Georgetown
Georgetown is the third largest city in Sober Thought and the provincial metropolis (but not capital) of the province of Thuvia.
According to reliable encyclopedia cites, Georgetown was named for the person who laid sight on the site where the city is sited. As the third largest urban agglomeration in the country, it offers a variety of attractions for people of all stripes. It is a magnet for leftwing, nonconformist and libertines throughout the province, section of the country and even the country as a whole.
Its inhabitants prefer to be called Georgetownites, but most of the rest of the country continues to call them Georgetowners not from malice but from inability to remember exceptions to a rule. Locals, though, are so laidback that they can't even muster faux indignation when confronted with misapplied toponyms -- merely reinforcing the current trend. One local wag joked that at this rate, in two generations Georgetownites will become the first people to go extinct from politeness.
Geography
Urban geography
Georgetown as a whole is nestled in valleys located in the foothills of the Thuvian Mountains, so not surprisingly its human habitation has had to adapt to uneven terrain. A foolish insistence on a grid pattern despite natural barriers, not unlike that of RL San Francisco, has resulted in some very steep streets which appear easy to navigate on a map but are found to be less so in real life. Even a cursory look at a physical map shows all the ridges, ravines, valleys and watercourse deltae that make urban planning and construction here a nightmare.
Although not a political capital, the city is still a commercial and social capital so it has lots of interesting and varied architectural styles represented among its public, semi-public and private buildings. There is an especially wide range styles and price ranges in residential housing, with dozens of easily identifiable neighbourhoods in differing price ranges attracting different types of residents. Housing costs in general are the highest in the country because the city's large population is crammed into an area with much less buildable land than it appears on a political map.
Demographics
At 4.9% of the national population, the city accounts for more than a third of the province's total inhabitants. Fuelled by its role as a regional hub, socio-political magnet and its proximity to the borders of other states in the International Democratic Union, its racial and ethnic diversity is second only to that of Schweindorf.
In addition to having a high portion of external migrants, it also has a disproportionately high number of internal migrants for a typical city in Sober Thought. The latter group also tends to be transient as well, so that while the percentage of internal migrants will remain largely unchanged over time, the identities of those migrants will change rapidly. This is explained by the transient nature of college and university students in a city crawling with educational institutions, the type of boom-and-bust industries in its economy, the repatriation of socially marginalised groups when their members realise that moving is not a panacea to social exclusion and by its position as a transportation hub.
Also not surprisingly, for many of the same reasons outlined above, the city is markedly younger than the province as a whole. Steep housing costs encourage elderly pensioners to retire outside the city, in either the rural semi-wilderness areas they grew up in or more likely the staid capital of Chapeauxdix which is even closer.
Transportation
Georgetown has an excellent internal and external transportation infrastructure. Its federally-owned and -operated airport offers international, national and provincial connections through the national flagship carrier, all national domestic carriers and many foreign carriers, although none exercise cabottage flights because airline regulation makes them uneconomical.
Rail transportation is better in Georgetown than in the rest of Thuvia, but the mountains, rivers and valleys make transit more difficult than in flatter provinces like Jarvet, Pastbeshchye and Cholmestay. Intercity and interprovincial passenger service is provided by STferro, the national passenger railway company. Privately operated freight railways -- which also tends to extend much further into Barr, Simon and other regional centres -- have Georgetown as its hub.
Highways suffer from the same problems of physical geography as do their terrestrial cousins, but at least a landslide on one highway doesn't put out the entire system, nor one bottleneck on a long weekend clog all the transportation arteries at once.
Public transit inside the city is also fast, efficient, reliable and cheap. Unlike its larger English speaking counterpart in Central Province, Georgetown does not have any subways for reasons of physical geography, but its elevated monorail network performs the same functions as Schweindorf's subway backbone. Trolleys, buses and handicapped mini-buses are the meat on this skeleton, and they perform as well as the rolling hills and straight streets allow them to.
Economic geography
The primary industries of fishing (with the Winter Run Sober Salmon), logging of old-growth deciduous and coniferous trees, and temperate agriculture (especially fruit growing) are still practiced in and near Georgetown. However, urban encroachment and division of labour have allowed secondary industry to eclipse it. Light manufacturing concerns appear throughout the municipality and in its immediate environs, including sawmills and food processing which is directly related to its primary industries.
But tertiary industries have surpassed both of the previous sectors combined. Financial and personal services top the list, with an active regional stock market, and many trendsetting clothiers and hairstylists. Cultural industries make a strong showing, with music, film and television production being especially strong. Georgetown, Schweindorf and Montroy share in approximately equal portions the lion's share of the domestic video production industry.
Quaternary industry has also become important since the city hosts campuses for four university-level institutions, in descending order of enrollment:
- University of Thuvia at Georgetown (satellite campuses at Chapeauxdix and Thompson), public university
- Institute of Technology of Thuvia (sole campus), public college
- George University, secular private
- Catholic University of Thuvia, religious private
In part because of attraction of the universities, the social makeup of the city is much more cosmopolitan than the rest of the province. Of course, this also creates a cultural disconnect between metropolis and hinterland.
Government and politics
Municipal government and politics
The electorate chooses, in a simple plurality vote, one Lord Mayor at large and thirty-one City Councillors representing single-member districts. The city's six wards consist of four to seven City Councillors who elect one from among their members a Ward Mayor. Together, the seven mayors form an executive committee for the city and can delegate matters from the city council to the ward council.
In fact, this level of government most closely models what the provincial legislature looked like before proportional representation. Single-member districts with multiple candidates tend to favour largish but most importantly cohesive parties in a Westminster system. Thus, more truly left- and right-wing city councillors make it than would be possible in a PR system. This effect is magnified by the whole city's left-wing tilt and the tendency of intracity settlement to concentrate the smaller number of right-wingers into a few districts in two wards.
The Lord Mayor is disproportionately right-wing, being elected by that community about a third of the time when left-wingers can't agree on a single compromise candidate or the periodic revival of the fortunes of the centre occur. The Ward Mayors are fairly representative, with only a slight overrepresentation of the right. Paradoxically, the City Councillors slightly underrepresent the right.
Consider a simple analogy: Four districts with seven voters each. Three pro-left districts have four left and three right voters each, with the reverse proportions found in the one pro-right district. Thus, 54% of the vote earns 75% of the seats. This in a nutshell is the entire problem with single-member district simple-plurality systems.
Provincial-municipal relations
The great divide between the city and the province in which it is located is especially evident in the House of Commoners where centre-left parties dominate in Georgetown and centre-right parties in the rest of Thuvia.
Leftward coalitions are usually led by Georgetown to this presents benefits rather than problems when they exist. However, rightward coalitions are almost equally likely and they present problems rather than benefits. The intergovernmental friction is such that hatred of the smaller provincial capital of Chapeauxdix competes with hatred of the larger national metropolis of Schweindorf in the popular minds of Georgetownites.
Federal representatives
Georgetown is somewhat underrepresented in the federal House of the Federation. It elects nine of the thirty-one constituency seats in the province, 29% of the MHFs vs. 37% of the population; and customarily four of the eight at-large seats (usually filled by right-wingers coming a close second in the urban seats and left-wingers coming a distant second in the rural seats). This brings the percentage up to 33% but still more than a seat lower than population alone would suggest.
When centre-left parties govern the province, two of the three members in the federal House of the Provinces are usually from Georgetown; when centre-right, two are usually from the hinterland. This is yet more manifestation of the leftist urban and rightist rural divide, which was much more pronounced before the adoption of proportional representation but still exists today.
Municipal jurisdictions
According to the constitution, the only two areas of exclusive municipal responsibility are fire and waste. In Georgetown, however, the competing demands of nature conservation and building sites has created a hybrid function which straddles waste disposal and natural resources (a provincial jurisdiction) in a curious way.
Fire
The Lord Mayor, with the advice and consent of the Ward Mayors, appoints a Lord Fire Warden at large and Lord Lieutenant Fire Wardens for each ward. City founders and their successors felt that having a Ward Lord Fire Warden would be too much of a tonguetwister.
Below these are Lord Adjutant Fire Wardens, roughly corresponding to RL pairs of fire companies located in joint firehalls. Normally one company operates a general pumper and the other a more specialised piece of heavy equipment like a ladder, urban rescue or chemical containment structures. Both fall under the command of the Fire Watch, who as three deputies: one each for the watch as a whole and then each piece of equipment.
A hilly urban terrain tends to make response times longer than one would expect and the fire officials themselves hope, but the general sturdy brick-and-steel construction of Georgetown's office, commercial and residential architecture makes this slightly less pressing. While smoke might kill victims before the arrival of firefighters, at least collapsing buildings won't.
Waste disposal and parks
The city has tried to solve several problems in one fell swoop with mixed results but at least with broad political support.
Both serious environmentalists and casual outdoor types have fallen in love with the natural beauty of Georgetown, with its hills, bordering mountains and interlacing watercourses. As city residents though, they also see the need for ploughing land under to make buildings.
The city building code already requires density of occupancy (buildings put closer together and with more stories). However, progressive developers also positively motivated by profit potential and pragmatic conservationists also negatively motivated by eco-destruction potential found another way to make land: infill with garbage, cap with clay and sterile soil, then landscape for parkland.
It's not so bizarre as it sounds at first. While reducing, reusing and recycling creates far less garbage than not following the 3Rs, it still creates some. The three obvious ways of disposing of this are incineration (dump it in the air), aquatic dispersal (dump it in the water) or solid waste storage (dump in on land), each fraught with its own problems.
By taking advantage of the many hills of Georgetown, planners were able to identify ravines which were not close to watercourse and could be safely used as dumps because they were also above the water table. When dumps are full, they are capped and redressed as public greenspaces -- freeing up what would otherwise be parkland for further development.
Upper tier jurisdictions
While these are not truly shared jurisdictions, the municipality of Georgetown has some interest if no direct say in them.
Public disasters
The city neither pays the salaries nor the equipment costs for the Civil Guard units located within its boundaries, but have had occasional to ask the provincial government to call them out to clean up after natural disasters, quell prison riots and aid in searches for missing persons.
Georgetown represents a diverse environment with a densely populated urban core surrounded by rugged mountains, so its Civil Guard units are similarly diverse to meet those challenges. In each wave of one hundred million populaton, the city raises a battalion each in the following regiments:
- The Georgetown Rifles, urban light infantry
- The Georgetown Mountaineers, wilderness alpine infantry
- Thuvian Health Regiment, officially province-wide but really just from the city
- Thuvan Engineers, alternating combat, civil and maintenance engineering units
- Thuvian Transport Regiment, officially province-wide, motor battalions only.
Police
Because the entire province is served by a single police force which often forces its members to move if they want to get promoted, there are fewer long-serving officers in Georgetown than in a similar RL city, but many more than in a smaller Sober Thought city with less opportunity for local advancement. However, an unforseen side effect of the Thuvian Provincial Police policy is that middle-ranking police officers tend to come disproportionately from small towns and remote areas.
When they arrive, many suffer culture shock and make some illadvised and heavy-handed arrests of local hippies for minor recreational sex or drug violations. By the time cultural differences have been worked out and cop-townite relations restored to normal, the offending police non-coms have moved on to higher promotions back in boonies and the offended minor miscreants have moved back to where they lived before uni. The long-serving TPP Chief Superintendent in Georgetown shakes his head, sighs, and watches the whole process resume with the same drama but different dramatis personae.
