City in the middle of nowhere

eh, there's plenty of reasons. You can actually use real life cities that are in pretty ridiculous locations as researchable examples. I don't know where in the world you're located, but Las Vegas is for all intents and purposes out in the middle of nowhere in desert land. As are several lesser themed cities in the western U.S.

I mean there's plenty of reason for it to be built, mostly the obvious reason, there's lot of surface area in the middle of nowhere, you can build quite a city with enough space. Plus seclusion does good things for a city, little competition for business. The local government has a lot more lead way as well when they don't have nearby cities or towns to compete or compare against. I mean a lot of things are made hard, like having functional utilities. But economies in out-of-the-way places usually do quite well despite details like that. Usually I think because of the away from it all environment attracts a certain level of tourism. But I don't know if tourism can really play a part in what it sounds like you might be aiming for.

"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy" - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Personally, I think you should take that typo and run with it. A city in the middle of a dessert sounds like a pretty sweet setting. It would be sure to give lots of sticky situations to make your plot more interesting...

Okay, I'll stop now and blame all that on the fact that it's about 3:00 AM.

Is your story set on Earth or in a fantasy world? Also this would depend on where the technology of your world stands. You said fully modern, but I'm not sure if you meant relative to the real world or relative to the rest of your fantasy world. If it's one you made up, maybe it is simply separated from the rest of the continent or whatever by some harsh environment(possibly a desert, but maybe tundra, marshes, 'impassible mountains', etc). The city itself wouldn't necessarily have to be a part of that environment, but could still be completely cut off by it.

If it's been there for ages, the area could well have been more lush when the city was established.

The only thing you'd really need to think about, I guess, is water source. You'd want a river or something, really, because oases don't seem very reliable. Of course, with a river, you'd need to decide why no one from up- or down-stream had ever sailed past your hidden city.

For some reason, the anime Haibane Renmei comes to mind. There, the city was surrounded by a very, very high wall. If anyone went over, they never came back, which really isolated the place and ensured that no one ever really left (because if you did, you'd never see your home or family ever again).

Other things to consider could include whether the original builders (if you decide to ever mention them) intended for the city to be so isolated, or whether that kind of happened by accident (e.g., all the other nearby cities fall to some disease or something? I unno); whether the city is expanding (popn. growth etc) or not; and where the food and water came from in the past before modern tricks like plumbing, as well as where they come from now.

Isolated cities and deserts really go together, so I would go with a desert too.

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S. Azelma Melmoth

I did the whole 'city in the middle of the desert' thing a few years ago with a novel that I'm now trying to get published. My central idea was that the city was built over a gateway to another world, with whom trade took place. However, I did think up a few ideas as to how the city could be self-sufficient without the gateway, which might be useful for you.

Water is obviously a key concern. I would suggest the use of wells as I think there's often water deep underground beneath deserts. Springs would be another possibility but these would probably develop a green area around them, like an oasis, which you might not want to include in your story.

As for food, this could probably be grown within the city providing there was enough water available for irrigation. Having said that, you'd have to come up with a way for the inhabitants of the city to have got hold of plants/seeds in the first place. Perhaps by magical means if the city is so isolated and there is a functioning magic system?

You might also want to think of a means of waste disposal. Sewers wouldn't really work in a desert as they'd have nothing to empty into. Perhaps toilet waste could be used as manure on crops? I'm not sure how suitable human waste is as manure, rather than animal waste. That could be something interesting (and slightly bizarre) to research! :D

Anyway, I hope that all helps!

Oh wow! That's what I'm doing! This is my third year. This year I'm doing an Adventure~Fantasy I'm thinking Carl Barks style adventure set in a fantasy world backdrop. I'm planning to send my hero off after a "lost treasure", and have him end up in the deep jungle where there's a lost civilization that is totally cut off from the rest of the world and is totally differant from humans as we know them. Not sure yet if it'll be a "magic realm" or not. At the moment, I set mine in the middle of a lush grren jungle, probably South America or PNG but not sure yet. I was thinking that maybe their city was in a volcanic valley, where the mountains were so tall and so forbodin (rumbling and spouting lava) that the people never dared leave the vally, while at the same time outsides thought it was just on big volcano so never went into the valley. That's how I'm planning to isolate my city anyways.

I had started a thread to ask for info here: Carl Barks Style Adventure

You could also have it forbidden by law to go out of the city.
maybe the dessert outside could be so alluring (because of the ice-cream's heavenly flavour or else - siren-type beings seeking to catch humans from the city, etc blah blah) that people venturing out of walls would never want to come back, or after an encouter with the desert would become unable to live in the city for some reason.
laws can be interesting sometimes as you can break them, which implies choice, and then retaliation.
plus you could still go with the pudding puddle !

Rolanda
--
hein? quoi? où ça?

How about Burwell, Nebraska, it has a population of 1100. It is the county seat of and the only municipality in Garfield County, Nebraska. Take a look at the following mapquest link.

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?searchtype=address&country=US&addto...

llkanta,
I hope your story goes as well as these replies, they are quite entertaining! You might consider one of Arizona's old ghost towns or Anasazi ruins areas. The world thinks they were deserted a thousand years ago, but really... there's a really nice Anasazi (they think) petrogliph site near Sedona called V-Bar-V. It was just recently opened to the public and is still so new that archeologists are studying the sun gliphs there to figure them out. Middle of nowhere in the red desert, but the site has water, trees, and sheer cliffs covered with petrogliphs related to the summer solstice.
I like your story premise. May I add you as a buddy and read it? Thanks.

"Double, double toil and trouble
Fire burn and caldron bubble."
Thanks, Willie, love you!

Heya, yes you can have a city in the middle of nowhere. People have mentioned Vegas, but Phoenix is a good example, and so is Tucson. Pretty much any big city in a desert state here in America. But the one thing that you must have, no matter what the technological level is, is access to water. We have the Colorado River pipelines and the water table underneath the desert. We take turns like every 7 years using one or the other to give the water table time to replenish its water. The same goes for any city, anywhere. Most cities are situated near rivers or oceans, and most of the time, both. Oceans for easy trade, and rivers for the obvious reasons. A city like Phoenix or Vegas wouldn't be sustainable at all if the Colorado River suddenly dried up.

Situating a city in the middle of a intense desert will also make sure that most of the people never leave. There will be nomads and trade, but the majority of people won't go out into a desert with no water and no shelter. Egypt was like this, with their 'black land' and the feared 'red land'. The Arabic and Hebrew places were also like this. It's no surprise that three of the world's biggest and well-known religions arose here, with the prophets always going off into the desert and getting visions and hallucinations. Egypt is slightly different since they had a nice wide river and access to the ocean. so they had sea-trade and contact with other cultures going on.

A island chain like the Hawaiian islands would work, they're so far away from other island groups that the first ancestors of the Hawaiian people must have been so lucky to run into Hawaii when they took a shot in the dark and pushed off in their outriggers from their old home island of Tahiti.

Also, you can use human dung to fertilize a field. It was/is called night soil, was probably mixed in with domestic animals' dung. It grew food pretty well, but was a conductor of disease.