Talk:Momuva'e

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So what is the purpose of this town?

Cities are not natural; even in civilised nations, they are the exception. Some civilisations, such as medieval Russia, almost entirely lacked them. Conditions are always worse in cities - so people need very strong reasons to live in them.

Leaving aside ritual centres, we can probably see three types of city:

- Early Classical cities - the inhabitants are basically the local farmers; the city is a marketplace for the surrounding area, and a defensive point. Talk of this being a small island makes this seem odd. Little or no industry

- Self-sufficient cities (medieval period) - defensive fortifications for protection against brigands. Money from trading networks creates a ruling elite; the service industry provides jobs for the rest. With no central government, however, this isn't much of a defensive fortification, and there's no mention of it being a prosperous port. Note also that these cities typically showed dramatic social upheaval and power struggles

- State cities (modern, late Classical) - city's power crushed by the State. Only with state organisation can real 'cities', with tens and even hundreds of thousands of people start to appear. What we tend to forget is that these cities are essentially administrative centres, and that is how they were able to support so many people. the money comes from the State. Take, for example, Early Modern London, one of the greatest trading centres in the world at the time. Nonetheless, only 1 in 9 people survived on the proceeds of trade - most were ultimately fed by the Crown. In Paris at the same time, 20 million livres were generated from trade, and 140 million from the government. In Berlin, 1 in 3 were officially state employees or their dependents - the remaining 2 in 3 being the service sector that catered for them.


Cities are created and survive because of: - the ability to defend in an organised way - maintainance of peace by public authorities - organised and efficient trade links - major sources of jobs - usually from benefactors, sometimes from natural resources (viz mines)

None of this seems possible without a government! That's why (almost?) all real-world cities have had a government.


Basically, I have three questions: a) Why does this city exist? b) How has this city managed to continue existing without the administration that sustains most (all?) cities c) Why, given the continued existence of the city, hasn't anyone installed an administration? Cartels, guilds, priesthoods, nobles, even just large clan-like families - it is in everyone's interest to have order, why has nobody been able to accomplish it?


[It would also be helpful to have a sense of the population size. Also, put the date! It's going to get confusing as the encyclopedia gets bigger to have lots of articles from different time periods without mention of date]


I'm not trying to be negative, and sorry if I'm being too aggressive. It's possible that I'm importing unrealistic expectations from my own work - I've noticed I tend toward a far more naturalistic approach than most, and less toward 'fantasy' proper.

No, you make good points and raise good questions. It's true that I'm willing to allow a little hand-waving if that's the only way to get things to work, but realism is definitely preferable. Let try to me answer your questions from a historical perspective. I'll just elaborate and build on my previous thoughts, here. If you think they need work I'm happy to listen to your advice on it. That said, I'm not convinced that high-level administration is entirely as necessary for a city's continuance as you say - one of the ideas I wanted to explore here was the "thousand villages in one place" concept. It probably wouldn't last forever, but the main question on my mind is: if a village council is good enough for a thousand people, why can't a hundred villages councils be good enough for hundred thousand people? What functions would an overall administration serve that are necessary for a city and cannot be served by lots of smaller administrations? The only one I can think of is overall coordination between the small governments - but exactly why would that be truly vital to the continuance of a city? (It may well be vital for the prosperity of a city, but prosperity is obviously not a requirement for a city's continuation, and Momuva'e is meant to be rather dysfunctional.)
But, I did not wish to go to extremes with the idea, here - I wanted something that could fit well into the social and historical context. So here is my historical explanation of how Momuva'e got to be how it is, and I am aware it could stand to be improved:
I don't know why the Ngauro founded the city. But once it was there, the Ndak took it over and made it one of their centers of power, for reasons that may be unrecorded (if we can't come up with something better). They then built a canal from the Aiwa to the inlet on which the city is located, so once that was in place, it was in an excellent location for trade and, after the Empire began declining, allowed central Kasadgad (which at the time was administered from this city) to keep a chokehold on river-sea traffic despite losing its military control over many of the provinces. So there's your economics+government, for Ndak times. That continued for almost a millennium, but when the canal finally choked up, Ndak power and the city of Momuva'e withered sharply. So far so good?
Next, during the Kascan dark ages that went largely unrecorded, I'm figuring the city continued to exist mainly out of inertia; it takes time for the decline of a city to become final, potentially centuries - during which time the city was still administered. And it was still one of the choicer bits of ground in the delta and continued to have a good harbor and good farmland around it, and there were still people around, so what would be the point of vacating? It's not like there was anything better going on anywhere else, as far as the people knew. And the existence of shops and services (poor but better than anywhere else nearby) provides all by itself a reason for people to stick around and thus continue providing those services, etc. But even so the population was likely reduced to below 10,000 in the city proper. This would have continued up to the Kascan Revival period, from around ten to eight centuries ago. This era saw an economic upswing in Kasca and the rise of local nobility to much greater power; existing centers of population rose to become true city-states, competing with each other for greater regional dominance all while their populations increased. Momuva'e was no exception and its ruling family became a local monarchy that held onto power until only three or four hundred years ago. So here too, the city was not at lacking for administration and continued to be sizeable - indeed, precisely because it kept a reasonably strong government for longer than many of the other city-states did (except its rival Pawe which was doing better still).
Following was a period that has not yet been worked out well in the history. I can't say what order events occurred because it hasn't been decided yet and what I wanted appears to be incompatible with what's now the official history of Huyfarah. I haven't yet taken the time to work out alternative paths, which I really need to do sometime. But in any case, there was a lot of squabbling for control of Momuva'e and resulting chaos - its royal family lost power at some point, other nobles tried to take it (and some succeeded for a generation or two), and Huyfarah and Pawe both conquered the city at least once each. The frequent changes of government between parties more interested in exploitation than civil order and the entirely ungoverned periods between them, combined with the "every man for himself" mindset that arose from poor economic conditions in both the city and the countryside, led to a population unaccustomed to strong social organization and many individuals being unwilling to sacrifice much for any greater good. Over the last 50-100 years the administrative needs that are truly inescapable have been taken up by neighborhood councils, which arose naturally out of simple need and are gradually growing in power, but the city has gained a reputation among foreign powers for being undesireable and ungovernable, so they have been making fewer attempts to take it. Meanwhile thugs and warlord-ism rear their heads from time to time, but limits on how far it can go are imposed by two things: 1) weapons worse than kitchen knives can be hard to come by (there is no local source of metal, so even metal farming tools are valuable) and 2) most people here are overwhelmingly more accustomed to individualism than loyalty.


This whole situation is obviously unstable. The two likeliest future paths I see for Momuva'e would be: the council system growing in strength until it evolves into (or otherwise brings about) a true city government; or the eventual death of the city. That or Huyfarah doing something drastic.
Still to be decided and addressed: the role of Tolyism, the cult-like religion that has taken root in Momuva'e. I'm not sure yet what I want to do with that. It could explain a lot, maybe... or it could be inconsistent with the rest of the city's culture. I just don't know yet.


Population: I'm guessing somewhere between 100k and 250k; date: 170 YP. The article is nowhere near done and I'll add both pieces of info with the next major edit. Radius 23:17, 27 November 2008 (UTC)


Just a short comment: I think Radius' reasoning here sounds quite feasible, except that the population figure seems way too high for a rather dysfunctional city. As a comparison: Amsterdam had around 150k inhabitants around 1650, in the middle of the Dutch Golden Age. It was one of the ten (possibly five) largest cities in Europe at the time, and the richest one at that. [1]. So for Momuva'e in 170 YP I'd expect no more than 50K, which would still be rather large. -- Cedh 08:05, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Even 50k is huge. Yes, it would be reasonable for a Roman provincial capital, I suppose. But they were sustained by the income from the Roman state - bureaucrats, soldiers, flunkies. Medieval towns, however, which might be a better analogue (being independent), were generally smaller - 50k would put it around the size of Paris. Venice was around twice that size.

If we say 250k, we're talking about something on a par with classical Alexandria, Pataliputra, or Chang'an back when it was capital of China, albeit a little bit smaller. Let's remember that the absolute maximum any city has attained is, for sake of argument 1m [up until the industrial revolution and modern times]. So this city would be a quarter of the maximum size of a city.

50k is a lot more likely, but even that is on the large side - it would make the city one of the major powers in a medieval world.

A third option is a situation like ancient Greece. Here, larger populations were attained, into the hundreds of thousands for the greatest cities. But this was attained by each city being the capital of a large area, most of the population of which lived in the city and migrated out to work. This required elaborate political and military structures. Such cities were also possible only due to strong colonial trading networks.

I think your idea of 'inertia' is misguided. Take, for example, Rome. From about 0 to about 250 AD at least, we can say on the basis of population density and the imperial dole list that there were at least 500k, probably several 100k more, and maybe even 1m.

Even after the breakdown of centralised Roman authority and the shift of the main capital to Constantinople, Rome still probably had at least 250k as one of the greatest cities in the world.

By 500AD, however, the population of Rome was around 80k - and still one of the largest cities outside Byzantium. People don't stick around out of inertia. They need food. Living in cities is horrible; people will avoid it if they can. That either means a really good reason to live in the city (lots of jobs from the rich; a dole handed out) or protection (military) from the reasons (brigands, invading armies) not to live in the country.

You can have 'cities' that are just a conjunction of villages. Witness Indonesia. But these 'cities' are just a lot of villages near each other - they are not continuous. When you stick villages together (and incidentally the population wouldn't be very high if you did, since population density in villages is very low compared to towns and cities), you don't just have the same number of villages. You have an exponential crisis of land (with people in the middle having to commute out), sanitation (diseases rise exponentially with population), infrastructure (roads will decay exponentially with population), violence (crime will increase maybe not exponentially but certainly massively with population) and so on. You need a centralised authority to get rid of this. Witness the crisis in Naples at the moment, where the central authority is stagnant. As a result, entire streets are becoming engulfed in rubbish, because there is no way to dispose of it. Each neighbourhood can't do it - they would only be pushing it into their neighbours, and having their neighbours push it back. And the neighbourhoods certainly couldn't perform the chief purpose of a city: defence.

Generally, centralised authority is synonymous with urban population. The bigger the authority, the bigger the population.

I don't think it's realistic that authority would disappear from the city, which is why it hasn't happened in real life. When there is a power vacuum, somebody fills it - whether that be the mafia, the wool guild or the largest family around.

I do think that you could avoid EXPLICIT authority structures by making it a cult city. If the cult religion has enough authority, and its practitioners enough respect, they could probably form a de facto authority.

Alright, although I am replying very late, let me state what I've decided in light of the foregoing material.
  • The population estimate was clearly too high, you're quite correct. I'm going to call it 60k. That would be enough to make it one of the world's major powers if it had a strong central authority, yes indeed, but since it doesn't the city is more like a sinkhole than a power. Think Ankh-Morpork here.
  • Both A-M and Momuva'e do require a little hand-waving, but I've decided to go for it anyway, because I don't see how to reconcile the character of the city as I've imagined it with strictly precedent-based realism; what I've got here is definitely a stretch. But I think the stretch is only unlikely, not impossible. We pull stunts like this in sound changes periodically, so why not with cities too.
  • As for "Even after the breakdown of centralised Roman authority and the shift of the main capital to Constantinople, Rome still probably had at least 250k as one of the greatest cities in the world.", that is plenty good enough precedent for my purposes. As I've said, the breakdown of central authority is relatively recent. The city would not continue on indefinitely out of inertia, but a century is just not long enough for the place to wholly dry up and blow away. The 60k is down from a height of 100k a couple centuries back.
  • And for "People don't stick around out of inertia." and "Living in cities is horrible; people will avoid it if they can.", I will respectfully disagree. I just don't buy it. I think the overwhelming evidence of human history is that the forces of attraction and repulsion to/from cities are, generally, pretty closely balanced, and that people try to avoid relocating in either direction if they can possibly help it. The path of least resistance is usually to stay where you are, unless there is no food.
  • And there is rarely any great shortage of food here. I will change the article to say that enough grain could be grown within a radius equivalent to two days' travel to keep far more people fed than actually live on the island, as it helps the justification and seems reasonable enough. The first limiting factor is meat, and since there are almost no livestock animals on the island, this comes in the form of fish. The fishing industry both sustains the city and is sustained by it (in that a network of workers are needed to build, maintain, and man the boats), so that's a source of inertia too. The second limiting factor is the agricultural perishables - vegetables and fruit.
  • Defense and jobs are good attractors certainly, but in their absence, the presence of other people remains an attractor itself. Certainly not a detractor. More people means better availability of all kinds of goods and services, even without a central authority. People go where jobs are only because jobs -> food/goods; ultimately, people go where the food and goods are. And we've still got both in Momuva'e.
  • With conditions in the city so disorganized, you might even with all the above expect a lot of people to leave. Some have, but another thing unusual to the Momuva'e situation is that there's hardly anywhere else to go. There's the south, of course - Påwe - but it takes more effort to move that far, and over water, than it does to stay put. On average. That too causes inertia.
  • Rubbish in the streets is a really bad thing when the streets are paved, it just sits there and builds up. But in Momuva'e, it equates to landfill, and thus has some positive value to balance the vermin and other negatives. It doesn't need a central authority to deal with this, the people just dump their junk in low spots where water collects without being asked (though councils sometimes organize people to do a more complete job of it), and stuff left in the street gets trampled into the mud soon enough, which helps keep the streets firm enough to walk on.
  • Power vacuums certainly arise in real cities, in exceptional circumstances (and the circumstances here are most definitely meant to be exceptional!) Recent example: Mogadishu. The sun-cult expanding into the vacuum is what I now plan for the post-history of Momuva'e, it just hasn't happened quite yet.
Lastly, Sal, it helps keeps comments separated if you sign them, like so: Radius 11:42, 14 February 2009 (UTC) Four tildes in a row, with a space on either side, is how you sign. Another helpful thing in comment formatting is indentation, which on mediawiki is accomplished by inserting colons before the start of each paragraph - the number of colons is the degree of indentation.
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