Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from 
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - City Locations
Cities often exist in an unchanged location for centuries or millennia. One of the oldest cities is Jericho; despite brief periods of abandonment and intermittent episodes of destruction (thanks, Joshua !), it's lasted for at least 11,000 years, and is still there today. Even Carthage, so famously destroyed by the Romans, was actually re-founded by them shortly after and remained one of the most important cities in the Mediterranean until it was absorbed into Tunis, a city which had most of the same advantages as coastlines moved.
Whether it's planned or evolves, a city's location will have to provide a lot of key things, which will enable it to grow to be more than just another town. Although maybe not the reason for it's initial existence, it needs the geography to support it's population; fresh water - rivers or springs, easy access to sufficient food - by trade or an agricultural hinterland, and space for it's population. It may also benefit from a natural river or sea harbour, or a geography that helps with defence (Jerusalem is a good example of this).
But what is it that causes a town to become a city ? I suggest the key factor is communications. A location that acts as a communications hub means trade, which supports enough jobs (either in trading or in manufacture) for a growing population. It can also make it a hub for administrative control; a city chosen as the capital for a country or empire because the ruler can run his domain from it will naturally be attractive as a centre of influence, finance and patronage.
Tell me about a city in your location ! Why is it there ? How long has it been there ? Does it have a mythological origin story ? What are the ups and downs of it's history ? Is it the splendid capital of an empire, or a dusty backwater living on the memory of past glory ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.