settlement-design skill

---
name: settlement-design
description: Design cities, towns, and settlements for fictional worlds. Use when creating urban environments, mapping city districts, or when settlements need realistic layered development and spatial logic.
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: jwynia
  version: "1.0"
  type: generator
  mode: generative
  domain: worldbuilding
---

# Settlement Design: Urban Development Skill

You help writers create realistic settlements by applying the ten core principles that govern how real cities and towns form, grow, and evolve. This produces urban environments that feel lived-in rather than designed-for-plot.

## Core Principles

1. **Geographic Determinism**: Natural features profoundly shape settlement patterns and growth
2. **Functional Necessity**: Settlements develop to fulfill specific economic, defensive, or social needs
3. **Network Emergence**: Settlements exist within interconnected systems, not isolation
4. **Layered Development**: Urban spaces evolve through accretion rather than comprehensive planning
5. **Power Projection**: Settlement design reflects and reinforces social and political hierarchies
6. **Resource Constraint**: Available materials and technologies limit construction possibilities
7. **Cultural Expression**: Built environments embody cultural values and social organization
8. **Adaptive Reuse**: Structures and spaces are repurposed as needs change over time
9. **Disaster Response**: Settlements evolve in reaction to catastrophes
10. **Spatial Stratification**: Social hierarchies manifest in physical organization of space

## The Ten Parameter Categories

### 1. Site Selection Parameters

| Parameter | Options to Consider |
|-----------|---------------------|
| **Water Access** | Rivers, lakes, coastlines, springs, wells |
| **Defensive Position** | Elevation, natural barriers, visibility |
| **Resource Proximity** | Mines, timber, fertile soil, wildlife |
| **Trade Route Placement** | Crossroads, harbors, mountain passes |
| **Climate Suitability** | Temperature, rainfall, seasonal patterns |
| **Spiritual Significance** | Sacred sites, astronomical alignments |

### 2. Morphological Parameters

| Parameter | Options to Consider |
|-----------|---------------------|
| **Street Pattern** | Grid, radial, organic, hierarchical |
| **Density Gradient** | Concentrated to dispersed population |
| **Boundary Definition** | Walls, natural features, markers |
| **Building Typology** | Predominant architectural forms |
| **Open Space Distribution** | Plazas, parks, markets, fields |
| **Vertical Development** | Height variation and skyline |

### 3. Functional Parameters

| Parameter | Options to Consider |
|-----------|---------------------|
| **Economic Base** | Agricultural, industrial, commercial, administrative |
| **Defense Systems** | Fortifications, surveillance, escape routes |
| **Civic Organization** | Governance spaces and structures |
| **Social Infrastructure** | Meeting places, recreational areas |
| **Religious Facilities** | Temples, shrines, ceremonial spaces |
| **Knowledge Centers** | Schools, libraries, universities |

### 4. Infrastructure Parameters

| Parameter | Options to Consider |
|-----------|---------------------|
| **Water Management** | Supply, drainage, waste disposal |
| **Transportation Network** | Roads, bridges, canals, ports |
| **Food Storage/Distribution** | Granaries, markets, warehouses |
| **Energy Systems** | Fuel sources, power distribution |
| **Waste Management** | Disposal, recycling, sanitation |
| **Communication Infrastructure** | Message systems, signals |

### 5. Socio-Spatial Parameters

| Parameter | Options to Consider |
|-----------|---------------------|
| **Elite Spaces** | High-status residential and ceremonial areas |
| **Common Quarters** | Everyday residential areas |
| **Marginalized Zones** | Low-status or excluded populations |
| **Transitional Spaces** | Areas between different social domains |
| **Contested Territories** | Disputed or ambiguous ownership |
| **Ethnoreligious Districts** | Cultural/religious group clustering |

### 6. Symbolic Parameters

| Parameter | Options to Consider |
|-----------|---------------------|
| **Monumental Expression** | Power and identity representations |
| **Ritual Pathways** | Procession routes and ceremonial ways |
| **Collective Memory Sites** | Historical event markers |
| **Identity Boundaries** | Cultural and social group divisions |
| **Cosmic Alignment** | Astronomical and religious orientations |
| **Status Signification** | Social rank indication through space |

## Settlement Typologies

### By Primary Function

| Type | Characteristics |
|------|-----------------|
| **Market Settlement** | Trade-focused community |
| **Administrative Center** | Governance-oriented city |
| **Religious Complex** | Faith-centered settlement |
| **Military Outpost** | Defense-focused installation |
| **Production Center** | Manufacturing/resource extraction |
| **Agricultural Community** | Farming-based settlement |
| **Transport Hub** | Movement-facilitating location |
| **Knowledge Center** | Education/research community |

### By Morphological Pattern

| Type | Characteristics |
|------|-----------------|
| **Planned Grid** | Regular, organized street network |
| **Concentric Settlement** | Rings around central point |
| **Linear Development** | Elongated along path/feature |
| **Organic Cluster** | Irregular, emergent organization |
| **Radial Pattern** | Streets extending from central hub |
| **Composite Structure** | Multiple morphological sections |
| **Dispersed Settlement** | Scattered buildings without center |
| **Nucleated Village** | Tightly clustered around focal point |

### By Geographic Setting

| Type | Characteristics |
|------|-----------------|
| **River Settlement** | Waterway-oriented community |
| **Coastal Port** | Sea-facing trade center |
| **Hill Town** | Elevated defensive position |
| **Valley Community** | Nestled between heights |
| **Plains Settlement** | Flat terrain development |
| **Mountain Outpost** | High-altitude location |
| **Island Development** | Water-surrounded community |
| **Desert Oasis** | Arid region water-centered |

### By Scale and Complexity

| Type | Population Range |
|------|------------------|
| **Isolated Homestead** | Single family/small group |
| **Hamlet** | Small cluster, no specialization |
| **Village** | Basic community, simple division of labor |
| **Town** | Medium settlement, some specialization |
| **City** | Large settlement, complex organization |
| **Metropolis** | Major urban center, regional dominance |
| **Megalopolis** | Interconnected urban region |
| **Imperial Capital** | Political/cultural center of empire |

## Development Patterns

### Settlement Evolution Sequences

- **Camp → Hamlet → Village → Town → City → Metropolis**
- **Military Outpost → Frontier Settlement → Regional Center → Capital**
- **Religious Shrine → Pilgrimage Site → Temple Complex → Holy City**
- **Trading Post → Market Town → Commercial Center → Trade Metropolis**
- **Mining Camp → Industrial Town → Manufacturing City**
- **Fishing Settlement → Port Town → Maritime Hub → Naval Center**

### Spatial Growth Patterns

| Pattern | Description |
|---------|-------------|
| **Concentric Expansion** | Growth in rings around original settlement |
| **Axial Development** | Expansion along transportation corridors |
| **Leap-frog Growth** | Discontinuous development with gaps |
| **Infill Densification** | Filling empty spaces within existing areas |
| **Satellite Formation** | Secondary settlements around primary center |
| **Linear Extension** | Growth along single axis |
| **Cellular Accretion** | Addition of whole neighborhoods/districts |
| **Polycentric Evolution** | Multiple growing centers merging |

### Crisis and Adaptation Cycles

| Crisis | Response Pattern |
|--------|------------------|
| **Fire Destruction** | Rebuilding with fire prevention |
| **Flood Damage** | Elevated construction, flood control |
| **Disease Outbreak** | Sanitation improvement |
| **Siege/Invasion** | Enhanced fortification |
| **Resource Depletion** | Economic diversification |
| **Overcrowding** | Peripheral expansion, vertical growth |
| **Political Collapse** | Fragmentation, repurposing |

## Setting-Specific Adaptations

### Fantasy Settings
- **Magical Resource Urbanization**: Settlement around arcane energy sources
- **Multi-Race Architecture**: Designs for diverse species needs
- **Defensive Magic Influence**: Mystical protection affecting urban form
- **Divine Presence Planning**: City design reflecting divine will
- **Magical Transportation Effects**: Portal/teleportation impact on layout

### Science Fiction Settings
- **Environmental Dome Cities**: Enclosed settlements on hostile worlds
- **Orbital Habitat Design**: Artificial gravity considerations
- **Subterranean Complexes**: Underground urban development
- **Interspecies Cohabitation**: Multi-species urban accommodation
- **Zero-G Settlement Design**: Spatial organization without gravity

### Post-Apocalyptic Settings
- **Ruin Repurposing**: Adaptation of pre-collapse structures
- **Defensive Scarcity Design**: Resource protection-focused layout
- **Contamination Avoidance**: Hazard-driven settlement location
- **Technological Regression**: Designs following capability loss
- **Remnant Infrastructure**: Communities around surviving systems

## District Design

### Naming Patterns

| Pattern | Examples |
|---------|----------|
| **Function-Based** | Market Quarter, Warehouse District |
| **Social Class Reference** | Noble Quarter, Craftsmen's Row |
| **Historical Development** | Old Town, New District |
| **Geographic Position** | North Ward, Riverside |
| **Ethnic/Cultural** | Elvish Quarter, Foreign District |
| **Occupational Cluster** | Tanner's Lane, Merchant Row |

### District Types

| Type | Characteristics |
|------|-----------------|
| **Commercial** | Markets, shops, warehouses, trade halls |
| **Residential (Elite)** | Large homes, gardens, quiet streets |
| **Residential (Common)** | Dense housing, narrow streets |
| **Industrial** | Workshops, manufacturing, pollution |
| **Religious** | Temples, monasteries, sacred spaces |
| **Administrative** | Government buildings, courts, archives |
| **Entertainment** | Theaters, taverns, pleasure houses |
| **Military** | Barracks, armories, training grounds |

## Implementation Process

### Step 1: Site Selection and Analysis
- Identify key geographic features
- Assess resource availability
- Evaluate defensive potential
- Analyze transportation connectivity
- Consider climatic conditions

### Step 2: Foundation Establishment
- Determine founding purpose
- Select initial morphology
- Establish core structures
- Define original boundaries

### Step 3: Growth Phase Development
- Map expansion patterns
- Add district specialization
- Develop infrastructure networks
- Create social stratification zones

### Step 4: Historical Layering
- Incorporate crisis events
- Show adaptive responses
- Create architectural palimpsest
- Develop contested spaces

### Step 5: Contemporary State
- Define current function
- Map active/declining areas
- Identify tensions and conflicts
- Show ongoing changes

## Implementation Checklist

- [ ] Define site selection rationale
- [ ] Choose primary function type
- [ ] Select morphological pattern
- [ ] Map district organization
- [ ] Design infrastructure systems
- [ ] Create social stratification zones
- [ ] Develop historical layers
- [ ] Include crisis response evidence
- [ ] Add cultural expression elements
- [ ] Identify current tensions/changes

## Output Persistence

### Output Discovery
1. Check for `context/output-config.md` in the project
2. If found, look for this skill's entry
3. If not found, ask user: "Where should I save settlement designs?"
4. Suggest: `worldbuilding/settlements/` or `explorations/worldbuilding/`

### Primary Output
- **Site analysis** - Geographic features and selection rationale
- **Morphology** - Street patterns, boundaries, districts
- **Historical layers** - Development phases and crisis responses
- **Infrastructure** - Water, transport, waste, food systems
- **Social geography** - Elite, common, marginalized zones

### File Naming
Pattern: `{settlement-name}-design-{date}.md`

## Verification (Oracle)

### What This Skill Can Verify
- **Scale consistency** - Do population and institutions match? (High confidence)
- **Infrastructure presence** - Are essential systems addressed? (High confidence)
- **Historical layering** - Does settlement show development over time? (Medium confidence)

### What Requires Human Judgment
- **Story fit** - Does settlement create interesting scenes?
- **Immersive quality** - Does it feel lived-in?
- **Navigation clarity** - Can readers orient themselves?

### Oracle Limitations
- Cannot assess whether settlement serves plot needs
- Cannot predict reader sense of place from descriptions

## Feedback Loop

### Session Persistence
- **Output location:** See `context/output-config.md`
- **What to save:** Site, morphology, districts, infrastructure, social zones
- **Naming pattern:** `{settlement-name}-design-{date}.md`

### Cross-Session Learning
- Check for prior settlement work in this world
- Ensure settlements maintain trade/political consistency
- Crisis response patterns inform anti-patterns

## Design Constraints

### This Skill Assumes
- Settlement exists (even ruins were once settlements)
- Writer wants functional urbanism, not stage sets
- Some historical development has occurred

### This Skill Does Not Handle
- **Economic systems** - Route to: economic-systems
- **Political structures** - Route to: governance-systems
- **Cultural texture** - Route to: memetic-depth
- **Scene staging** - Route to: scene-sequencing

### Degradation Signals
- Perfect symmetry without historical disruption
- Every element serving current plot
- Scale mismatch between population and institutions

## Reasoning Requirements

### Standard Reasoning
- Single district design
- Site selection analysis
- Basic infrastructure mapping

### Extended Reasoning (ultrathink)
- **Full city design** - [Why: all systems interconnect]
- **Historical layer development** - [Why: tracing centuries of change]
- **Multi-settlement regional design** - [Why: trade and political networks]

**Trigger phrases:** "design the complete city", "city history", "regional settlement network"

## Execution Strategy

### Sequential (Default)
- Site before morphology
- Foundation before growth phases
- Infrastructure before social geography

### Parallelizable
- Designing multiple districts
- Research into different urban analogs

### Subagent Candidates
| Task | Agent Type | When to Spawn |
|------|------------|---------------|
| Historical research | general-purpose | When modeling on real cities |
| World consistency check | Explore | When verifying against existing setting |

## Context Management

### Approximate Token Footprint
- **Skill base:** ~4k tokens (parameters + typologies)
- **With development patterns:** ~5k tokens
- **With setting adaptations:** ~6k tokens

### Context Optimization
- Focus on relevant typologies for current settlement
- Implementation process is reference, not required
- Setting adaptations load on-demand

### When Context Gets Tight
- Prioritize: Current typology, active parameters
- Defer: Full typology matrix, evolution sequences
- Drop: All setting-specific adaptations not in use

## Anti-Patterns

### 1. Designer's Map Syndrome
**Pattern:** Creating settlements that look good on a map but don't reflect organic development—perfect grids, symmetrical layouts, convenient district placement.
**Why it fails:** Real cities accumulate over time through crisis, growth, and adaptation. The "designed" appearance signals artificiality. Readers sense something's off even when they can't articulate it.
**Fix:** Add at least one layer of disruption—a fire that forced rebuilding, a flood that redirected development, an invasion that destroyed the old walls. Show the scars of history in the urban fabric.

### 2. Functional Perfection
**Pattern:** Every element of the city serves the current plot—the perfect tavern for meetings, the convenient sewer for escapes, districts that exist only when characters visit.
**Why it fails:** Cities exist for their inhabitants, not for visiting protagonists. Plot-serving urbanism makes the city feel like a stage set rather than a lived environment.
**Fix:** Include elements that don't serve the plot but serve the city. Markets for goods the characters don't need. Temples to gods the characters don't worship. The city should feel like it would exist without the story.

### 3. Scale Implausibility
**Pattern:** Descriptions implying vastly different scales—a "small town" with specialized districts that would require a population of 50,000, or a "great city" that characters walk across in an hour.
**Why it fails:** Readers have intuitions about urban scale from experience. Contradictions break immersion. A hamlet can't have a thieves' guild district; a metropolis can't be crossed on foot between breakfast and lunch.
**Fix:** Choose a real-world analog for scale reference. Research population densities for your technology level. Match institutions and specializations to actual population thresholds.

### 4. Missing Infrastructure
**Pattern:** Rich descriptions of palaces and markets without mentioning where water comes from, where waste goes, or how food arrives.
**Why it fails:** Infrastructure is what makes cities possible. Its absence makes the settlement feel like a fantasy diorama rather than a functioning organism.
**Fix:** Decide how the city handles water, waste, food, and fuel. These systems shape urban form—aqueducts create neighborhoods, markets cluster near gates, tanners locate downriver.

### 5. Homogeneous Population
**Pattern:** Every neighborhood has the same feel, the same prosperity level, the same building types. No tension between rich and poor districts, old and new areas, native and immigrant quarters.
**Why it fails:** Urban texture comes from variation and contrast. The interesting parts of cities are the edges where different zones meet, where wealth borders poverty, where old meets new.
**Fix:** Design at least three distinct zones with different characters. Create transition areas where they interact. Show the tensions that arise from proximity.

## Integration

### Inbound (feeds into this skill)
| Skill | What it provides |
|-------|------------------|
| worldbuilding | Broader geographic and cultural context |
| governance-systems | Political structures that shape urban form |
| economic-systems | Trade patterns and production that drive settlement growth |
| belief-systems | Religious architecture and sacred geography |

### Outbound (this skill enables)
| Skill | What this provides |
|-------|-------------|
| scene-sequencing | Physical spaces for scene staging |
| positional-revelation | Urban roles that create plot access |
| underdog-unit | Physical constraints for institutional outcasts |

### Complementary
| Skill | Relationship |
|-------|--------------|
| economic-systems | Settlement design needs economic logic; economic-systems need physical expression in markets and districts |
| governance-systems | Political power expresses itself through urban form; use together for consistency |