Cities in Bottles

[Sindri]

Relatively small scale confined societies are a popular concept in fiction, especially in science fiction and they offer some advantages for a RPG setting.

What are some ways in which a culture might react to being confined to a small area?

[Toptomcat]

Energy would be a problem...at any TL, really. Even a Stone Age village will probably run out of firewood, but a modern city would be in dire and almost instantaneous trouble without outside electricity and fuel. Ditto for food...again, a Stone Age village would start slowly exhausting the roots, berries and game. A medieval hamlet would starve within about a season without being able to take the surrounding farmland with it. And a modern city would likely see a large fraction of people die of starvation and thirst inside of a week, and an overwhelming majority of its population inside of a month.

Assuming both of those issues are somehow taken care of- as well as related ones like waste disposal and, in the case of truly sealed societies, oxygen deprivation and heat dissipation...hmmm. There'd be a natural maximum to the population just for want of living room, even with techniques like building up and digging basements. Inspiration might be taken from real-world hyperdense urban environments, like the Kowloon Walled City. Technological progress would be very limited without any communication with a wider civilization. There'd be substantial genetic difficulties if the original population of the settlement wasn't in the thousands, with an enormous risk of inbreeding and consequent ideosyncratic genetic defects. Plenty of attention would need to be paid to the degree of relatedness of any given pair- perhaps a class of professional matchmakers could keep track? Some kind of system of clans with arranged-marriage interchange?

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Toptomcat

Energy would be a problem...at any TL, really. Even a Stone Age village will probably run out of firewood, but a modern city would be in dire and almost instantaneous trouble without outside electricity and fuel. Ditto for food...again, a Stone Age village would start slowly exhausting the roots, berries and game. A medieval hamlet would starve within about a season without being able to take the surrounding farmland with it. And a modern city would likely see a large fraction of people die of starvation and thirst inside of a week, and an overwhelming majority of its population inside of a month.

Assuming both of those issues are somehow taken care of- as well as related ones like waste disposal and, in the case of truly sealed societies, oxygen deprivation and heat dissipation...hmmm. There'd be a natural maximum to the population just for want of living room, even with techniques like building up and digging basements. Inspiration might be taken from real-world hyperdense urban environments, like the Kowloon Walled City. Technological progress would be very limited without any communication with a wider civilization. There'd be substantial genetic difficulties if the original population of the settlement wasn't in the thousands, with an enormous risk of inbreeding and consequent ideosyncratic genetic defects. Plenty of attention would need to be paid to the degree of relatedness of any given pair- perhaps a class of professional matchmakers could keep track? Some kind of system of clans with arranged-marriage interchange?

I'm thinking about the deliberately designed sustainable city rather than a suddenly isolated community.

Also "city" shouldn't be taken too literally. In addition to science fiction societies with advanced life support technology urban areas surrounded by necessary agricultural lands is a common variety.

Minimum viable population isn't much of a limitation, especially if you want to maintain much tech. I do like the idea of having professional matchmakers or clans just to be careful though.

Pushing for substantial vertical development is quite sensible. Not compromising an area's group support for tall buildings by developing underground works could be a common legal issue.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Sindri

I'm thinking about the deliberately designed sustainable city rather than a suddenly isolated community.

Also "city" shouldn't be taken too literally. In addition to science fiction societies with advanced life support technology urban areas surrounded by necessary agricultural lands is a common variety.

Minimum viable population isn't much of a limitation, especially if you want to maintain much tech. I do like the idea of having professional matchmakers or clans just to be careful though.

Pushing for substantial vertical development is quite sensible. Not compromising an area's group support for tall buildings by developing underground works could be a common legal issue.

A lot depends on just how big the society is. There will be a world of difference between a self-sustaining isolated group of 1000 and a self-sustaining isolated group of 1 million. In the latter case, for many of the individuals in the million, it might not be very different than life anywhere else (modulo the overall nature of the situation).

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

A lot depends on just how big the society is. There will be a world of difference between a self-sustaining isolated group of 1000 and a self-sustaining isolated group of 1 million. In the latter case, for many of the individuals in the million, it might not be very different than life anywhere else (modulo the overall nature of the situation).

That's true. Let's focus on the lower end of the scale where effects will be more significant.

[Johnny1A.2]

Well, again, the details will matter enormously.

But let's say you've got a town of 10,000. If they start out with a healthy population, that ought to be enough to at least potentially maintain a viable genetic base. But here everything depends on the nature of the confinement. It makes a big difference if the town sits somewhere on Earth but limited to an island, say, or sits under a pressure dome on Mars.

A few likely common threads: there will either be formal rules, or informal but iron customs, to maintain genetic spread, the moreso because population presumably can't be allowed to grow, so it's 2.1 kids per fertile female on the average, everything else being equal.

Note that this is 'on average', to maintain population. Holding a steady population requires that the average women have 2.1 kids during the period roughly from age 15 to age 45, it doesn't matter population-wise whether one woman has 4.2 or two women have 2.1 kids, and population-wise the paternity doesn't matter.

But genetically both matter a screaming heck of a lot! So it's likely that women are going to be expected to have kids, with at least social and possibly legal incentives and sanctions in play to encourage this. This flows from the need to maintain population and genetic diversity. If one woman has six kids, your genetic diversity plunges even if the population stays the same.

Likewise, there are going to be disincentive to having more than a couple of kids, because you can't let the population grow and again, you want the maximum genetic spread.

Corollary to this is that you want the maximum genetic spread of paternity, so divorce and remarriage (at least during child-bearing years) is likely to be discouraged, likewise extramarital sex. You don't want one attractive guy fathering a dozen kids for genetic reasons.

The incentives and disincentives may be official, unofficial, or both, but for the community to thrive they'll have to be there and they'll have to be enforced. The smaller the group the harder the rules have to be, the bigger the group the more margin for error there is.

What form could the incentives take? There are many possibilities. Women might not be seen as full citizens until they have 2 kids, for ex. Men might not be full citizens if unmarried. Maybe there are just unofficial but iron social rules that mean you have to have your two kids before you can be seen as a full member of the society.

But the incentives will be there.

Children are likely to be highly protected in a 10,000 person society, because they are precious and you can't risk having very many 'extras' around. Which means that parents will be expected to raise their kids in accordance with social standards that are likely to be pretty strict. The details could vary widely, but this won't be a society very tolerant of eccentric behavior. It won't have that luxury at 10,000.

(Or the eccentricism might be confined to certain areas that have no survival relevance.)

How regimented the society will be in other ways depends on the details of the situation. If they live on an island in the Pacific, for ex, air is free and water may be free, depending on the climate. Food would be the limiting factor.

If they live on Mars, air and water are also tightly important and the margin for error is much narrower, and with it the tolerance for individual foibles and dissent.

We can't just handwave the details, the form of the society will depend heavily on the details of the situation.

[LokRobster]

City of Ember gives a neat treatment of the Enclosed City.

Strict control is often seen as the only way for a small society to continue reliably. Inventiveness and individuality seem to fight against what is needed to sustain the small society, but then are necessary for a small society to survive. It's an interesting dilemma.

The Time of the Great Freeze is a novel (author Robert Silverberg) from the 60s that I remember quite well. The decaying underground survivalist civilization is portrayed in the first couple of chapters, and the rest is the adventure to 'see what's out there' above the glaciers. The society is similar to Ember in its decline.

[starslayer]

On the very low end scale of things many feudal castles contained a small orchard, wells, and oat/what stores capable of providing meagre but sustainable foodstuffs for attempting to last out a months long siege. Of course now we are only talking about at most hundreds of people, and the duration of the disconnect is limited to a season or so.

[nerdvana]

I wonder if the OP meant Cities in Bottles more literally...

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by nerdvana

I wonder if the OP meant Cities in Bottles more literally...

I too thought of Kandor and Liddleville. http://marvel.wikia.com/Liddleville
They have extra problems with self defense as outside actors tend to steal the entire city or literally control the entire populace.

Dystopian examples of normal sized enclosed cities can be found in Paranoia (every citizen is a cloned six-pack, preferably as little genetic variation as possible to prevent mutants, anarchists, communists, etc) and The Machine Stops http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html