San Antonio, Texas during Christmas.
In fictional settings authors often decide to make great cities for their work. In "classic" sci-fi the city served as a common trope to be used to represent whatever society that existed. They, when animated, drawn or otherwise shown a Design Student's Orgasm usually occurs. This comes in two flavors and is often the capital of The Federation, The Alliance, The Empire, or The Republic. Is usually a City of Adventure. If part of its coolness comes from bright lights, it may be a Neon City.
Super-Trope to City Planet (the city is awesome because it takes over an entire planet/plane).
Shiny and Awesome
- Dresediel Lex from Two Serpents Rise. Floating skyscrapers, giant black-glass pyramids for office buildings, zombie street cleaners, and goddesses hovering over every poker game.
- Vampire New York as seen in Day Breakers. While it's the exact opposite of "shiny", the sheer infrastructure of adapting the biggest city in the world to Vampires gets it put in this category. Besides, Dark is shiny for vampires.
- Themyscira of Wonder Woman. Just take a look.
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- Star Wars: Coruscant is a city that covers the entire planet. It's so large they needed an entire subsidiary guide just to explain how it worked.
- The titular MegaTokyo.
- New Domino City from Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's.
- Metru Nui from BIONICLE.
- Any city level from Ratchet & Clank. You'd think those guys were architects.
- Metropolis from Superman.
- Dentech City from Mega Man Battle Network. The fact that Everything Is Online compounds this. And its virtual counterpart Navi City which is online.
- Inkopolis from Splatoon.
- Prelude to Foundation: Hari Seldon explores multiple areas of the planet-wide city Trantor, capital of the Galactic Empire, which is almost entirely enclosed and continues many kilometers underground.
- The city of Zootopia with its multifaceted districts enabled by the installation of artificial climate zones.
- The Citadel from Mass Effect. It's a giant space station. Just check out its page. It is awesome. Of course it was made by crazy Robo-Cthulhu death farmers. But that's beside the point.
- Although it's getting beat up on at the time by Reapers, future Vancouver looks pretty impressive, as does the asari city on Thessia. Illium, which you get an aerial car chase through in Lair of the Shadowbroker is similarly scenery-porn-tastic.
- Mitakihara City from Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
- Sternbild City, a three-leveled city decorated with several Statue-of-Liberty-sized monuments from Tiger & Bunny is also a nice example.
- Atlantis from Stargate Atlantis. Crystal Spires on hyperdrives.
- Our city is a submersible and can fly between galaxies. What does yours do?
- In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- Canterlot, the capital city impossibly perched on a steep mountain.
- Cloudsdale, a hovering (and possibly mobile) city made almost entirely from clouds and rainbows and featuring a weather factory.
- The Crystal Empire, whose crystal street layout is actually an enormous accumulator array to collect love and camaraderie from the city's inhabitants and feed it into the city's central spire to be weaponized against evildoers.
- Minbari cities such as Yedor and Tuzanor from Babylon 5. In fact, the planet is rich in ginormous crystals, so much so that they carve entire cities out of these crystals. Just take a look.◊
- Zaofu in The Legend of Korra, a city made entirely of metal. The city is made to look like a congregation of lotus flowers, that stay open in the day and are closed at night.
- Most cities in Rocket Age could count, although most of the Martian cities are in various states of decline, but New York takes the cake. It's in many ways the same as our universe's New York in 1938, only with even more money thrown into it and enough sky traffic to make it feel like Coruscant.
- Starbase Yorktown in Star Trek Beyond is like a Domed City but with the dome being a perfect sphere, as it is in space. It is also beyond gigantic. Artificial Gravity will make the definition of "down" different for you than for the street twisting above you.
- In the future depicted by The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign, not-Disney has made a habit out of buying defunct cities and converting them into amusement parks. The result is still clearly a city- but the immaculate, ideal version of a city, complete with an army of janitors and construction workers who come out at night to keep its flawless image maintained. Citizens remark that it's like living in a fairytale.
- In Exalted: Lands of Creation, which details the actual setting's Time of Myths, many Exalted channel their wealth and power into building their own personal utopias. Examples include Samiaren, the treetop city built out of amber, and Illio Stara, the size-shifting city built into one little bonsai. Some Exalted's ideas of 'utopia' are significantly creepier (Dari, for one), but even they must carefully conceal such horror with cleanliness and public amenities.
- In Deltora Quest, Tora is the magically shielded, self-sustaining city left behind from when And Man Grew Proud. It is all carved of seamless marble, except the plinth that symbolized their vow of loyalty towards Del's kings, and filled with tapestries and fresh fruit that the protagonists (who come from the more medieval lands outside) find extremely welcome.
Dark and Gritty
- Gotham City from Batman, epically post-earthquake when the city looks like a mash up of the 1930s, Gothic London and a Modern city.
- Ankh-Morpork from Discworld, though most of its dark has turned into grime (and might occasionally become part of something served in a bun).
- The eponymous Dark City (set only at night) is a Scenery Porn-tastic, German Expressionism-inspired, Always Night City in a Bottle.
- The City from the Thief series.
- New Krobuzon from China Miéville's Bas Lag trilogy.
- The City of Yharnam from Bloodborne won't win any prizes for urban planning, but its dark gothic structures, intricate streets and tall imposing spires make it a true sight to behold.
Uncategorized
- Examples of both the above appear in The Reckoners. Newcago (the former city of Chicago) is dark and gritty, under a perpetually black sky, the entire city transmuted to steel with many living in tunnels beneath. Babilar (once New York) by contrast, is a bright and colorful party city where the waters rise up so high, the people live on the roofs and upper stories of skyscrapers. Ildithia (Atlanta) is a city of salt that grows out of the ground on one side, collapses on the other, cycling through once a week and so crawling across the landscape.
- The titular Metropolis. It borrows from H. G. Wells The Time Machine and has a shiny Art Deco city on top and a gritty worker's city under the earth.
- Minas Tirith.
- Asgard.
- And the major cities of World of Warcraft: Silver Moon, Undercity, the Exodar, Dalaran and Shattrah.
- Warhammer 40,000 has quite a lot. Eldar cities and the Dark Eldar capital of Commorgah are both very impressive (the former are Crystal Spires and Togas style cites housed inside Craftworlds, spacecrafts the size of small moons, the latter is a Dark Towers and Spikes style city located inside the Webway). Humans have numerous heavily populated worlds with impressive looking cities, but the grand price goes to Holy Terra, seat of the Imperium. The Imperial Palace alone covers most of what used to be Eurasia.
- New Mombasa from Halo, particularly in Halo 3: ODST, where it feels legitimately futuristic.
- The Human City from The Matrix. It's a virtual merger of several real-world cities.
- The city in Blade Runner is certainly Dark and Gritty, as depicted in fanart.
- Dinotopia's Waterfall City.
- Drowtales: Chel'el'sussoloth, literally means "City of light in the darkness". For Lonely Rich Kid Ariel, it's a fantasy world beyond her wildest dreams, to Cloudcuckoolander Lirel, it's a Wretched Hive that also has Crystal Spires and Togas... perfect for having A Hell of a Time.
- Sharn from Eberron. Literal mile-high towers, floating islands, and flying taxis, starting at a Wretched Hive down in the undercity and progressing to lavish estates built on magically solidified clouds up at the top.
- In Futurama, New New York◊ actually finds itself suffering from a garbage shortage, while they dump their radioactive sewage directly into Old New York◊ and the sewers below, the later of which now look like this◊ because of a civilisation of mutants (who are required to live there by law).
- In James and the Giant Peach, James tends to think of New York City this way.
- In RoboCop, OCP portrays Delta City as Shiny and Awesome, but, like every other product OCP makes...
- Star Trek's Stratos City: Crystal Spires and Togas for everyone! (Except Troglodytes.)
- Starfleet's own capital, San Francisco (the actual capital city of the Federation is Paris, but San Francisco was seen quite a bit more, and at times played host to non-Starfleet governmental functions).
- Starfleet's own capital, San Francisco
- Star Wars:
- Aldera◊
- Cloud City, which was allegedly inspired by Stratos City.
- "Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."
- Theed, which could have been inspired by Waterfall City.
- Level 1313, the darker side of Coruscant, probably even worse than Mos Eisley.
- Aldera
- Stargate: The Ancients, Great City Ships (notably Atlantis).
- Real Life, more or less:
- Dubai.
- New York City.◊
- Hong Kong.◊
- Tokyo Old, meet new.
- Seoul. Just whoa.
- San Antonio, Texas (the page image).
- Modern/Greater Lisbon, Portugal. Parque◊ das◊ Nações,◊ Amoreira,◊ Praça Marquês de Pombal◊. (Not to be confused with old,◊ Royal◊ Lisbon.◊)
- Dubai.
- "Ubiquitos" (mostly known as 'The City') from Mirror's Edge. See also Ascetic Aesthetic and Scenery Porn.
- Ravnica, a true megalopolis in that the entire world is a city.
