If you check this link, you will see wikitravel nicely gives a short characterization of each district. You can also click on each neighbourhood for additional info. It details everything that stands out, like historical districts, downtown, industrial works, nightlife areas, city parks etc.

I just know a few years back I'd been given a European travel guide that had really excellent maps of the city centers of various European cities of note; don't remember the title or publisher, however.

Well, for WoD games I prefer maps like these:

• Moscow
  
• Ravensbridge
  
• Miranbrück
  

I found a few other city books. There is the Bedlam setting for M&M. There also is a cheaper edition Bedlam City Basics available for a few bucks. I got my hands on the Haven City of Violence RPG. I believe it's two or three bucks. A pretty run of the mill game, but the city setting is very clear and well done.

Then this thing. You see, I like Deadlands. So I bought the Deadlands Noir edition. To my surprise there is a New Orleans setting in there. And it's really good. The weird thing is I like it a lot better than the WW New Orleans city books. Both the old and the new. But it has roughly the same content.

So what is it then? The By Night books aren't bad at all. But they suffer from WW's usual problems. Too many words and bad layout. I think it's mostly that. In the Deadlands Noir book you can easily see which neighbourhood belongs to which district. That way it's easy to get a grip on the setting. And you can decide the amount of detail in your city. For a lot of detail you include the nieghbourhoods, for a little bit less detail you stick to the districts. So it's all about getting a clear overview on the content.

I don't know if this is usuful for anyone, but anyway I recommend Deadlands Noir. I am gonna check out the Companion book as well.

For city building go back to the base models for city topography. So Burgess, Hoyte, Ullman etc.

I find that Hoyte's sector model works best.

generally what I would do for a fastasy city is take a map of a european medieval quarter, Dubrovnik, Sienna , whatever, apply the Hoyte sector mode as an overlay based on the shape and size of buildings roadways etc and then add a sprinkling of fantasy over the top.  

For a modern city I just use google maps.

Much as I may malign the game... d20 Gamma World had one expansion book that had this really nifty idea.

Communities as Characters.

The players worked together to stat out their base town. The town had skills and feats, could level up and had internal dynamics. It was a great system buried in a bad reimagining of a game setting in a game frought with mechanical problems.

It should have been adapted to a fantasy setting with more fleshed out rules for city to city interaction.

Quote from: The Butcher;731454Have you checked out Damnation City for Vampire: the Requiem?

Damnation City is an awesome book for *any* RPG concerning how to make a City, and make it its own character. Good call!

Quote from: jibbajibba;733333For city building go back to the base models for city topography. So Burgess, Hoyte, Ullman etc.

I find that Hoyte's sector model works best.

generally what I would do for a fastasy city is take a map of a european medieval quarter, Dubrovnik, Sienna , whatever, apply the Hoyte sector mode as an overlay based on the shape and size of buildings roadways etc and then add a sprinkling of fantasy over the top.  

For a modern city I just use google maps.

Most districts correspond with that. There is a central bussiness district, a lower class, middle class (suburbs) and higher class district. And an industrial. I personally always add a nightlife district or tourism zone with lots of restaurants, shops, bars and clubs. For the world of darkness or vampire that's perfect. The problem with WoD books is that they never make a clear distinction between districts. They just start rambling about everything and nothing. It actually makes it harder to come up with five or six areas each with their own personality.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;733492Most districts correspond with that. There is a central bussiness district, a lower class, middle class (suburbs) and higher class district. And an industrial. I personally always add a nightlife district or tourism zone with lots of restaurants, shops, bars and clubs. For the world of darkness or vampire that's perfect. The problem with WoD books is that they never make a clear distinction between districts. They just start rambling about everything and nothing. It actually makes it harder to come up with five or six areas each with their own personality.

That's why they are the definitive models of geographic construction of cities

If you really want to build a city fromt eh ground up then just run it through from origins.
The city was founded 300 years ago by Dutch trappers who used the river to get intot eh interior where they hunted beaver and elk. 50 years later the city was captured by the French who exploited the deep natural harbour and abundant forests to establish a naval base that they used to build ships in a number of minor shuffles with the British. The British finally captured the town and burn out he ship yards in the mid 1850s. The British expanded trade and build the university and new civic buildings before independance in 1902.

So now you can build the city. The orinal Dutch bits will be gone but the centre of the town will be on the river where their trading point was as opposed to on the high buff where the air is better or on the docs. The French woudl ahve established a rich residential and light industrial zone round this and the street names and local population will have a distictly French feel. then the British will have build a central plaza area with neo-colonial townhall, museum etc. they will have renewed the docs and set up teh harbour front which is now either desintigrated into old run down warehouses or has been gentrified to a load of yuppie lofts and starbucks.  riff from there.

Or just pick a city that already exists

I will be using Chicago, but this advice helps and wikitravel is also useful.

Chicago South and West side or lower class. The North side is upper class and the Far North is middle class/suburbs. Chicago Far South is industrial. South West used to be meatpacking and South East steel.

not sure if this is what you are looking for but maybe:
- Runequest's CITIES (chart-based rather than text; section on populating villages and cities, might be adaptable for modern day)
- GURPs 'City Stats' (might be able to find something in here, or at least get some ideas about what to consider)

RuneQuest Empires and Guilds, Factions and Cults also provide a mini-game for running communities and groups as "characters" that interact with each other. Pretty handy stuff if that's the game you're looking for ...

I was thinking you could build a random city generator based on a number of tables.

it woudl be better if it were computerised but tables would do.

Start with the reason it was founded, port, crossroads, defensive choke point, market, all the usual options. Then roll for the central zone, then basically roll for each other zones using a tile kind of model.

Easier to do for fantasy cities as they are smaller.

About 12 tabels would let you generate the different sections of town and define its rough shap, the computer program could of course map the wholetown and even populate it it you wanted it to.

Might be a worthwhile endeavour

One of my favorite things to note is the difference between old, often rather organic city "planning," and new, very artificial city planning. Comparing older Asian or European cities versus very recent American cities (especially if a lot has been remade in the past 200 years) is a great study in contrasts. The latter has street grids, ideas on civic space and parade routes, massive thoroughfares, mass transit, etc. (A good exception example would be China's old imperial city grids.)

Old travel guides -- often available on the cheap at library sales -- are another resource. Those are good for noting how city districts are grouped and designated. Sometimes what once was planned for one function ends up in practice being spliced between other districts anchors. Travel guides are a great source for categories and examples of these regional anchors (parks, museums, malls, temples, & universities) and the flavor bits that these tend to attract.

To further comment on Opaopajr's remarks.. depending on how much of a time suck you want this to be,

General 'city building' :

In terms of cities from a designing perspective, the first book I think I would recommend is Design of Cities- by Edmund Bacon

For one book on the history of city planning, I would probably recommend The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History by Spiro Kostof. But it deals with a timeframe much larger than you can concerned with here. Nonetheless, I think it gives a great sense of how cities develop.

If your local library has the OOP series 'Planning and Cities' put out by the Publisher George Braziller, you might check this series out.

For maps, there is the David Rumsey Historical Collection


Specific to the OP (re: Chicago):


I found a few floor plans for 1920s Chicago Projects (Marshall Field Gardens and Michigan Boulevard Gardens) that I scanned and uploaded, if you have some use for them.

This animated map of Chicago growth from 1850 to 1990 is pretty neat (the animation is a bit slow..)  the individual maps can be found here: http://tigger.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/imagebase/chimaps/mcclendon.html


1956 Chicago map from the David Rumsey collection.