Avishraa Reloaded

Water, at least, is not usually a problem. Being directly adjacent to the river, the water table is high enough for the population to get their water from fairly shallow wells - as mentioned, most precincts have one in their courtyard, and it isn't uncommon for individual property owners to dig their own.

Some food can generally be produced on one's own property. In Poradrin, many families keep dresenil, domesticated draconiforms roughly analogous to Earthly chickens, and consume the eggs or - if an animal is no longer productive - the meat. Many properties also have some form of fruit tree for food and shade, and gardening is also not uncommon, usually producing herbs and legumes.

Being a riverside city, fish is widely eaten. While this is particularly true of those living directly on the waterfront, who usually have rafts and boats to fish from, many families sell their excess catch. Likewise, as previously mentioned, the produce of the outlying villages is also sold in the city - particularly root crops, which sometimes face difficulty in the city itself due to the high water table, and cereals. Some properties in the city are also devoted to mushroom farming.

The removal of waste is a more complicated affair. It could be worse - for most people in a pre-modern society, most disposables are biodegradable, one way or another - but still, it's often not a pleasant experience to have it around while it's degrading. While riverside homes can simply dump things into the water, serial offenders will if caught be admonished by their downstream neighbors, who have long recognized that such practices make drinking and bathing less sanitary for themselves.

As for the rest of the city, plumbing does not yet exist. While some streets have gutters, the topography is flat enough that these are only really effective at carrying away water (or at least liquid), with anything else tending to clog them and cause the adjacent street to flood. But since organic waste is rarely useless, there is profit to be made in transporting it from where it is generated to where it's needed, and waste collectors are ubiquitous. Urine and dung are of use in tanning; bones can be calcined for bone ash, used as fertilizer; various scraps can be composted. The industries that use them will pay the collectors to get them, and residents may also pay to have them taken away. It's not a profession that many people like doing, but it's certainly a living.

In the absence of centralized emergency services, equivalent arrangements are usually made by the precincts in the form of community watch rotations, partly because of intense mutual interest in having a safe neighborhood and partly because of deep community ties. Through some predetermined process set by the precinct - which may vary from place to place - the precinct is patrolled by several members whose job it is to watch for situations that might require a wider response and alert the community if one occurs. Usually watchmen are equipped with a horn, with which to spread the alarm (with different signals used for different types of alarm), and a lightweight weapon. Many precincts have an elevated platform near the well, that the watchmen operate from; often one will man the platform while the others fly around, taking turns at these duties as they tire of flying.

The somewhat cellular layout of the city means that fire does not spread quite as readily in Poradrin than it might in a human city; while individual homes catch fire quite commonly, for fires to be allowed to get large enough to threaten other properties is rare, as unusual amounts of smoke are easily visible to flying watchmen. The one who spots the fire sounds their horn, and other precinct residents within hearing gather at the well, from which the watchman on the platform directs a bucket chain to the affected home.

Preindustrial human cities saw an increase of crime at night both because fewer people were walking the streets (being asleep) and because, in the absence of widespread light, those humans up and about could not see an attacker clearly. The long day-night cycle of Avishraa, however, means that many species, including all three known sophont species, are well-adapted for activity at either day or night and sleep more or less when they find it convenient. As a result, a would-be criminal suffers several problems in that there is rarely a time when the streets are not populated and that, unless the target and her habits are known in advance, there is no guarantee that she could be caught sleeping - and the previously-mentioned watchmen will, of course, be patrolling.

Individual criminal enterprise is at a disadvantage in such an environment, and things like muggings and burglaries are in fact relatively rare and usually performed out of desperation. City life in Poradrin is unhygienic and noisy, but it's relatively safe from overt threats to life or property. Rather more prevalent are acts of what might loosely be called organized crime but which, in a fairly law-free environment, are viewed by the Poradrics as something more like unethical business practices, usually under the control of all- or mostly-male gangs.

There are actually very few truly public spaces in Poradrin. While each precinct has its courtyard, which is a common area, it is both frequently used and subject to a kind of loose “community ownership” and most precincts make it a point of pride to see that the courtyard is kept neat and well-graded. The same is true of the precincts' internal lanes, which are essentially extensions of the courtyard.

The roads separating the precincts, however, as well as the city wall, are somewhat more problematic. Both are alike in that they are 1) vital to the good of the city, 2) on no one individual's property and therefore no one individual's problem, and 3) too big to be consistently maintained from a small scale.

Most roads in Poradrin are kept sufficiently clean by the everpresent collectors, but keeping them passable is a different kind of task. None of the roads are paved, and only the most important ones are gravel roads; the others are simple dirt roads. Both are highly susceptible to the wear of use and to rain, and without frequent maintenance frequently become unusable.

While regrading of roads is most visibly done via fundraising by business owners - whose livelihoods may depend on being able to move goods along the streets - the success of such campaigns often depend on the road, and on which other roads are competing for the same funds. This leaves certain other roads chronically undermaintained, and this is one of the gaps that criminal gangs have filled; precincts isolated by deteriorating roads often find themselves paying one of the gangs to have them repaired.

The city walls, by contrast, are a far more serious matter. Any resident can manage to ignore the condition of a street that he or she never uses, but a damaged city wall is of concern to everyone who relies on it for protection. One of the stipulations in the pact that holds sway over the city is that, when wall repair is called for, all precincts must answer - with labor and materials.

Many of the other areas that in a human or takma city might be considered public spaces are, in Poradrin, a type of property. Marketplaces such as the Great Commons, for example, are also precincts with their own set of inhabitants, but with a different layout and different rules of use than 'traditional' precincts; instead of a ring of homes, each with a walled surrounding space, surrounding a small courtyard, individual homes in a market precinct generally abut each other directly from side to side; the walled open space associated with each home is behind it in a “back yard” arrangement, while the front face of each home includes a space with a counter and a small amount of storage, which directly faces a large courtyard. These spaces may be used by the inhabitants themselves, if they have something to sell, but are often rented to others; the same is true of the courtyard, in which for a fee (divided equally among the residents) the precinct will allow temporary stalls to be erected. Marketplace living is generally considered far more noisy and stressful than a 'traditional' precinct, but homes in a market precinct are nonetheless highly coveted, as they have a reputation for allowing one to make an easy living.

Another example of this is the Forum. The Forum is by far the largest building in Poradrin, and is to the city what a courtyard is to the precinct; any event of multi-precinct, or even citywide, importance, is held here, and is the site of the great city councils that occur when momentous decisions need to be taken.

Unlike the markets, which are entire precincts unto themselves, the Forum is one single property unto itself. Although the precise details are lost to time, the city's pact mentions that the maintenance of the Forum as a property is part of the honoring of an ancient bargain with the Forum's founder: that, so long as the property contained a building that allowed meetings and gatherings “for all of the City”, it and everything on it would be bound by no rules except those of the city as a whole: it would not be part of any precinct.

Ownership of the Forum has remained within the same lineage, mother to daughter, since its founding, and the owner and her rather enormous brood live in part of the property. However, maintaining and operating the building requires more people than one family can provide, and a considerable amount of resources. For the former, however, there is an easy solution; since unmarried males rarely own property and wander the landscape in groups, there is often no shortage of them looking for places to stay and ways to make a living. As a result, the Forum has long has a policy of allowing living space to anyone who, in turn, allows themselves to be employed at the Forum - not in collecting admission, which is entrusted only to family members and other trusted individuals, but in most other aspects of the Forum's operation.

By and large, it works out well enough; the Forum gets a cheap workforce and the workforce gets cheap accommodation. Regardless, since no actual wage is involved, the Forum workers often have to have other occupations on the side in order to survive, and therefore the building either hosts, or is the source of, a number of other ventures; a surprising number of the city's criminal gangs are based there.