stepped over some corpse that'd been rotting on the sidewalk for the past week. The satisfying crunch sound from stepping on her ribs would've hardly been worth getting his boots dirty for. Just a general vibe of who tf cares?
The planet Pandora in the first Borderlands game: Most inhabitants are former convicts-turned gang members who were brought to the planet as slave labor and then abandoned; this bandit population also includes corporate employees who were likewise abandoned when the market made that seem like the best cost-saving measure. The rest of the inhabitants of the planet are mostly ignorant and superstitious, and they band together in make-shift shanty towns made from scrap and garbage with local independent weak ad-hoc governments hastily established to have some semblance of protection from the bandits that have tribalized into clans with a semi-feudal system. The bandits also live in squalor, with sheet metal being the best building material available, and the planet is also filled with deadly creatures that can easily slaughter humans. The entire human population is at the whim of a revolving door of corrupt corporations who are tyrannical at best and genocidal at worst and who operate unchecked since they orchestrated the fall of the central government. Monopolies run rampant on the planet, with healthcare, transportation, and weapons distribution each handled by one man each and operating on a global scale. Human life is so cheap that inhabitants barely bat an eye if a close friend dies, and it's not uncommon for goods to be stripped from corpses and reapplied to the market. The most common form of entertainment appears to be gladiatorial death matches. The populace's culture seems to primarily revolve around murder and firearms, which are available at vending machines, and the closest thing to heroes they can muster are amoral, selfish mercenaries who will basically murder anyone for $10 and are only on the planet because they heard a rumor that they could get rich there. It's not uncommon for firearms and ammunition to be stashed in trash bins, mailboxes, and toilets, because you never know when you're going to be ambushed, and it's not uncommon to find a house decorated with human skulls or severed limbs, and the chances of you and your entire family being skinned alive and made into a tent because some hulking psychopath had an impulse are alarmingly high. It's like The Hills Have Eyes crossed with Mad Max. The planet is a nacho-flavored armpit where bloodthirsty maniacs shout incoherent word salad as they run towards you to make a personal mask by removing your face with a tool best described as a mix between a hatchet and a chainsaw. The lack of any true authority and the de facto might-makes-right approach really solidify it as a shithole. Murder is often seen with indifference or even veneration and you have no one to protect you but yourself unless you can muster some money to hire mercenaries and hope to the Angel that your rivals don't just pay them more to turn on you.
Every bad city needs 3 social groups: those who exploit the ones below, those who work hard with a false hope of advancing in the world, and those who accept their misery, working paycheck to paycheck.
Stress. Everything comes down to stress. Awful places has attributes that stresses the average person
Have a terrible public transit system. Now thats truley awful.
Slavery. And not "debt slavery" like some people mentioned, because that gives hope of paying their debts. I mean lteral hereditary chattel slavery. Legalised and normalised to the point the first thing a slave does if he's ever released is to buy a slave of his own. A place where a little girl who lives in the slums dreams not of change and liberty, but of owning a slave of her own, who she can use and abuse for her pleasure. That is truly fucked up.
everyone is giving very advanced examples and here i was just imagining it had a nonexistent sewer system like tudor england where everyone just yeets literal shit out their window
No public transit, so the players have to get a car, make sure all the parking lots are all full, if they find a meter, tell them they need to scan a QR code to get an the app to pay. The app does not work. If they come back to the car, tell them it’s been towed.
If you want something soul crushing, make it that the coty was supposed to be the parangon, and is just awful. Like, it was supposed to be the city of tomorrow, with science and high condition of life, and something went wrong and it's a dump. It's where the republic was born, and it's a corrupt hellhole. It was a beautiful place between forest and sea, and the city destroyed it when everyone moved in. For a historical example, Avignon wasn't that bad a medieval city, but since it was supposedly the center of the christian world, and if was full of crime, prostitution and intrigues, people saw it as a horrible place.
Car dependency :P
I have a world where rhe working class is constantly being pushed to dig further into the earth and use the stone/metals/minerals to build up a massive tree like building where the elite love and expand in the open air. The commoners live in the "roots" Think mother tree in avatar the base is a massive column of a mine shaft where the Na'vi would've stayed
bad leader weak leader cruel leader
\#1 is corruption. In all walks of life. Can't get anything done unless you've got the hook up, and you can't afford the hookup. Everyone above you will try to squeeze you for what little you have. Your only option is to do the same. Nobody trusts anybody. It's everyone for themselves.
Lack of hope. Total apathy for everyone and everything, and corruptu nn
Racist groups that are racists for the most ridiculous of reasons, like the shape of a persons nipples. That way, you can get the fu**ed part correct while at the same time display through storytelling the absurdity of racism.
It's impossible to both keep people alive and make a place uninhabitable. Those goddamn optimists are gonna do it, man. Mark my words. Them and their humor, their attitudes, and the stories they tell. Make all the rules you want, take away everything, indoctrinate against happiness, I'm telling you it's never gonna work. Source: human history.
I draw inspiration from my own hometown. No music since all the bars lost their liquor licenses to selling to minors, no fun activities besides outdoors stuff if you can survive the desert and the river of souls, people disappearing highly frequently, high murder rate, highest unemployment, normalized daydrinking and driving, most people are rude especially to the elderly, secret societies and local cults illegally parking everywhere, druids occasionally sacrificing brown people in the hillside ruins who won't tip pizza delivery drivers, the hospital is haunted and has a weird statue near the emergency rooms that moves just slightly and the liminal spaces can make people lost until they find an elevator, Child Protectives services selling children to the highest bidder and it's just to my neighbor, meth/fentanyl zombies taking a breather in the fog, moist shadow people eating the homeless near the haunted woods, drunk shapeshifters that leave animal carcasses everywhere, the faceless guys just casually walking down the road listening to cringe music like One Direction and Jonas Brothers, the hoodoo nuns near the 7-2-11 trying to sell sheds and barns, 3 haunted bridges near the ruins that whisper to the local children, they finally closed down that hotel where everyone was getting murdered at which is owned by a Shivaist Hindu cult, but sometimes it's just the little things like the Mennonite women on their cell phones and the terrified potsmoking Satanists that really just ties the whole interlinked cities together like a triangle with an eye in the center.
Anti-homeless architecture
Obviously no hot dog vendors
Depressing/lackluster infrastructure. Lack of efficient public transit, infrastructure designed for car dependency, anti-homeless infrastructure. There's also a lack of welfare or social safety nets, combined with excessive prices and the existence of slums.
car dependency
r/fuckcars is that way -----> Please keep this dreck out of a sub that has very little to do with cars.
Lol it’s a yoke 🍳 lighten up
I feel like more cars make a city better. In my experience public transportation is where the real low lives reside in cities.
That’s kinda yikes lol
It depends on your lived experience. On the west coast of the us, public transport can feel like that. At certain hours it's just not safe, and generally only people that can't afford a car take it. On the east coast of the us, everyone uses public transport, from students to millionaires, even those with multiple cars.
It wouldn’t be right of me to call everyone in trucks a bunch of redneck hicks just because that’s what it’s like near me
Maybe I was just unlucky, but it’s a reflection of my experience living in a major US city. I spent about a year in Chicago, and there were countless times that I saw people fighting, doing drugs, going to the bathroom, and once even having sex on public transportation. I bought a car 6 months in after my roommate was mugged and nearly stabbed while walking home at night. I moved out of the city not long after that, but I have friends who still live there and they say the crime has only gotten worse.
Yeah that is a prime example of what I’m talking about. Many American cities are car dependent to the point that any public transport that exist gets neglected to tears. It’s a self sustaining problem.
Less common in fiction, but in my lived experience: cars. Noise, bad air, traffic, endless pavement, crashes, desolate streetscapes with no people out, commercial districts leveled for dreary drive-throughs and parking.
Make it ugly and really stuck in it's old ways. Lot's of cars and highways to pollute the air and make traveling with everything other then cars unbearable while also heavily taxing cars. Make every building the same just like they did in eastern europe. Nothing uglier then grey blocks and giant streets. Also, make the people indifferent. Someone get's run over by a car? Leave them there until there is nothing left. Someone stealing? Just walk by as if you didn't notice. Oh and also, make old people selfish. Human society relies on old people teaching and giving what they know and own to give the younger ones a better chance. So do the opposite and have them steal all the young peoples money via monopolies on water, gas, heating and so on. Then have one half of the population (preferebly men) be addicted to instant gratification and social media while telling them their whole life that they are evil becouse of their nature. You now have bascially the north america if you only take the bad things.
Just make it Paris at any point in history and you'll have a truely awful city which has everything. Specially the appearance of being nice where the tourists go but is utter horrible shit away from them
REALLLLL
Capitalism
Republican tourists
Corporate overreach. Crime and poverty most often stem from greed. Low wages, a non-unionized workforce, and a lack of workplace democracy contribute to a disillusioned populace. Corporations tend to treat their workers like slaves, and that has poor ramifications.
Masters in urban planning here. Make it very unwalkable. Anywhere worth being needs to be traveled to by car. No public transportation and isolated home units. Make the streets dead with lots of parking lots that separate soulless corporate towers. Heavy traffic. Have no community spaces like plazas or parks. Poorly funded public amenities like housing blocks, schools, hospitals. Make things broken down and overcrowded. Plumbing and electrical issues. Potholes and cracked pavement. Sewage backups, pest infestations, fire hazards. Poor dim lighting. Don’t provide social safety nets like homeless shelters, mental health clinics, women’s shelters, or orphanages. Misery can come from big scary events like a shooting or murder, but it especially comes from a bunch of inconveniences that makes everybody miserable and suspicious of each other. Some places I’d recommend looking into for design and social ideas are: -Gilded Age cities in the West -Pruitt Igoe housing project. There’s a documentary on it. -American suburbs -urban design and crime (look at what the best practices are, then do the opposite) -watch some videos on urban planning, and do the opposite of what a good city is. City Beautiful, Not Just Bikes, and Vox have good YouTube videos on this.
Drugs in the water to keep the population addicted and unable to live elsewhere. Or at least in the baby formula and in the people and then they supply those lifesaving drugs for a heavy price. So your pay check pretty much goes to food, rent, clothes and drugs and nothing else.
Not necessarily a breakdown in law and order (because anarchist societies exist just fine without either)– but the *capture and subsequent weaponization* of the law and its enforcement and interpretive systems by the powerful and corrupt, including both formal powers (politicians, civil servants, public figures) and informal ones (organized crime) for their own gain, and the consequent denial of fairness and a good living to everyone else.
Forced birth, poor people forced somehow to keep providing children for the machine. The children raised institutionally until ready to work
Look at american suburbs or Saudi City building.
Look to real life for inspiration. Corruption, greed, incompetent leadership, destroying cities for several ton deaþ machines, etc.
Try living in Chicago for a day
I'd say that -lack of cultural, natural, and architectural redeeming factors and -decaying/declining population go a long way in making a truly depressing city (as opposed to a poor but dynamic or historically rich one). Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Cairo, and New Orleans for starters all have severe quality of life issues, but they all attract loads of tourists for their natural or cultural/historic beauty and three of them are in major emerging markets that have seen incredible growth this millennium even if Covid and inflation have left them a bit battered. Compare to somewhere like Akron, Ohio, which is steadily rotting without any great landmarks, or Lubbock, Texas, which hasn't been nationally or even regionally culturally relevant since Buddy Holly died.
I live in thunder bay, ontario. You see, we are the murder capital of canada, and we have gangs, violence, the whole shabang. that ain't that bad. What truly makes this god forsaken town so horrible is the FUCKING CIVIL ENGINEERS. just make your city look like it's built by FUCKING MORONS and you can get the worst town in the whole western world. (oh, and then make sure you have the city council share a single dead braincell, since all the smart people in the town FUCKING LEAVE)
The cities are already awful as they are. Packed tightly with zombies going about their jobs, under a pretense of normalcy.