# How many buildings in a medieval city?



## the Jester (Apr 24, 2014)

Hey folks- I'm working on mapping a city for my upcoming urban game, and I'm unable to find any real indication of what the population density per building is like. In a typical very large city in medieval times, what was the average population per building? How many of a city's buildings were housing as compared to businesses or other non-homes?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!


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## Lwaxy (Apr 24, 2014)

It really depends on your world. The poorer the country/region, the denser the population. In slum ares and other poor housings, you can very well expect a family of 12 to live in one room, with the houses 2 or maybe 3 stories high. The richer the area, the less people live in a room and house, with the rich housing their servants. 

Maybe this will help, too. 

http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm


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## diaglo (Apr 24, 2014)

and how old is the city?
often things like sewer, water, markets, and walls could have been built by earlier empires. heck they could be even buried under the current one and forgotten.


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## the Jester (Apr 24, 2014)

diaglo said:


> and how old is the city?
> often things like sewer, water, markets, and walls could have been built by earlier empires. heck they could be even buried under the current one and forgotten.




The city is several centuries old, perhaps a thousand years at most. 

Its population is no longer as big as it once was, but at its height it had about 70,000 people in it (which included around 10,000 refugees).


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## Celebrim (Apr 24, 2014)

I generally divide population by 12 to obtain domiciles, then add on 20% or so to obtain outbuildings of various sorts - barns, coups, silos, etc.   Of course, a few of the buildings are going to be larger manor type dwellings, but I figure that sort of thing comes out in the wash.  For every palace you make, there are probably a several buildings with few or no residents as well. 

Exactly how you 'paint' those numbers depends on the style of city you are making.  The current city the campaign is in is one of the 10 or so largest on the world at 140,000 inhabitants, but was originally founded by air genasi and so, long ago, before their empire collapsed had a large amount of flying technology.  That technology is in decay, but the buildings and structure of the city still depends on it - it's one of the few places in the world with many residential buildings of more than 2 stories, and 7-10 story buildings aren't unknown.  Many buildings have streets running over their roofs - streets seldom used any more because flying/levitating traffic is almost non-existent.  All this creates an extremely high population density, and an increasing economic burden on the city that is part of the current stories subtext.  The people need magic to continue to enjoy the lifestyle they are accustomed to, but they are running out of it and unable to repair what's getting broken.

That city looks nothing like a 'medieval' city.

For a more typical very large medieval city I might do a quite small dense urban center surrounded by a wall that was the original economic/political center, and then a patchwork of very closely spaced villages and hamlets extending about it for a mile or two in all directions with about 1/4 mile between 'villages' (16 little neighborhoods per square mile) and 60-80 buildings per village.  That works out to about 10-11k people per square mile, not that different than some modern urban areas albeit with more 'yard' and less 'bedroom', and with about half the land still in some sort of cultivation.  Outside the walls houses would have small garden plots, pig sties, small orchards, and so forth gradually being overtaken by less agrarian pursuits.  I'd mess up the grid with a few small brooks and streams wandering around then gravitate nearby villages toward the streams, and line them with mills and mill ponds and the like, and add a major river or sea harbor.  Keep in mind there is zero sanitation.  The waste of all the people and their animals is flowing down the same stream that is used for washing, drinking, and powering the mills, although in medieval times this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that you've got this crop land sucking up manure everywhere.   (Ironically, there are in medieval cities actually public baths, fed by springs or wells, were people can go to get clean water to bathe in.   The medieval are generally cleaner than the early moderns, who didn't bathe - because all the baths get shut down by the black death and people don't start bathing again for 400 years or so.)  Then I'd draw major roads between the villages, build an irregular grid around the intersections and sprinkle black squares everywhere, leaving a few big squares for churches, monasteries, and the like.

At this point in time, there is little distinction between 'place of business' and home.  Economic production is centered in the home and distributed across the community, and businesses are generally in the home.  The biggest factories/employers are probably also monasteries, which often have lots of both water power and man power.  If you have a shop, you probably sleep above it or next to it in the same building.  If you have employees, they probably sleep in the shop.  Servants more or less sleep where they work - cook in the kitchen, stable boy in the barn, cinder wench by the fire place (which isn't all bad in the winter), maid outside the door to her ladies' chamber (in an antechamber or drawing room if she's lucky, in the hall if she isn't).  

Beyond that zone we'd leave the city proper and thin out to one village every 2-4 miles with broader fields and pastures between them.   Beyond that, we get truly rural, with villages spaced about every 8 miles - one days drive by ox cart.   Big cities like that though would be importing food from not only a 30-40 mile radius, but probably by ship from around the world.  Food production has been globalized a lot longer than is commonly realized.  Rome for example couldn't feed itself without regularly wheat shipments from Egypt, and was really consuming excess crops from across the Empire - oil from Greece, salted fish and cured meat from Spain, etc.

As the things got less medieval, roads would get more paved, and the dense urban area would increasingly creep out around the old walls eating up the older medieval town.


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## Hussar (Apr 24, 2014)

I would highly recommend sauntering over to www.cartographersguild.com .  They've got some absolutely brilliant maps for cities and tons of information on this sort of thing.


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## steeldragons (Apr 24, 2014)

Having been to a number of medieval cities throughout southern France and Germany, I would say the vast majority of buildings will have occupants.

The buildings in the city that would not, automatically, have people living there would include the church (in a D&D world "large city" I expect there would be multiple temples to multiple deities, but whatever suits your world's religion/s), a jail, chancery/courthouse, granaries (for the lord's/keep's food reserves, if not the city as a whole) and that about does it. Assuming a "large city" as you said, you would take into account things like theatres and arenas for public games/spectacles, warehouses, fortifications (toweers, a gatehouse, etc...), a library (depending on the size/culture level of this city)...places like that, that might have a few folks stationed there/caretakers/watchmen, but no one "living" there per se.

Just as a completely average/on the whole/guess, I would say make 1 building per 10 a non-residence building. Certainly no more (barring in-story reasons, see below). Maybe even 1 in 20.

The normal streets and shops and inns and taverns, assuming streets lined with 2 or 3 story buildings, are all dwellings for someone. Either in some back rooms attached to the shop or in the upper story(-ies). The smithies/forges probably abut the smith's family's dwelling, etc... 

The_ number_ of actual persons, that's a matter of you to decide in your campaign world. Is this city affluent enough that average families/households are 10 or 12 members? Is there a culture of promiscuity? Worship/revere a fertility god? Does the city house refugees from the neighboring warring kingdoms and so population density has doubled in the last 2 years...tensions are constantly at a breaking point these days? Or simply overpopulated?

Is everyone crammed in with foodstuffs in constant short supply, so families over   4 are considered odd and/or reserved for/considered a sign of the wealthy? Is there a law forbidding [or demanding?!] families over X? Did a plague move through the region a decade ago, so you have whole streets of buildings that house no one (believed to still be cursed or some such) or a block of ten homes with only a few members of 5 (of the original 20) families remaining there?

And, of course, the style and construction of the architecture of your medieval city will also play into the possible numbers you can support.

The city may be constructed with 1 shop at street level, 1 room for the family on top...maybe a loft/attic third floor. Maybe buildings are crammed in narrow but deep (3 or 4 rooms along but no more than 10' wide) with alleyways behind/between them and the buildings from the next street over. Maybe, in a D&Desque medieval/magical world, maybe there were dwarf engineers helping in the city's construction and/or mages involved, so you have bent/unique/twisting/soaring/"impossibly tall" 6-10 story buildings housing dozens of families each - and the casting of _Dispel Magic_ within the city walls is completely against the law/may cause collapses  - (as in real world cities, where you have limited/run out of horizontal space, you build "up").

There's no real formula for this. 
Soooo...yeah. This probably didn't help at all. lol. Sorry. More "stuff/variables to consider/think about" than "an answer."


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## SkidAce (Apr 24, 2014)

I use A Magical Medieval City as my go to.  The author had a web page a long time ago were you put in the population and it generated city blocks.

Here is a page from the DnD Wiki with similar info.  http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/A_Magical_Medieval_City_Guide_(DnD_Other)/Generating

That's if you want to go the detailed route.  Some of the suggestions above are simpler and just as effective in play.

But if you like that stuff, I would recommend picking up all the pdfs in the series.  Love them!


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## howandwhy99 (Apr 24, 2014)

Yeah, "A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe" is the best thing I know of too without asking a professional historical geographer. 

My answer is: It's going to be what you want it to be, but you can account for all kinds of stuff you want accounted for. 

So, cities are basically treated as fortifications of non-mobilized monster populations in D&D. How these are built depend on Alignment (culture, religion), race or monster type (including life needs), knowledge and classes, population size, time, available building materials, and plenty of other potential factors over time (history matters). In short, Lawful creatures build, Neutrals take what they can, and Chaotic ones kill others and move in. 



			
				The Jester said:
			
		

> The city is several centuries old, perhaps a thousand years at most.
> 
> Its population is no longer as big as it once was, but at its height it had about 70,000 people in it (which included around 10,000 refugees).



So a lot of your buildings will be run down and empty. With a wealth of housing populations will more likely disperse by relationship then (family, marriage, friends) not just money and availability. I expect the poorer parts of the city are those evacuated by the civil population. A large refugee population means there was likely a large area of makeshift housing in parks, outside the city center, outside the gates, or wherever else they could be accommodated. But how long ago were the refugees there? Temporary housing doesn't last nearly as long and materials like wood are scavenged for their value. 

A very old city like you have will almost certainly have many large buildings, famous locations, repurposed areas and buildings, varied architectural designs over time, several different population groups with lasting ties to the city, some serious cosmopolitan tastes either current or in aged traditions, a good deal of interbreeding and intermixing of other cultures into its own unique variety, and not least a ton of secrets built in over the years (many forgotten).


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## Zardnaar (Apr 26, 2014)

Varies generally population density is crammed with some exception. Constantinople at its height probably had a population of around 300k, when it fell to the Turks it had a population of around 50k so the city was semi deserted by most accounts. There were some stats around for buildings in ancient Rome as well which was notoriously cramped.


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## haakon1 (Apr 26, 2014)

*Random thought*

With a thousand year old city, it might be fun to have a "Ghost Quarter" of ruins that are rumored to be haunted, where no one goes . . . except Rogues making deals by night, adventurers, etc.


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## howandwhy99 (Apr 26, 2014)

I believe old cities became cramped because they took over the role of castle in defense of the local population. We ran to the "leader" because he had a stone tower and we didn't. (And boy did he ever Lord it over us). ;p

Cities had armies camped in them and/or walls to protect them. Maybe just the inner quarters, but something defensible when the barbarians came to slaughter and steal in force. 

A large city with a small population may have trouble defending its walls. It may only defend interior walls and leave others open. Outer quarters may be less populated because they aren't as safe. But they are cheaper to live in too, larger living conditions, etc. So many take the risk. It's not like living out in the surrounding farms who high tail it when siege armies arrive too.


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## Yaarel (Apr 27, 2014)

I find it helpful to refer to medieval ‘cities’ as ‘towns’ to keep their small size clear.

On average, the diameter of the townwalls are about a kilometer across. In other words, about 10 city blocks.

The streets are often like a web of main streets with labyrinthine alleyways between them.

Often there are unprotected parts of the town outside the townwalls. During a seige these residents will flee into the townwalls.


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## gamerprinter (Apr 27, 2014)

When I created the original hand-drawn map of the city of Kasai as a commission for the Paizo Publishing Jade Regent Adventure Path, The Empty Throne module, I didn't know what the intended population was supposed to be - Paizo didn't tell me. It turned out to be double what I created, but I created a population close to what you say your city might have. I created Kasai to have about 40,000 population. While there would certainly be multi-storied, larger buildings to contain many family units, as well as crowded brothels and less standard housing for particular subcultures, I guess that most buildings were single family units with an average of 5 individuals per household - of course this covers a single inhabitant or an extended family of 10+. So at 5 people per smaller home, I created roughly 8,500 hand-drawn buildings. I also included a more densely populated ghetto area on the north and northwest of the main city.

If you decide that the average per household is higher, and that there are more multi-family structures, then your number of buildings should be greatly reduced. In a city with a smaller population than previous, that might allow a smaller number of people per structure, but also requiring you to create a greater number of largely empty buildings. If you're creating a map for yourself, I don't envy you, it's a lot of work. Kasai took me 16 hours to draw in four 4 hour sessions, at a high rate of speed, and I'm a pro. It will probably take you longer.

The northeast quarter of the city has thicker lines, as I had to use a different pen to draw it in. It was several weeks wait to finish this last quarter as Neil Spicer had yet to send me his version of the palace of the Jade Regent so I could match its' design with my drawing.


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## Mercurius (Oct 16, 2014)

What a gorgeous map, Michael - and kudos to you for spending 16 hours on it. I'm glad you put so much thought into the ratio of population to structures, because I think many fantasy city maps aren't drawn with this in mind. Your city of 40,000 has far more buildings than many cities I've seen done for D&D (mainly Forgotten Realms) with higher populations.

This is also useful for me as I'm currently working on two settlements, one of 1,000 and one of 18,000. I can look at your map and figure that the latter would have a bit less than half as many buildings. The former is harder to say, as it is a small town with a different density. 

But looking at Magical Medieval Europe, it says that a small down has roughly one building per two people. That seems like a very low density to me, but I figure that it includes buildings that aren't inhabited, small sheds etc. Still, it is hard to imagine a small town of 1,000 with 500 buildings. I might go for more like 3-400.


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## Hussar (Oct 16, 2014)

I suppose it depends on what you consider a building really.  Is an outhouse a building?  Chicken coop?  Tool shed?  I dunno. But, that might account for the ratio.


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## Celebrim (Oct 16, 2014)

Mercurius said:


> But looking at Magical Medieval Europe, it says that a small down has roughly one building per two people. That seems like a very low density to me, but I figure that it includes buildings that aren't inhabited, small sheds etc. Still, it is hard to imagine a small town of 1,000 with 500 buildings. I might go for more like 3-400.




I'm normally quite the fan of Magical Medieval Europe, but that figure seems way off.   Medieval buildings were very heavily occupied by modern standards.  Eight to twelve people in a very small space would not at all be unusual, and generally domestic residences doubled as shops or 'factories'.  The master might sleep upstairs, and the apprentices and servants in the work area, the cook by the fire in the kitchen and the scullion on the floor.   Heavy occupation makes all sorts of sense for an economy barely above the subsistence level.  You have reduced heating needs, reduced building costs, and so forth.   And since no one works after dark because most people can't afford lighting, and during the day everyone not involved in domestic labor is out in the fields, you don't need a lot of space.  If you have a barn, the stablehands and grooms sleep in it.  

So I generally use 8-12 people per building for cities, particularly because D&D buildings tend to be rather large and modern.  In a city, I might well have something like 40 people to the building, on the assumption that they are large apartments similar to roman villas or modern town homes.   Really, the density in cities is probably greater than 1 person per 100 square feet of floor space.

In terms of land usage, medieval cities could hit 50,000 persons per square mile, and 30,000 wouldn't be unusual.


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## Mercurius (Oct 16, 2014)

Yeah, it seems a bit off, @_*Celebrim*_ (although in truth it ranges from 1 building per 2-3 people, depending upon the size of the settlement). But let's just think about the average 10 buildings.

1 public building - 0 inhabitants (e.g. a temple, although possibly a groundskeeper would live there, but let's assume they don't)
1 warehouse - 0 inhabitants
1 shop - 0-3+ inhabitants (the owner and family might live upstairs, but might not)
1 tavern - 0-3+ actual inhabitants, although again in some situations servants might live there
1 wealthy residence - 1-12+ (depending upon size of family, servants, guards, etc)
2 merchant/guild class - 1-10+ (as with wealthy residence)
3 laborer homes - 1-20+ (could be anything from a shack with one person to an apartment type building with several families)

So that's ten buildings, a total of 3-45 inhabitants - really a broad range. Now if we include structures of all kinds, sheds and outhouses, then I could see how the 1 structure per 2-3 people would actually make sense. The point being, perhaps only about a half of all structures are actually inhabited - maybe a bit more, but you've probably got a sizeable number of buildings that aren't inhabited.


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## Celebrim (Oct 16, 2014)

Mercurius said:


> Yeah, it seems a bit off, @_*Celebrim*_ (although in truth it ranges from 1 building per 2-3 people, depending upon the size of the settlement). But let's just think about the average 10 buildings.
> 
> 1 public building - 0 inhabitants (e.g. a temple, although possibly a groundskeeper would live there, but let's assume they don't)
> 1 warehouse - 0 inhabitants
> ...




The big problem with that list is that the proportions are all wrong.  Public buildings probably constitute 1% or less of the buildings in a town or city.  Warehouses again probably constitute less than 1% of buildings - most town won't even have one.  You'll probably only see them in ports that receive goods in large quantities.  Taverns probably constitute less than 2% of all buildings, but when they exist they are someone's home.  Actual period inns and taverns look more like what we think of as bed and breakfasts or boarding houses than hotels and restaurants.  In fact, very commonly they'd be referred to as "public houses" or "pubs".   So real population here could be like 1-20+.   Shops are 90% of the time also households, so uninhabited shops are a small percentage of buildings and not 25% of the total number of shops, and the maximum occupation ought to be the same as standard domiciles.  In fact, if it is a shop keeper, then you are in the educated/skilled class and already in the upper 10% of income (particularly because of guild monopolization).  That is a wealthy residence!  

So real numbers might look something like.

1 Public Building - 0(?) inhabitants 
1 Warehouse - 0(?) inhabitants
1 Unoccupied Mill, Craft or Guild Hall - 0(?) inhabitants
1 Inn (~6 inhabitants)
1 Wealthy Residence (~16 inhabitants)
10 Wealthier Merchant Homes/Shops (~8 inhabitants)
90 Laborers Homes (~12 inhabitants, usually an extended family covering 3-4 generations, working as teamsters, day servants, crafters assistants, farmers, wood cutters, green sellers, spinsters, etc. generally with multiple incomes per household, including older children)

105 buildings = 1182 persons > 9 inhabitants per building.

To get that number down you have to note this is primarily an agrarian economy, so there are barns, dove coots, smoke houses, out houses, spring houses, summer kitchens, carriages houses, lumber rooms, and sheds of various sorts with average occupation below 1 and probably near enough to zero not to matter.  (Though can I imagine servants with less desirable jobs, goose girls and swine herds and so forth, are often using them as bed chambers particularly when they can sleep with the animals for warmth.)  Or you might have the numbers slightly lower per household.  Still, I can't imagine those numbers tripling or even doubling the number of buildings in a town, as ownership of those things indicates advancing wealth and status and the vast majority of those buildings are going to be outside the town proper in the more intensive farming areas.  Additional buildings were usually noted in the Doomsday book (because they were valuable for tax purposes).  Not even every rural farm had them, much less within the crowded area of a walled city.

And to the extent that we could get those numbers down, we could also go the other way and get numbers up.  That public building could be a barracks, with 40+ inhabitants, or a temple housing a high status priest (a 'bishop' type) with his various servants (a cook and a groundskeeper, certainly), his dependents (an unmarried sister, his young nephew), a bell ringer, various lesser priests (deacons, lectors, cantors, acolytes, etc.), or a temple might house 24 vestal virgins, or a temple might house 40 temple prostitutes, 20 eunuchs, and various priests/priestess and their servants.  A public building might be the mayor's home.


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## Mercurius (Oct 16, 2014)

Thanks @_*Celebrim*_, that's quite helpful. Adding it all together, I think a range of something like 8-12 people per building, or roughly 10, works. If we want to include all possible structures, we could take half that. If it isn't perfectly accurate, it is close enough and manageable. This fits in with @_*gamerprinter*_'s map, although he's clearly not including outhouses and chicken-shacks in that map! By your estimation, his map would better fit a city of 80-100,000.


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## ephemeron (Oct 16, 2014)

There aren't as many historical maps of cities online as I'd like, but the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection contains, among other things, scans of a 1911 historical atlas that includes plans of London c. 1300 (upper-right corner of a large JPG) and Rome c. 1200, plus a generic "Medieval Manor" and other fun stuff.

These aren't at small enough scale to show individual buildings except landmarks (not to mention that the specific locations of individual houses and shops are largely going to be uncertain anyway), but I've kind of been looking for an excuse to link to them in this forum.


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## gamerprinter (Oct 16, 2014)

Yeah, I figured though some buildings were homes only, the majority were homes upstairs and some kind of shop downstairs. I did include warehouses along the riverside. The larger structures include temples/shrines, castle/fortress, rice grain stores, theaters and brothels, most everything else are shop/homes. As I was drawing the buildings, although I didn't keep an exact count, when I reached an estimated 100 buildings I would stop and also include a temple or shrine, a market square lot, and a cemetery. Because I did the map, I also wrote large chunks of the city of Kasai gazetteer - so as well as a cartographer, I'm a published author for Paizo Publishing (which I think is pretty cool since I never planned on being a freelance author - I'm listed as a contributing author on the credits page for Jade Regent #6, The Empty Throne.)

And... though I didn't do the finished (colored) version of the map, that was done by Paizo's inhouse cartographer (to maintain consistency with the other maps), but this is one of three maps as part of the Dragon Empires Map Folio, which won an Ennie for Cartography at last year's Gencon. So though it wasn't me, per se, I kind of feel I earned that Ennie, myself. Also nothing was added nor removed from the map I did, so the final looks exactly like my outline version just with color.


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## Celebrim (Oct 16, 2014)

Mercurius said:


> By your estimation, his map would better fit a city of 80-100,000.




Based on my exposure to maps of medieval/early modern cities, my guess is that 80-100,000 is a much better estimate of the population of gamerprinter's (amazing) map than 40,000.  In fact, it might be a bit on the low side depending on the scale he indicates on the map.

Keep in mind Venice peaks out at something like 180,000 persons, and Venice is tiny.  Depending on the scale of gameprinters map, 160,000 people isn't completely out of line since a large scale would allow those domiciles to be multi-family insulas with 40 or more persons per building.  Some of Rome's larger insulas housed hundreds of residents, much like large modern apartment buildings.

Another thing to consider is the structure of grand buildings.  Most wealthy homes and certainly palaces were constructed something like a modern condominium with a shared common area.  Each section of the home was an apartment with a salon, antechamber, chamber, and wardrobe (in the case of the best apartments) that collectively functioned as a sort of private home for the resident (roughly a living room, den, bedroom, and bath in modern terms).  Only the greatest would sleep one to a bed, and they would probably have servants that slept in the outer less private portions of the apartment and/or lesser servants sleeping in the hall at the doorway.  Most bedchambers would have a married couple, or several close family members (2-3 sisters, or several cousins, for example).  So the bigger wealthier houses, much like the houses of the poor, are also multi-family dwellings with large extended families plus their live in servants and retainers.  Living without your extended family around you is a recent development, and even having your own room probably involved more wealth than was common even for the wealthy until the relatively modern era.   Ancient, medieval and early modern cities would approach New York density without having nearly as much vertical space.

As long as I'm critiquing Magical Medieval Europe's numbers, and keeping in mind its been years since I read them, their figures for urbanization are too highly dependent on Northern Europe.  In areas with more moderate climates, long distance trade, and strong organization, urbanization could rise rather higher than the figures that they tend to give.   Roman Italy for example was about 40% urbanized.  I wouldn't be surprised to find similar numbers for Southern China.  Given the 'magic' in the magical medieval Europe, I tend to prefer a higher degree of urbanization than the 20% or less they tend to suggest.  It's also a bit easier for me to manage since I don't need quite so many dots on the map (to say nothing of names).


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## Mercurius (Oct 16, 2014)

[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], not only magic but monsters! Tribes of orcs and gnolls, as well as all kinds of unearthly beasties lairing and wandering about would likely increase urbanization, with probably more fortified towns and cities, with guard towers and barracks interspersed throughout farm land and villages.

As far as population goes, I'm also thinking that we'd see greater density the larger the city. Perhaps 2-5 people per structure in a village makes sense, but then it goes up from there. While of course this doesn't really matter in the game session, I do care about such things in terms of world building. I'm thinking about these general guidelines, with "buildings" not including out-houses, chicken-shacks etc, but would include shanties and shacks that people live in:

Village (<500): 2-4 / building
Small town (500-2,000): 4-6 / building
Large town (2-5,000): 6-8 / building 
Small city (5-10,000): 8-10 / building
Large city and above (10,000+): 10+ / building

Or something like that.


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## Hussar (Oct 17, 2014)

Just a question about buildings:

I know you said that towns wouldn't have warehouses, but, what about granaries and stables?  Surely they would be big enough to be counted wouldn't they?  Although, as I write this, maybe there wouldn't be that many buildings overall anyway.  It's not like every house would have a stable like a modern house would have a garage.


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## Hand of Evil (Oct 17, 2014)

This is hard, you really just make up a number and use it for each ward and district of your city.  

What are you counting?  

Heads - is exact count 
Families - average count two adults and 2.5 kids, the problem with this is that poor have more kids and other family members living with them, so you will have high density of people in some areas.   
Tax Payers - those that you get money from but may not count kids and the poor.


Now for crazy stuff:

Equality - are all counted the same or does it take four gnomes & Halfling to equal one human?  Then monsters, are they even counted?  
Immigrant population - what is the traffic of people entering the city and staying.


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## Celebrim (Oct 17, 2014)

Hand of Evil said:


> Families - average count two adults and 2.5 kids, the problem with this is that poor have more kids and other family members living with them, so you will have high density of people in some areas.




Prior to the modern era, this is what census takers actually tried to count.  But you have tons of anachronisms in that.  

First, families and taxpayers were basically the same thing.  You counted families to count taxpayers.  The head of family may have owed the tax, but the whole family was effectively liable for it.  There was no such thing as a youth or poverty exemption.   If you weren't a family, and weren't a taxpayer, you were a legal criminal - a bandit, beggar, vagrant or the like to be put lashed, pilloried, imprisoned and put in the work houses.  If you were lucky, a monastery might take you in and put you to work, but that was about the whole of the social safety net that existed.  As a largely subsistence economy, that's all they could afford.  Attempting to feed you if you couldn't be made productive would have meant someone else was starving.   There was barely enough left over food in the good years to feed your widowed grandmother or aunt, or your orphaned nephew.

On average, women would give 7-8 live births.  Eventually, this would kill most of them.  But the life expectancy on men or children was hardly better.  Of the 7-8 live births, maybe 3 or 4 would survive to adulthood.   And even so, a third of children would see one or both parents die before they reached it.   Those Grimm fairy tales filled with ache and horror and broken homes and dreams of some sort of rescue - that was the reality of daily life.  You'd lose your parents, and you'd quite probably enter a world of complete social and economic insecurity, abuse and exploitation.  Childhood as you understand the concept was invented by the Victorians as enough wealth arrived to support it.   Prior to that, by age 10 you were working in some capacity - field hand, maid, apprentice, etc. - not just because your family needed the income, but because you needed to get independent and get some economic value attached to you as soon as possible in case you lost your family.  Poverty was indigenous to subsistence pre-industrial agrarian economies in a way you can't imagine.

All this meant that a household looks nothing like a modern American urban family.  A typical household might be a grandfather or grandmother, 2 adult children and their spouses (which might be a second spouse, the first having died in childbirth), 1 unmarried adult child, plus 3-8 living grandchildren the oldest of which might be approaching marriageable age.   Taxes were owed on account of the family land, whether freeholders, cottagers or serfs.   The main differences were your legal rights, because all people weren't born equal in the eyes of the law.

This would be even more true of the wealthier households who'd have more children and more family members living them, because children were a sign of wealth and not poverty (and likewise an indication of the families future economic success).   It was poor families who had fewer children, fewer resources to support them, greater losses due to malnutrition and starvation and disease and ill-health resulting from short food supply.  It was poor families that couldn't afford to stay together as a family unit and who more often lacked surviving family members to depend upon for protection.  A farm with lots of children on it was one that was wealthy, not just because those children were farm hands or hand secondary incomes as maids or apprentices, but because it meant the parents were healthy (and often the children of healthy parents).  Families would take great care who to marry, because marriages were primarily economic contracts between families.  Join yourself to an economically poor partner might mean your children or yourself would have no support in the event of one or both partners death.



> Equality - are all counted the same or does it take four gnomes & Halfling to equal one human?




Well, you don't have voters.  You are taking a census to know how much tax each lord owes his lord.  You aren't really counting persons, you are counting tax.  If Halflings and gnomes are as economically productive as humans, then they pay tax accordingly.  Otherwise, they still get counted, they just pay less or a least a different tax.  



> Then monsters, are they even counted?




Do they pay tax to the lord of the land?  If so, yes.  If they don't, then they get counted as the reason that the lord doesn't owe tax on a certain piece of property.  For example, the census might record:

"Barony of Tibbleton...

And there is in the district of Beeby also a fine wood, amounting to 7000 acres, stretching from Beeby to Wallsburch.  But from this wood there is no good forage for pigs and no wood can be cut, owing to the presence of a fearsome wyrm of great size and evil disposition, whose depredations are a scourge upon the wood and on the surrounding countryside."

Translation, the Baron owes his lord no taxes on account of the wood - which might otherwise be very economically profitable - because there is a dragon that renders the property values lower than an accounting of the extent of the forested area would indicate.  

On the other hand, in a fantasy census we might have something like, 

"And in the district of Vengard, there is a fairy wood, amounting to six hundred and three score acres.   And in this wood there is a Sidhe Court, which by ancient tradition has all rights pertaining to the wood and holds it in fee complete to the King, and may not be disturbed on penalty of the King's Justice.  But, in accordance to this tradition, the fief-holder of Barkindale renders tribute to the Sidhe Court twenty tuns of good wine annually, for which he is rendered a payment of 30 pound of good fine gold."

Translation, heck yeah, the Baron of Barkindale owes taxes on that wood!  It's a freaking gold mine!  The King better be getting part of the profits.  Who cares how many fairies live in the wood, point is, they've got gold and share it!


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## gamerprinter (Oct 17, 2014)

Hand of Evil said:


> [*]Families - average count two adults and 2.5 kids, the problem with this is that poor have more kids and other family members living with them, so you will have high density of people in some areas.
> [/LIST]




Statistical data that applies to modern society have no correlation in pre-industrial society - the statistical parameters are apples and oranges.


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## Mercurius (Oct 19, 2014)

I found this rather nifty generator, thought [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] and others might be interested. It also gives total buildings for different population sizes, which seems to follow the formula of roughly 5 people per building. 

For instance, the settlement I'm designing has about 1,000 inhabitants, which the generator considers a small town. It would have 220 buildings, of which 3 are mansions, 2 are churches, 85 are businesses, 1 municipal, and 129 homes. 

It also breaks down different business types. I'm honestly not sure how realistic it is, but it seems like a good starting point to build from and adjust.

As for my creation, I've decided to take a reverse approach from what I was originally doing. Rather than say, "I want a town of 1,000 and need to figure out how many buildings to draw," I'm going to draw the town and buildings to my liking, then extrapolate population from there.


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## gamerprinter (Oct 19, 2014)

Indeed, when I design towns and cities for my own uses, I decide what factions and facilities I want in a given community, then build around that. Whatever the population might be is the result of organic development.

The only time I build a city for a specific population is when I'm asked to map a city to fit a given publisher's parameters, which usually includes the population as a part of that. Then choosing appropriate formulas and working by that to fit someone else's needs. For me, that is the only time population density matters.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Dec 19, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Just a question about buildings:
> 
> I know you said that towns wouldn't have warehouses, but, what about granaries and stables?  Surely they would be big enough to be counted wouldn't they?  Although, as I write this, maybe there wouldn't be that many buildings overall anyway.  It's not like every house would have a stable like a modern house would have a garage.




There are potentially quite a few other things that would exist in any modest sized town as well. There would probably be for instance slaughterhouses, coopers, tanners, candlemakers, weavers, soap makers, tile and brick makers, potters, lumber mills/yards, etc. Not to mention baths, hospitals, government offices, monasteries (or something similar), etc. All these things existed within the walls of medieval towns. Larger towns/cities, particularly in large and more urbanized kingdoms would probably sport colosseums, race tracks, etc as well. Large areas of shopping and market arcades were very common. 

If you look at maps of ancient cities in particular you find that public space could be an inordinately large part of the city, with vast temple and palace complexes sometimes occupying more than half of the area. Of course these kinds of buildings were home to many people! There was also often substantial open space even within city walls, particularly if the city has fallen on hard times (old buildings rarely last long, people scavenge the wood and stone in a few years). Even a densely packed city requires a fair amount of open space, and there will almost surely be some wide boulevards or other similar things in a bigger city.

I'd note for instance that the 1300 London linked above contained a LOT of open space, the walls were built by the Romans in the 200's and even in 1300 the city was smaller than in Roman times.


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