Neo-Atlantica, the planetary capital of High Atlantic, is one of the largest cities in known space. A permanent population in the high tens of millions is not exceptionally high, but a tourist throughput in the high hundreds of billions surely is. The city is famed for its nightlife and underground music scene, primarily concentrated around the Old City and the former brownfield sites of the East Portlands, while its criminal underworld is renowned for its all-pervading influence and exceptional brutality.
Geography
Neo-Atlantica sits on the southwest coast of Khurran, High Atlantic’s great northern continent, straddling the mouth of the trans-continental river Atlantica. The climate is temperate and the temperature rarely extreme, though the wind blowing in off the Argent Ocean brings a sharp chill to the evening air and there is rather more rain that the Tourist Board finds strictly desirable. Nonetheless, the warm summers are suitable enough for beachfront resorts, and the seaborne currents make even the winter palatable enough that the tourist population scarcely fluctuates year-round.
Khurran’s western plains were the obvious place to built a colonial hub when the world was first settled, and Neo-Atlantica can trace its history back to that first small collection of battered grey prefabs crouched on the shoreline. Since then it has naturally grown substantially, taking advantage off the swathes of empty space offered by the coastal grasslands, and managed to retain its status as planetary capital by occupying an excellent location for a large omni-port, now large enough to service the arrival of three interstellar heavies simultaneously without disrupting regular stratocruiser flights or private shipping.
The city itself has built out concentrically around the Old City. This is a haphazard collection of old high-rises and narrow alleyways, much of it a holdover from the chaotic expansion that immediately followed the Crisis of Faith. The newer parts of the city tend to be more regimented, though the initial plan for numbered streets eventually succumbed to the sheer weight of expansion and plenty of the new districts are just as disorganised as the earliest parts of the city.
Vertical expansion has widely been encouraged despite enormous room for lateral growth, and this has facilitated the accommodation of a large tourist population right at the city centre. This in turn has relieved any potential pressure on public transport and thereby reduced the need for investment from the Tourist Board.
City Districts
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Neo-Atlantica consists of numerous districts, and given the city’s size and social stratification these different areas can be vastly different from each other. While a full outline of individual districts is beyond the scope of this page, some of most significant areas are worth noting:
The Portlands - home to one of the largest omni-ports in known space
Galveston - an enormous slum, exact population unknown, that straddles the river to the South
Old City - some of the most high-brow neon-soaked nightlife in the galaxy
Gangland
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Neo-Atlantica, like most of High Atlantic’s major cities, is half-run by its criminal underworld. Some of the city’s gangs rank among the wealthiest private entities in non-aligned space, with thousands of ‘employees’ and interstellar dealings.