New Neo City

aka: Neo New City

"Neo Olde Tokyo...? Who comes up with these names!?"

— Phoenix, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

When a major city or province is destroyed during The End of the World as We Know It, and it gets rebuilt After the End, instead of going back to the original name for it (or naming it something else), it's common practice for the builders to tack on "New" or "Neo" to the original name, probably to show how this incarnation is nothing like the old, destroyed one. If there's still ruins of the old city left, you can bet that the remaining townsfolk will refer to it as "Old"-whatever, as a show of how much they want to forget what happened and move on.

Settlers and colonists also frequently use this in order to name new cities, countries, and planets after their homeland, whether the original still exists or not — in this case, it's to show that their new home will be a new, better version of the old. Because of Planetville tendencies, it's not uncommon to see entire planets named things like "New London".

This trope is a time-honored hallmark of the Cyberpunk genre. There are a variety of reasons for this. Perhaps Old Tokyo was destroyed in the Great Offscreen War; perhaps nebulously-defined environmental collapse or nuclear fallout rendered it uninhabitable; maybe the occupants were forced to flee when the usual suspects took over the world, and rebuilt it somewhere else.

Because of the phenomenon of Creator Provincialism, the city in question will nearly always be New York or Tokyo, although in the first case it's generally Played for Laughs, for obvious reasons.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

Note: Because Tokyo is annihilated so frequently in anime, it tends to get this treatment a lot.

• In AKIRA, Tokyo was destroyed years before the story takes place. Since then, the city had been rebuilt as Neo Tokyo.
• In Bubblegum Crisis, the old city of Tokyo was destroyed by a Second Great Kanto Earthquake, and was rebuilt with the help of Genom into Megatokyo (no relation to the webcomic of the same name).
• Neon Genesis Evangelion has has an example of the second type: since the original Tokyo was nuked and submerged, and the city of Matsumoto was converted into the new capital and renamed "New Tokyo-2", New Tokyo-3 (commonly just Tokyo-3 in English) is a ground-up purpose-built city over the location of Hakone that is intended to eventually replace Tokyo-2 as a capital city (presumably after all the Angels are defeated). Also, the fleet in episode 8 moored in "New Yokosuka" (formerly Odawara), which serves as a port for the landlocked Tokyo-3.
• In ARIA, the city where most of the story takes place is Neo Venezia on Aqua (formerly known as Mars) and is based on Venice.
• Romeo × Juliet, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, takes place in the city of Neo Verona. No mention is made of an "Old Verona", however, the implication being that Verona is Shakespeare's one.
• New Namek in Dragon Ball, established after the old Planet Namek was destroyed by Frieza.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds is set in Neo Domino City, a Shout-Out to the original Yu-Gi-Oh! taking place in Domino City.
  • Which actually appears in 5D's as the run-down Satellite slums.
• Nation-wide version in Mobile Fighter G Gundam, where every country names their space colony "Neo-(country name)". For example, Neo Japan.
• In Powerpuff Girls Z, the series takes place in Tokyo, while in the English Dub, the series takes place in New Townsville.

Comic Books

• Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire is based on the planet of New Hong Kong.
• The backup feature in the X-Men Noir miniseries was a parody pulp story set in New New New York.
• Rogue Trooper is set on the planet Nu Earth, and includes cities such as Nu Atlanta, Nu Paree, Nu Georgia, and Nu Memphizz.
• Nueva York in Marvel 2099.
• The DC Universe has New Carthage (which, as pointed out in the Real Life section, is pretty redundant) in New York, and the underwater city of New Venice, which Aquaman uses as a base.
• Legends of the Dead Earth:
  • In Batman Annual #20, New Gotham is a domed city ruled by the oppressive regime of the City Controllers.
  • In Batman: Shadow of the Bat Annual #4, Nu-Gotham is a city ruled by King Bruce the 23rd of the royal Wayne line, also known as the City Hero, the Batman.
  • In Aquaman Annual #2, the first storyteller claims that King Aquaman visited the city of New Phoenix in disguise.
• Star Trek: Early Voyages: In "Flesh of My Flesh", it was established that Gabrielle Carlotti lived on the New Milan colony until it was destroyed by the Chakuun, the shock troops of the Tholians. Out of her family, only she and her two younger brothers survived.

Film

• Neo Seoul in Cloud Atlas.
• In the post-apocalyptic film Six Reasons Why, The Entrepreneur's father is murdered in the town of New Gibraltar.

Literature

• The Robert A. Heinlein juvenile Between Planets has some early chapters set in New Chicago, Old Chicago having been nuked in a previous (non-world-ending) nuclear war some generations ago. Also, the capital of the Venus Republic is New London being named after the Earthside city.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series: The city of New Rome, located in Camp Jupiter, which even has its own River Tiber. They are fully aware that Old Rome still exists, of course; it's just that they regard themselves to be the rightful successors to Ancient Rome, which no longer exists.
• According to The Compleat Discworld Atlas, the current capital of the Egyptian Fantasy Counterpart Culture Djelibeybi, built by Queen Ptraci for the purpose of getting as far away from the bloody pyramids as possible, is New Djeli.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe: When a military dictator seizes control of Britain, he renames it New Britain. In 3350, Britain on the recolonized Earth was also named New Britain, ruled by a supercomputer from the city of New London.
• The capital city of Haven in David Weber's Honor Harrington series is Nouveau Paris, which only underlines the fact that Haven is a stand-in for Revolutionary France. Passing mention is also made of Neo Geneva in an earlier book when the plot was still thick with the French Revolution IN SPACE.
  • Inverted for stories taking place on Earth, which typically are set in the city of Old Chicago, which is the rebuilt city of Chicago, on top of the remains of the original city of Chicago.
  • Many other examples can be found there too. Off the top of my head, there's also New Berlin and New Britain.
• In the Hyperion Cantos, quite a few planets were named after Earth: New Earth, Earth 2, Earth City and Terra are some that are mentioned.
• In Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, many places on Luna are named after cities on Earth, such as Novy Leningrad (Russian for "New Leningrad") and Hong Kong in Luna, often referred to simply as Hong Kong Luna or HKL.
• The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle has New Chicago and New Caledonia, which has the worlds of New Ireland and New Scotland. There's also New Annapolis on Earth, since the original was destroyed in The Great Patriotic Wars. Incidentally, New Caledonia is also the name of a pacific island in Real Life.
• In Red Handed by Gena Showalter, there is New Chicago.
• In The Saga Of Billy, the town of New-New-Azure is frequently raided by Kränelornians and rebuilt by its inhabitants.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • There's a planet that goes through severe upheavals every seven years or so, destroying everything on the surface. The planet's colonists don't let this stop them, evacuating and rebuilding whenever necessary. One town has been called, over the years, Hopetown, New Hopetown, Newer Hopetown, Newest Hopetown, and Another Hopetown. The character who encounters this, one of Luke Skywalker's Jedi Apprentices, gives the colonists a severe What the Hell, Hero? about this, especialy after an old friend of his is killed in one of the upheavals.
  • In X-Wing: Iron Fist, there is a town on the planet Aldivy called "New Oldtown". The Big Bad is horrified by this name, and when his dragon is giving him a report about someone involved with the town, he interrupts constantly.
    Zsinj: "Surely you're joking about that name." [...]
    Zsinj: "You're sure he didn't destroy it because of that name."[...]
    Zsinj: "Don't ever say that name again. It annoys me."
    • After that, his second-in-command calls it the "hometown-whose-name-is-nevermore-to-be-said."
• Ward: Following the near-complete annihilation of the original Earth (Earth Bet), the survivors mostly move to an alternate universe Earth (Earth Gimel), forming a mega-city on the east coast of Gimel's North America. No one's sure what to call the mega-city as a whole (it's mostly just called "The City"), but many of its subdivisions are named after locations from Earth Bet. The most prominent is New Brockton, located where the city of Brockton Bay was located on Earth Bet. "New York C" is also briefly mentioned (as opposed to the original New York City or the New York City on Earth Aleph).
• Lampshaded in John Zakour's Zach Johnson books; the World Council added "New" to EVERY place on Earth, a fact which is occasionally commented upon by the characters, who live in New San Francisco.
• In The Reckoners Trilogy, Chicago has been redubbed "Newcago".

Live-Action TV

• Almost Human has mentioned a New Pittsburgh.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): New Caprica.
  • One wonders how non-Capricans felt about that naming choice.
    • Capricious.
• The short-lived Birds of Prey (2002) is set in New Gotham. For Batman fans, it appears to take place in an alternate-continuity future following the "Cataclysm" and "No Man's Land" comic books arcs (in which an earthquake levels half of Gotham).
• The first season of the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century series took place in New Chicago.
• In the Community episode Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design, Troy and Abed build a blanket fort called Fluffytown. One season later, in the two-parter Digital Exploration of Interior Design and Pillows and Blankets, they build a pillow fort called New Fluffytown.
  Voiceover: Its name: New Fluffytown. Its goal: to be a newer, fluffier town than Fluffytown.
• Doctor Who: Lampshaded in "New Earth", where the Tenth Doctor explains that New New York (on the planet New Earth, of course) is actually the fifteenth New York, so it's technically New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York. The city reappears in "Gridlock".
• Frontier Circus: In "The Courtship", the T & T Circus visits New Atlanta, a town founded by refugees from Atlanta who are striving to keep the spirit of the antebellum South alive.
• Horrible Histories, at the end of the pilgrims' song:
  "My home was in Plymouth, let's call this New Plymouth!"
  "I've got an idea, let's call this New Hampshire!"
  "Wait, I'm from Newcastle, can we call this New Newcastle?"
  "Nah!"
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "The Grell", High Secretary Paul Kohler tells his wife Olivia that he plans to talk to the President of the Federation about the threat posed by the Grell rebels once they get back to New Washington, the seat of the Federation's government. There is also mention of Old Seattle, suggesting that there is a New Seattle.
• In Power Rangers S.P.D. the protagonists live in Newtech City - a bit of a stretch considering that it implies that there was a city called Tech and then another city with the same name. It's even more of a stretch given that the series takes place in 2025 - Those must be some fast builders.
  • Of course, who do you think builds the cities after every single Megazord fight, huh?
• The ill-fated colony of New Bajor, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • There are also a couple references to the human (but not Federation) world of New Sydney, from all descriptions a regular Wretched Hive mostly under the thumb of the interstellar mob.
• Sliders: In "Slide Like an Egyptian", New Cairo is a major city of the Egyptian Empire that is located in the same place as Los Angeles on Earth Prime.
• In Star Trek, New Berlin is the largest city on the Moon. We also hear of (but never actually see) a city called New Seattle on a Federation colony world.
  • Another New Berlin is also a Federation colony on the frontier. New Manhattan, New Providence, New France, and New Paris are also mentioned briefly. The Expanded Universe also has examples like New Siberia, New Sahara or New Reykjavik.
  • In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Resolutions", Captain Janeway and her handsome Number Two Commander Chakotay are abandoned on a planet for plot-related reasons so they can explore their UST. They decide to call the planet New Earth, but have to leave before an Adam and Eve Plot can occur.
• In Terra Nova, the title location, as the name translates to "New Earth".

Tabletop Games

• Eclipse Phase, taking place 10 years after Earth is rendered uninhabitable by a Robot War, has several examples:
  • Mars: Valles-New Shanghai
  • Titan: New København (Copenhagen), New Quebec
  • Asteroids: Nova York.
• Rifts has the New German Republic.
• In Fading Suns the capital planet of the Empire is currently named Byzantium Secundus, previously it was New Istanbul.

Video Games

• In Battle Clash, New York, guarded by the Warm-Up Boss Guido, is left in ruins. In the sequel, Metal Combat: Falcon's Revenge, no one's bothered to clean up the rubble of the Statue of Liberty, but the inhabitants (those that are left, anyway) refer to the city as "Neo New York".
• Parodied with the "Neo Olde Tokyo" city of the Show Within a Show "The Steel Samurai" in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (an attempt to translate the meaning of "Neo Edo" in the original).
• In Warcraft, Stormwind City was razed by the Orcs in the First War and rebuilt after the Alliance reclaimed the continent of Azeroth six years later. The original city is referred to as "Old Stormwind" in historical texts. The southeastern district of the city is called "Old Town" in-game, even though it's architecturally identical to the rest of the metropolis and was ostensibly (re)built at the same time.
  • In the expansion Wrath of the Lich King of World of Warcraft, the Forsaken name a Howling Fjord outpost of theirs "New Agamand". Agamand is the name of a former human family that lived on the land of the same name in Lordaeron before they got corrupted by the Scourge, with all its inhabitants being turned into undead. Some Forsaken starting quests involved killing said undead Scourge minions in Agamand.
• In combination with Punny Name, Mother 3 has New Pork City.
• In TimeSplitters 2 (a series which thrives off of pastiches of stock settings) there is a level set in Neotokyo in 2019.
• In Civilization 3 and its expansions, when a faction runs out of unique city names from its predefined city list, new cities' default names will go back to the top of the list, adding "New" to the original city name. This can result in a few oddities (New New York) and Easter Eggs (Neo Tokyo, Not Constantinople). When the city list runs out after then, it starts numbering cities, e.g. Thebes 2.
• Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden takes place mainly in post-cyberpocalypse New York, aptly renamed as Neo New York. At one point, the characters visit Proto Neo New York, which is now an abandoned wasteland.
• Freelancer has quite a few of these. New Tokyo, New Berlin, New London are the capital planets of Kusari, Rhineland, and Bretonia, but strangely, Liberty's capital name is Manhattan. That said, Manhattan is in the New York system - so all the capital systems start with New.
• Armored Core: Another Age does this. Several locations from previous Armored Core titles, like Isaac City, are featured, however they've now been supplanted by newer cities of similar name. Isaac City in particular is now divided between Neo and Old Isaac City.
• MegaRace featured a few tracks in NewSan, named after San Francisco. One such track went over a bridge probably intended to evoke the Golden Gate Bridge.
• Hideo Kojima's '80s cyberpunk game Snatcher takes place in "Neo Kobe City."
• Halo:
  • In a few levels of Halo 2 and the entirety of Halo 3: ODST, the action takes place in New Mombasa, Kenya, a cosmopolitan industrial port city centered around Earth's first space elevator. The more run-down municipalities surrounding New Mombasa are what's left of "Old Mombasa".
  • Halo: Reach has New Alexandria on Reach.
  • Halo 4 has New Phoenix, Arizona, which was formed when Flagstaff and "Old" Phoenix grew so much that they merged into a single metropolis.
  • The expanded universe has a galaxy full of these, including: New Legaspi, New Manila, and New Paris on Mars; the colonies of New Caracas, New Constantinople, and Newsaka; Nueva Lima on Madrigal; and New Stockholm on Sansar. We even have the city of New Jerusalem on the planet of New Jerusalem.
• Escape Velocity has a bunch of planets and moons named this way. In the third game there's a planet called Neo New York that was apparently depopulated by a plague.
• Inversion: the prologue portion of Policenauts takes place in "Old L.A." in 2040, which is the city that used to be Los Angeles after the actual Los Angeles relocated to the north.
• The setting of Contra Force is actually called "Neo City", even though the game takes place in 1992 (the present year when the game came out). While Contra Force has nothing to do with the rest of the Contra series, the localization staff at Konami attempted to establish a connection between it and Contra III: The Alien Wars by claiming that the Occupied City stage in Contra III was actually Neo City in ruins.
• A majority of Final Fantasy VII is set in the city of Midgar, a metropolis built by the MegaCorp Shinra Inc. Shinra's master plan is to build a new city on a scale meant to handily eclipse Midgar's. Its name? "Neo Midgar," what else?
• Official Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped artwork refers to the future-themed setting as "Neo York"... that is, what would happen if Cortex managed to Take Over the World.
• Fallout 2 has New Reno.
  • And later on in the series the eponymous New Vegas. New Vegas is largely intact after the war, with only neglect and age wearing her down; the reason she's call "New" Vegas is due to who's running the city and the casinos.
  • The first and possibly second of which are part of the New California Republic. And in Fallout 4 it seems that New Vegas is now a part of the New California Republic according to brahmin caravaners along with the fall of Caesar's Legion.
  • The Chosen One's home village of Arroyo has, over the years, grew and became New Arroyo and became the capital of the state of Arroyo.
• One of the cities in the game Just Cause is named "Nuevo Estocolmo", being an obvious reference to Stockholm, capital of the developers' native Sweden.
• Mario Kart 7 and Mario Kart 8 have Neo Bowser City, set in a futuristic metropolis, with lots of bright lights, shiny towers, and flying vehicles for backdrops. In the PAL release, though, it's just called Koopa City.
• Mario & Luigi: Dream Team has Neo Bowser Castle, the final dungeon. Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam also names its final dungeon the same thing, though they're two different castles.
• Miitopia has New Lumos, a rainy futuristic city, where a multitude of brightly coloured neon lights shine into the perpetual night.
• In Mega Man Zero, Neo Arcadia is the name of both the last bastion of civilization after the cataclysmic Elf Wars, and the totalitarian regime that rules it.
• New Los Angeles in Xenoblade Chronicles X.
• Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has New Baghdad.
• The monsters' capital city in Undertale is called New Home. This is because their king Asgore is really bad at naming, so that's the best he could come up with after they migrated from the original city of Home.
• Remember Me takes place in Neo-Paris.
• Act 1 of Diablo III takes place in a growing village called New Tristram which is located a short distance from "Old" Tristam, where the original Diablo was set.
• Cyber Cycles has the Neo Yokohama course.
• Prototype builds of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 have a "Neo Green Hill Zone", named after Green Hill Zone from the previous game. It was renamed to Aquatic Ruin Zone for the release build. The name would later be reused for the first zone of Sonic Advance.
• FAST Racing NEO and its Updated Re-release FAST RMX have the Neo Kyoto course.
• Star Control Origins: The Menkmack have had to relocate their homeworld numerous times to escape a giant atmosphere-eating space monster. As a result, their homeworld, whatever planet it is located on at the moment, is called "New New New Whatever Menkmack".
• Sunless Skies: In a more colonial manner than post-apocalyptic, the Reach's capital, founded by the renewed British Empire, is called New Winchester. Averted in the strangest of ways with London, however: It's not a new city. It's the old one, moved brick by brick to Albion and made skyfaring for the sake of showing off. Thus, it's still just called London.
• Taken to its ultimate logical extreme in the SimCity series if you don't bother to pick a better one: The default city name is simply "New City".
• Episodes 2 and 3 of Code 7 are primarily set in Germany, in New Berlin.
• The main setting of Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story is Neo Hong Kong, in the year 2083.
• Katana ZERO takes place in the city-state of New Mecca. Unusually for the trope, it appears to have cultural influences from both Asia and the Middle East.

Webcomics

• Blink and you'll miss it, but Last Res0rt has Slick Giovanni, the don of Third Jerusalem on Planet Arael. We'll be optimistic and assume the original is still intact, although we don't know anything about the second.
• Ronin Galaxy has New Edo on the Moon.
• In Schlock Mercenary when a ship's deck is flooded Tagon compares it to "Third Orleans", which the author's footnote assures the readers is not even on the same planet as New Orleans. There's also a Tokyo^3 in South America.
• This Starslip Katrina tribute strip has "New New New Orleans" and "New-to-the-fifth-power Jersey".

Web Original

• Void Dogs features the "Celtic revival" planets of Nova Hibernia and Nova Caledonia (New Ireland and New Scotland).

Western Animation

• Played with in Futurama with New New York. Old New York is currently ruins found in the sewers of New New York. The pilot episode actually gives the impression that New York was destroyed and rebuilt twice, but the movie Bender's Big Score reveals that one of these was just a few buildings being knocked down because of Bender's antics.
• The 31st-century set Legion of Super Heroes cartoon has New Metropolis in the place of Metropolis. In the 41st Century, the ruins were christened Neo Metropolis, making this a double example.
• RoboCop: Alpha Commando features a number of cities undergoing with, including Detroit becoming "New Detroit" with no word as to what happened.
• Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century had New London as the capital of Britain. We were never told what had happened to the old one.
• In the South Park episode "Go God Go XII", Cartman and some sapient otters visit the ruins of New New Hampshire.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles variation: Although the 2105 Manhattan seen in Fast Forward is officially "New New York", as evidenced by several signs, it is still usually called "New York".
• ThunderCats had New Thundera when Thundera magically reformed.
• Ninjago: After Ninjago City was trashed by the Great Devourer in season two, season three reveals that tech genius Cyrus Borg has led rebuilding efforts, and the city has been redubbed "New Ninjago City," featuring such sci-fi elements as hovercars and robot sentinels. The sci-fi elements are dropped at the end of the season, along with the "New," and Ninjago City of later seasons falls more in line with how it was depicted in seasons one and two (when the Ninja are actually in Ninjago City, that is).

Real Life

• New Delhi, India. Unlike most examples, it sits right next to the still fully intact Old Delhi, having been built just to the south of it.
  • New Delhi was initially built by the British to be the capital of The Raj, and named in contrast to "Old" Delhi (the pre-British, Mughal part of the city). Since then Delhi's massive urban sprawl has dwarfed both parts, and both are subdivisions of the much larger Delhi National Capital Territory.
• Right after Katrina hit New Orleans, the Internet started buzzing with jokes about "New New Orleans".
• Any number of place names in North America are this. New England, which also has towns/cities named New Bedford, New Britain and New London (among others), itself is named after England. New Orleans is named after Orleans, France. Subverted with New York, which was named for the Duke of York in 1664, the man who would become James II of England and VII of Scotland. OK, so he's named for the City of York, England. And before then, New York was named New Amsterdam... ^note Why they changed it, I can't say. The people just liked it better that way.
  • Even before New Amsterdam, New York was called "New Angouleme", after the birthplace of the French king who'd bankrolled the expedition ^note  Technically, that expedition didn't found any settlements, let alone NYC, so "New Angouleme" would have referred to the area that became the state.
  • New Rochelle was named after LaRochelle, as it was settled by French people (mostly Huguenots fleeing religious persecution) from around there.
• This is Truth in Television for many places named by colonists; New Zealand, for example.
  • In Canada, The Province of Quebec (and the rest of the French territory in America) was once known as "Nouvelle France/New France". New Brunswick is named after a territory in Germany that was once ruled by a relative of the British king, and Nova Scotia is Latin for "New Scotland". "Newfoundland", meanwhile, is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • What's now northern Quebec used to be controlled by the British, and was called New Britain. California was also originally going to be called New Albion.
  • But then, there is a place called Neu Kamerun (New Cameroon) in Germany...
• However, in regards to places that have been destroyed and rebuild this is a Dead Unicorn Trope in real life, as that just doesn't happen, and wouldn't make much sense; there's an old name already, and changing it would cause confusion or fail to catch on. The closest examples of this trope happening in real life are cases of cities expanding and calling the new districts "New Town" or similar, which becomes an Artifact Title over time.
• New Jersey is named for an island off the British coast, while New Hampshire is named for an English county.
• New South Wales, Australia. As mentioned in Down Under by Bill Bryson, no-one's sure if this is meant to be a new Wales of the South, or a new South Wales. Especially since Captain Cook (who named it) wasn't even from Wales.
  • On the whole, Australia tends to avert this. Partly because many of the "New" names had already been taken by the (at the time) newly formed United States. Instead many places such as Perth, Ipswich and Newcastle (to name but a few), are named directly for their British counterparts with no modifiers.
• New Spain, now know as Mexico.
  • And then New Mexico continues the process. (It was so named because the Spanish had hoped they would find cities and riches there like they had found in the Valley of Mexico;^note The Valley of Mexico being the region of what is today Central Mexico in which Mexico City lies, the heartland of the Nahua peoples whose alternate name—Mexica—gave the independent country its name. while they found some decent-sized towns, they were disappointed in the riches department.)
• New Guinea. A little odd, since Guinea is a country in Africa. Nearby are the islands of New Britain and New Ireland. Also in the South Pacific is the island of New Caledonia.
• Naples (Napoli to its actual inhabitants) comes from the Greek Neapolis "New City". The name was given by Greek settlers thousands of years ago, and it stuck.
  • The name of the city of Nablus in the West Bank also has its roots in the Greek Neapolis by way of Arab Beoble Talk. Ironically, Nablus is one of the world's most ancient settlements; it's the city known as Shechem in The Bible and was founded around 6,000 years ago. The original Shechem was razed by The Roman Empire during the First Jewish Revolt and replaced by a town the Romans named Flavia Neapolis. The Roman name stuck, and while it was true at the time, that was 2,000 years ago.
  • There are about six towns called "Neustadt" (new town) in Germany, and even more if you include all variants like Neustadt an/in/an der … (“New Town at/in/at the …”).
• New Lanark, Scotland. About one and a half miles from Old Lanark, Scotland.
• Carthage literally means "New City" (Qart-Hadasht). The Carthagenians founded another city of Qart-Hadasht in the south of Spain, which ended up being called Carthago Nova by the Romans ("New New City"), who were unaware that "Carthage" meant "New City" already. "Carthago Nova" was eventually mutated and shorted to Cartagena in Spanish. In the New World, the Spanish had the opportunity to extend this further by building a "Nueva Cartagena"...but they opted for "Cartagena de Indias" ("Cartagena of the Indies") instead.^note It is today substantially larger than the original Cartagena, though it's not as big as modern Carthage—which can be confidently identified with Tunis. (They did end up naming the colony in which Cartagena de Indias was situated "New Granada"...though when that colony won independence, it ended up with the name Colombia.^note How New Grenada became Colombia is a long and complicated story involving Francisco de Miranda, Simón Bolívar, and a whole lot of intricate 19th-century South American politics.)
• Constantinople, being the new capital of the Roman Empire, was sometimes called "Nova Roma" even before the old Rome fell to the barbarians, as when the Roman Empire was split into its Eastern and Western halves, Rome was the capital of the West and Constantinople was the capital of the East. The early Tsars sometimes referred to Moscow as the "Third Rome".
• Russia has Novgorod (New City), which, in an ironic case of Non-Indicative Name, is one of the country's oldest historical cities. And also there is Nizhny Novgorod (Lower New City).
  • Novgorod is called such because it was founded by the settlers from nearby Ladoga to whom it indeed was new. The only thing that this happened somewhere in the 9th century. Because of the said historical significance, it is also often called Veliky (Great) Novgorod despite being nowadays a small and somewhat unimportant town, much smaller and less developed than its Volga namesake. The (still existing) town of Ladoga itself is now quite appropriately called OLD Ladoga.
• A smaller-scale example exists with Shinjuku, one of the 23 special wards of Tokyo. The name literally translates as "New Lodge", a rather appropriate name as it was one of the least-damaged parts of Tokyo after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Consequently, a lot of new development is located here - it is one of the few areas of Tokyo with many skyscrapers, several of the facilities used in the 1964 Olympics were here, and it contains the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which houses most of the administrative offices of the prefecture.
• As a matter of fact, Tokyo itself is something of an example, the name translating as "East Capital", in contrast to the country's previous capital, Kyoto ("Capital City"). Nothing happened to Kyoto (in fact, Kyoto fared better than Tokyo, having been spared the devastating fire bombing that Tokyo underwent in World War II), but the city of Edo had become the political center of Japan as early as the 17th century, and the Emperor moved his capital there in 1869, renaming the city Tokyo and making it the official capital.
• A rather literal example is with New Taipei City, which is not the same city as Taipei the capital of Taiwan and in fact both completely surrounds it and is more populous. It was formerly known as Taipei County (still a separate legal entity from Taipei) but got upgraded to the status of special municipality in 2010 and took the current name so that there weren't two cities called Taipei, one of which is the capital and one isn't. Its official name in Mandarin is Xinbei ("New North"), which just plays into this trope again ("Taipei", or "Taibei" if you go strictly by Hanyu Pinyin, translates as "Tai(wan's) North"^note Many of Taiwan's cities are similarly unimaginatively named - there's also Taichung (Taiwan Middle), Tainan (Taiwan South), and Taitung (Taiwan East)). (There had been discussions about just merging the two into one large municipality along with Keelung, but the City and the County were governed by opposing sides of the two main political rivals in Taiwanese politics so we get the previous.)
• Further along the vein of geographically distinguished cities, in mainland China, there is the city of Beijing ("Northern Capital") and the city of Nanjing ("Southern Capital"). ^note The Chinese name for the Japanese capital of Tokyo meanwhile is Dongjing ("Eastern Capital", a direct translation of the Japanese name since the Japanese language's Kanji characters are based on Chinese characters and often share meanings, if not pronunciation.)
• Novovoronezh is a "factory town" serving the eponimous nuclear power station 38 km from Voronezh proper in Southern Russia. Its population of ~40,000 largely consists of the station personnel and their families.
• Salisbury, also called New Sarum and its predecessor Old Sarum, later famous as one of England's worst “rotten boroughs”.
• Inversion in Guatemala. When the capital city was destroyed in 1776 (which by this time was practically a Running Gag), the government had to be relocated to a new valley and create a new city. Today the capital is known as Guatemala City, while the previous one is known as Antigua Guatemala (Old Guatemala).
• The city of Huambo in Angola was formely known as Nova Lisboa (New Lisbon), named after Lisboa (Lisbon), the capital of Portugal.
• According to medieval legend, London was originally named Trinovantum- that is, "New Troy"- by refugees from the Trojan War. Obviously this isn't something we know for certain, but there was a tribe from around Colchester that the Romans called the "Trinovantes".

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