Sprawls


 * Cerillis
 * Sunridge
 * Whitehill

Low-rent zones with a mix of commercial installations, multi-family dwellings and squatters, Sprawls are built during real-estate booms, and often connect older suburbs and transportation zones with more built-up areas.

Second most dismal would be the light grey areas: Sprawls. These look like the remains of dense middle-class suburbs which have fallen into disrepair. Graffiti, strip malls, tiny houses packed into identical tracts, cramped apartment complexes covered with advertisements and inhabited by people of the lowest class that's still in the system: lots of struggling, poverty-stricken, handicapped, drug-addicted, criminals, or simply people who don't like working. The corporate class basically would consider them "losers". But many of them have regular (low-paying) gigs, and they do have access to the cloud (if they can afford it).

The vast majority of the urbanized folk live in great, choking, crowded and polluted metropolises which resemble all the worst aspects of the modern big city (multiplied by a population growth rate of about 200%). Over the years, as the population grew, the suburbs moved outward (away from the crime and pestilence of the urbanized areas) and the industrial zone expanded behind them, leaving the less affluent members of society in the center of the old “downtown” districts. The more wealthy, important and fortunate people managed to secure sites for their families in the Corporate Suburbs, or on one of the orbital stations, while the refuse of their past indulgences gathered in the Inner Cities, also known as “Combat Zones”.

These areas are unbelievably dirty and congested, and their inhabitants are generally unskilled, diseased, drug-addicted, insane or simply luckless. In several areas of the world, where metropolization has accelerated beyond the ability of city planners to accommodate it, the neighboring cities have grown into one another, creating the truly huge urban tracts known as “Sprawls”. These areas often stretch for hundreds of miles, all of it without a single undeveloped field.

In the dingy streets of the Inner Cities and Sprawls, just about anything can be found for a price. The black markets have their homes here, as do the drug and illegal tech smugglers, not to mention prostitutes of all kinds. The Combat Zones are the homes of the homeless and the hopeless; and only those who pull in a really crack score can ever hope to make it out alive.

Corporate employees and security rarely travel into these parts, unless they need to pick up some black market tech item or solicit inside information from a worldly informer. The nasty job of patrolling these streets is left in the hands of the regional police department (if there is one to speak of), handled by self-appointed vigilante groups, or performed by specialized security teams hired by the government. These deputized officers are often no more than roguish mercenaries and bullies with licenses to cause pain, but they do their part in maintaining some semblance of control on the streets. Encounters in these areas could include just about any unsavory character you can imagine; from cops to criminals, conspirators to crazies. One thing that can be said in the Combat Zones’ favor: life in these parts is never dull.

Keywords: older buildings, high crowding, much illegal construction, shared walls, graffiti, gangs, police presence