Two or more distinct populations all live in the same place, and all are aware of each other. However, there's something about the setting that keeps them distinct. Either they're time-shifted from each other, or they're prevented from interacting by some kind of Applied Phlebotinum, or something similar. As a result, they have different governments, possibly different cultures, and they definitely think of themselves as distinct from each other.
Depending on the details of how this is implemented, it can be used as an allegory for Real Life ethnic or class division.
Compare the Masquerade, which often operates similarly except that one society is unaware of the other's existence. Compare also Wainscot Society and Mouse World. Compare Layered Metropolis as well, which is a literal take on a layered civilization with multiple stacks of floors and/or districts. May involve Urban Segregation if the wealth, class, ethnic, or society gap between civilians is large.
See also Ethnicity Monarch.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Film — Live-Action
- Star Wars: On the planet Naboo, the Gungans and the Naboo live in separate but linked societies. In The Phantom Menace Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn tries to enlist the help of the Gungans as the Trade Federation's takeover of the Naboo would affect the Gungans eventually. Jar-Jar and Queen Amidala get their help for the final battle.
Literature
- The City & the City by China Miéville is about two cities that exist in the same place, whose inhabitants have trained themselves to "unsee" whichever city they're not currently in. The division is further enforced by a secret police called Breach, which disappears anyone who crosses between cities by unsanctioned means, a crime considered worse than murder.
- Darkborn: A curse has caused the world's population to be split into the Darkborn (who are burned by light) and the Lightborn (who die in the dark). There's no actual taboo against interaction, but the practical difficulties mean they have essentially separate societies and governments.
- Dayworld: Overpopulation has caused the Earth's population to be split into seven groups, each of which lives for one day of the week and spends the other six in stasis.
- Delusion World: The human worlds are in danger of being overrun by telepathic aliens, but there's one human colony world that the aliens won't touch. When the Earth agent arrives, he finds two societies that exist in the same city but can't see each other, although both can see him. It turns out to be an advanced form of selective obliviousness that the philosophically opposed people have learned to use to avoid having to deal with each other. At the end, we learn it is this that keeps the telepathic aliens away — the humans' power of disbelief is so strong, it causes the aliens actual pain and can outright kill them!
- Trinity Blood: There's a society that straddles this and the Masquerade: what seems to be a society of Muggles on the surface is actually knowingly preserving the Masquerade, and there is a second city just below the ground. The city above ground is Londinium, Albion; the city below is home to Friendly Neighborhood Vampires essentially being used as forced labor in return for protection.
- Twilight Robbery by Frances Hardinge has the city of Toll, split into the day city and the night city, with citizens allocated to each one depending on how auspicious their name is.
- Wave Without A Shore by C. J. Cherryh is set in a city where the upper class has got so good at ignoring the underclass that they literally don't see them anymore.
Live-Action TV
- The Outer Limits (1995): In "Stasis", a society plagued by overpopulation is split into three groups: Alphas, Betas, and Elites. The Alphas and Betas are workers who alternate with their counterparts in stasis, and the small group of Elites are an administrative elite.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy VII: The Layered Metropolis of Midgar has the eight slum districts, which used to be named towns, and the plate, which is elevated above them and blocks most of the sunlight from the slums. The most important buildings and people live on the plate.
- Super Paper Mario: The Hub Levels Flipside and Flopside are identical mirror copies of each other, right down to having Mirror Character NPCs, only being separated by dimensions and having reverse layouts. With the exception of Merlon, Nolrem, and a select few of NPCs (like the one that builds a shortcut pipe between the cities), most of them are not aware of each other's existence.
- Xenogears has The Sacred Empire of Solaris and the land dwellers. Extreme Urban Segregation applies: most if not all Solaris citizens view the land dwellers as chattel animals only fit for food, fuel, experiments, and labor, and the very existence of Solaris is concealed from the land by a set of interdimensional gates, so the only interaction between them are extractive activities, essentially mining the land and the land dwellers.
- Among the land dwellers, there's the split between humans and demihumans, and between both and the Chu tribe.
- In a more meta sense, due to repeated apocalyptic collapses and due to reincarnation and effective immortality existing in the setting(from the forced crash landing on the planet itself to the Zeboim nuclear war to the Solaris-Shevat War and the Day of Collapse 600 years before the game's present time) all of life on the planet is recursively overlaid over itself.
Web Original
- SCP Foundation has SCP-3838
, a series of eight tribes in Turkmenistan that occupy the same area of land, but over different time periods. They can time travel to visit other time periods, and treat the time periods they inhabit like territory that can be inhabited, migrated to and from, invaded, or conquered.
Western Animation
- Buzz Lightyear of Star Command has the deuteragonist Mira Nova hail from a world called Tangea. She's a princess among her people, who can move through solid objects with ease, among other powers. Also living on Tangea are the Grounders, who have psychokinetic powers. The two races are segregated and are antagonistic to each other. Moreover, being in close proximity means the powers of both are negated.
- Futurama: Beneath the city of New New York is a society of Mutants who have built their own city out of the flushed waste from the surface. The mutants are forbidden from coming to the surface on the grounds of being "Inferior genetic scum".
Real Life
- Caste societies can be like this. Also, moieties and various other forms of kinship require certain members of society to treat other members of society as if they don't exist.
- In The Netherlands, during Pillarisation, each community - Catholic, Liberal Protestants, Conservative Protestants, Liberals, and Socialists - had its own institutions, from the cradle to the grave: political parties, schools, trade unions, and even sport teams were separated.
- The South African Apartheid system aimed to do this, with each racial community being given its own homelands. Of course, it ended in naked White supremacy.
- The Ottoman Empire had separate laws and institutions depending on which millet (religion) you belonged to.
