Is Your Fantasy City Missing THIS Critical Infrastructure?

In this episode of Worldbuilding Blueprints Season 2, we'll discuss the services your city government should offer, from banking to sewers and everything in-between! 

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Chapters

• 0:00 City Services are a Group Project
• 3:33 Sanitation & Healthcare
• 16:35 Commercial Services

Transcript

We often think of city governance as a matter of grand thrones and sweeping laws. But the truth is much grittier. Before a king can conquer or a merchant can trade, someone has to decide where the sewage goes. Today, we're looking at city governance not as a quest for power, but as the world's most dangerous group project, where if one person fails, everyone pays the price. To see how this works in the extreme, we're heading to a city built on a swamp: medieval Venice. Welcome to Season 2, Episode 5 of Worldbuilding Blueprints.

Before we can talk about how a city is governed, we have to understand what a city governs. Of course, there are the basics of governance that we covered in Season 1, namely: protect society both internally and externally, adjudicate disputes, and manage collective resources. But a city is not necessarily a whole culture. For a city, the best approach is actually to start with the management of collective resources. This is because protecting society and adjudicating disputes can often be governed at a higher level than the city governance. A city that's part of, say, a kingdom will often be protected under the crown's authority, for example. Or a city that's part of an empire with a judicial framework has the laws of the empire enforced through that judicial framework and only contributes local resources. But collective resources are very often the domain of the city exclusively.

So, let's start by discussing collective resources and the services offered by a city before we talk about protection and disputes. A city's collective resources can cover almost anything, from water for irrigation in our early Bronze Age cities to green beltways in more modern, skyscraper-filled cities. But a more subtle resource is the service that a city offers as a collective resource by spending various forms of taxation income.

In other words, how does the city support its citizens? This can be quite telling in terms of the actual focus of the city's activities. A commerce-focused city likely spends money on ensuring the roads are good and there's some kind of security for traders. A city focused on political power will spend money ensuring the wealth of the leader is well protected and on display. A religious city will spend money on churches and the like. And so each city, or even different cores in the city—as we have discussed previously in this season—have different economic priorities.

But still, there are two services that all cities must offer, and the first is sanitation and healthcare. All cities, no matter their core or cores, need sanitation and healthcare of some kind. People have waste needs. Food goes rotten and needs to be discarded. People need to bathe and drink water. If someone dies, their body needs to be taken care of. And if your city is hit by a plague, you really need to take care of both the bodies and the sick.

I guess you could leave it all up to the private sector, but historically this has not worked out well. Let me put it bluntly. As I said in the opening segment, sanitation is a group project. Either everyone in the city has a passing grade, or no one does. Being rich won't isolate an elite if city garbage is never removed. Rats and other scavengers will multiply out of control. Sickness will breed. Death will stalk the city until there is no one healthy enough to work. For this reason, it's the first service that we discuss and possibly the most important, with perhaps the exception of internal security.

So, let's go to Venice and explore an example to demonstrate how sanitation and health have been handled. Due to its role as a trading hub, Venice was uniquely vulnerable to plague, leading to some of the world's first public health services. Venice had the world's first quarantine. It invented the Lazzaretto, a permanent plague hospital that was located on islands in the lagoon, away from the main city. When a ship arrived from a suspicious port, it was forced to wait for 40 days at the Lazzaretto Nuovo. And 40 days is quaranta, which is the root of the word "quarantine." It was a 40-day quarantine.

Venice also dealt with death in the street. The city instituted a permanent public health office, the Provveditori alla Sanità. They didn't just wait for people to die. They gathered data on suspicious deaths and coordinated street cleaning and burial protocols to prevent miasma, which they believed caused the disease. Of course, it didn't, but clearing the bodies would still have made a massive impact on containing the plague, as would investigating deaths and cleaning houses infected by the plague.

Venice also offered a degree of professional medical care. Unlike many medieval towns, Venice had a high density of pharmacies—over 100—and medical practitioners. The nearby University of Padua provided a steady stream of educated physicians. Even the poor had access to care through a "web of institutions" that viewed public health as a collective economic necessity. And this is simply because Venice needed labor, and labor needs healthy bodies.

Now, while this healthcare was impressive, especially for the time, it does pale in comparison to their water and waste management, which was spectacular. To keep a city of 150,000 people from becoming a swamp of its own making while being built on top of a swamp, the Venetians relied on a combination of ingenious engineering and the "breath" of the sea.

The first thing we need to talk about in Venice's waste management system is the Gatoli. Listen, I actually have no idea how well I'm pronouncing these Italian words. I don't speak any of the Romance languages at all, so I'm probably butchering the Italian names. If I am, I'm sorry, Italy. Anyway, the Gatoli: instead of the deep, circular sewers we see in so many fantasy cities, Venice used these rectangular masonry tunnels made out of clay, brick, and stone that ran just beneath the streets.

They were oversized tunnels and laid with very little inclination. This was intentional. They were not meant to pour sewage into the canal; they served as a primary decanting chamber for waste. Waste from the houses and rainwater from the streets flowed into the Gatoli. And because there was no steep slope, the coarser parts of the waste—the solid waste—would settle at the bottom of the tunnel, and the liquid part would slowly seep or flow out into the canals.

In order to maintain this system, there was a specific class of worker called the Cura Gatoli, which you know had to be an amazing job right there. But a man has to make a living; you know, bills don't pay themselves. Anyway, at dawn, these workers would trudge through the lanes and unblock drains and dredge the sediment from the bottom of the tunnels. So, that would get the waste into the actual canals.

But canals that fill up with waste are just as much of a hazard as waste in the street. So, why didn't Venice succumb to its own waste? The answer to that is the tides. Every six hours, the Adriatic Sea pushes fresh salt water into the lagoon and pulls the old water out. This natural cycle acts as a giant automatic flush, sweeping the liquid waste from the canals out into the open sea. And as a bonus, the brackish, salty water of the lagoon is a natural disinfectant. The high salinity helps neutralize many of the bacteria that would have caused rampant epidemics in a freshwater city.

But of course, the canals could get clogged up with waste and even with silt. So, to prevent this, the city engaged in constant dredging. They even had a dedicated office, the Savi ed Esecutori alle Acque, who managed the water health of the entire lagoon.

But the greatest threat to Venice wasn't just human waste. It was the infilling of the lagoon. If the lagoon filled with too much sediment, from either the waste coming from the canal or from silt being deposited by rivers, it would turn into a stagnant marsh. And a stagnant marsh is a breeding ground for malaria and plague. In one of the most massive engineering feats of the Renaissance, Venice actually moved rivers. They realized that the silt brought in by the Brenta and Sile rivers was filling the lagoon faster than the tides could clear it. They dug massive artificial channels to divert these rivers directly into the sea, bypassing the lagoon entirely.

Okay, so that was how they managed waste. But what about fresh water? While the city used the salt water to get rid of waste, it had to be terrified of that same water—that same saltiness—getting into the drinking supply. To solve this, the Venetians used cisterns as filters. Under almost every Venetian square, there are massive, sophisticated rainwater filtration systems. The Venetians dug 3 to 4 meters down, lined the hole with impermeable clay to keep out the salty groundwater, filled it with sand, and used it as a giant filter for rainwater. This kept the clean water system completely physically separated from the waste Gatoli system.

This is an incredible example of managing your waste, your water, and your healthcare. And all of that was without magic, which we can engage in, of course, as fantasy worldbuilders.

So, let's talk about questions to consider when building out your own sanitation and healthcare. First, think about your medical services. Is there any kind of availability of healthcare? This could range from mundane herbalists and apothecaries to high-magic clinics or temples dedicated to healing. Also consider: how do poor people gain access to healthcare, if at all? And if they don't, what happens during a health emergency? Do you just routinely lose half the population of your city?

Two: death and illness. How does the city deal with the dead? What happens if sick people have to isolate? Is there any way to contain or check if somebody is ill? Who covers the cost of funerals and quarantine and so on? Who feeds people while they are under quarantine? And don't forget your fantasy elements here. It might be possible to check somebody magically for disease or to place them in some kind of magical containment.

Three: sewage. How does the city manage waste? How do they remove garbage? How do they keep whatever sewage system they have clean?

Four: fresh water. How is fresh water supplied to the city? How is it kept free of sickness and waste? How is it supplied to homes and businesses? It's one thing to have fresh water in a system, but how do you deliver it to the people? And how is that governed? Is there a fine for throwing something in the system? Are there people whose job it is to ensure that the pipes are clean and so on? And don't forget that we did talk about this in earlier episodes as well, but this is specifically dedicated to the governance of these resources.

Before we talk about the commercial services that a city offers, give me a moment to tell you how you can get even more out of this podcast. Members of the Just In Time Worldbuilding YouTube channel get free access to the worksheets on the topics we discuss in these podcasts! From the "Build It in Straw" tier to the "Build It in Stone" tier. Not only do they get worksheets, but also a monthly members-only live stream and early access to all my videos. But if you don't want to commit to monthly memberships, you can also purchase these worksheets on my Ko-fi page. And if you're interested in the first season's worksheets, buy the book Worldbuilding Blueprints Volume 1, which is an epic book with color layout and worksheets that will guide you from zero to hero in worldbuilding. The digital format of the book is available on my website right now, and the physical will follow in February or March, depending on how fast the Kickstarter fulfillment completes. Links to all that in the description down below.

Now, let's move on to the second very big service a city has to offer: commercial services. Even for a city that isn't primarily focused on trade, some commercial services must be offered. There are inevitably goods that must be imported and exported. Food and other necessities need to be sold or otherwise acquired. Entertainment needs to be available, and that means entertainers need a place to perform and a way to gather their payment and so on. All of these require services from the city or from some private institution.

For example, inns need roads. Shops need a means of getting goods into the city. Money-changers need a place to operate and a generally accepted monetary system. Inventors need a way to communicate with other people, perhaps in other far-flung cities. Now, a city doesn't have to provide all these services, of course, but a city that does provide these services—or at least some of them—will frequently have a flourishing economy as private industry takes advantage of the services offered by the state. This gives them a leg up over industries in other cities that perhaps do not have good roads, places of business, safety in the streets, and so on.

So, let's plunge into Venice once more and see how it worked in that very trade-focused city. In Venice, commercial services were a matter of state survival. If your city is a trade hub, as Venice was, services must be standardized to build trust with outsiders. Venice's government well understood that and offered a great deal of support for commercial activities, four of which are worth highlighting.

First is banking as a public utility. Venice pioneered the first international financial center. By the 14th century, money merchants at the Rialto—the commercial heart—developed an intricate system of "monies of account." These weren't physical coins, but a stabilized accounting system that allowed merchants to trade long-term without worrying about fluctuating metallic values. While monies of account had been invented earlier, Venice really forged forward with this concept, especially under the reforms of Enrico Dandolo.

Just to briefly explain what a money of account is: this is an official definition of a denominator of value or basis of exchange which is used in keeping accounts and for which there may or may not be an equivalent coin or denomination of paper money. That is one hecking big mouthful of words! So, let's try it this way: money of account is a denomination of money that doesn't have a physical equivalent—or possibly doesn't have a physical equivalent. It exists theoretically, but it exists to make transactions easier.

For example, around 755, amid the Carolingian reforms, Pepin the Short introduced a new currency system which was eventually adjusted so that 12 deniers equaled one shilling and 20 shillings equaled one pound. But only the denier was an actual coin. The rest were money of account, used only to make accounting, bookkeeping, and transactions easier. And that is the system that Venice built on in their monies of account.

The other service that Venice offered was a public navy. Now, they did have small-scale trade, which was handled by the private navy using heavy, slow ships called cocche (or cogs) for bulk goods like timber and wine. However, for high-value goods like spices and silks, the state ran the Mude, a public navy of merchant galleys. These were state-owned, scheduled like a bus route, and protected by the city's warships. And this public navy also greatly benefited the mail.

Information was the city's most valuable currency. But in the Middle Ages, you couldn't exactly phone in your report to the city. But the public navy could carry not just high-value goods, but also letters, and this allowed information to flow in and out of Venice, making it the center not just for trading, but also for innovation and communication.

And then the last service that we need to talk about that the city offered was the Arsenal. This was the world's first industrial factory—not automated, but industrial. It was a massive, state-owned shipyard that could, at its height, produce one fully armed warship a day. That might be exaggerated; the number was only claimed later, well after the Arsenal was past its heyday, but regardless, it could produce a lot of ships. And the state literally built and launched these ships. This is where their public navy came from.

All of these services that were offered by Venice made them a commerce giant. Venice was the heart of the European economy for a very, very long time based on the services they offered. It was only much later, after they'd closed off their nobility to any new blood and they'd basically gone to a fully inherited form of nobility, that the city started declining.

So, questions for you to consider when defining your city's commercial services:

One: Retail and hospitality. Identify the presence of permanent shops, bustling inns, traveling merchants, and so on. How are their locations governed? How does the city provide space for this kind of commercial activity?

Two: Your financial infrastructure. If your world uses different currencies—and it certainly should use different currencies—consider if the city provides money-changing services or formal banking institutions. Perhaps these institutions are privately owned. In that case, how does the city provide a space for them to operate and a regulatory framework for their services?

Three: Logistics and communication. Think about how information and goods travel into your city, through your city, and out of your city. Is there a postal service, a network of messenger birds, or perhaps magical talking-stones for long-distance communication? How does the city move goods in a mundane way? How does it maintain the streets? How does it maintain street lighting? Does it have any ships? Does it have canals or a harbor that it maintains?

Four: Market dynamics. Does the city rely on a central market square, scattered neighborhood stalls, or specialized districts? Are there markets daily, or organized around specific festivals and harvest cycles? How does the city govern these markets? And remember to refer back to the economics of your city when you're defining the governance.

And then lastly, think about the fantasy elements of your city. In a high-magic setting, consider if the city utilizes teleportation networks or portals. Such infrastructure might, of course, be very expensive and reserved for the elite, potentially breeding social resentment. Also consider if the city provides any other aspect of magic or fantasy to practitioners. For example, a properly registered mage might be allowed to access some amount of the city's magical components.

Also, think if certain kinds of spells are forbidden in the city. For example, maybe you are not allowed to cast Leomund's Tiny Hut in the city because doing so would undercut the value of inns, and the inns have put in place rules and regulations against that. Or alternatively, the city casts heaps of Leomund's Tiny Huts and they're available to anybody who doesn't have accommodation. So, there is never any homelessness in the city because they can always just go claim a Tiny Hut and that provides them with at least a meal and a sleeping place—and so your city is perhaps somewhat utopic.

All of these elements are worth considering in the commercial governance and services of your city. As you head back to your own maps and your world-bibles, remember that a city's budget is its true biography. If your city spends its gold on golden statues while the streets smell of rot, you're not just building a setting. You're building a revolution waiting to happen. Whether it's a portal network for the elite or a clay Gatoli for the masses, the services a city provides tell your audience exactly what that city values.

So ask yourself: in your city, who is the state actually serving, and what services do they provide?

Next time on Worldbuilding Blueprints, we will be discussing city security. So, make sure you subscribe for that episode. And a huge thank you to my channel members who make this possible, especially to the members of the Build It in Stone level: ep_ic, Jeff Hicks, Laurabones 79, A. Wellyard, NecromancerJm, Neil Buckley, Katie KofeMug, and Tony LaManna, as well as the members of the Build It in Wood tier: husoyo, fallowrpg, Patricio, Ignacio Rascovan, Moxain, Jackmeowmeow Meow, Joaquin Moreira, Nicholas Ammann, BearNecessities, Carrie Noyes, Aya Shameimaru, and Tiffiny Felix. Without your support, this podcast wouldn't be possible.

I will see you soon for another episode of Worldbuilding Blueprints. Remember: build what you need, when you need it.