How many buildings in a medieval city?

the Jester

Legend
Hey folks- I'm working on mapping a city for my upcoming urban game, and I'm unable to find any real indication of what the population density per building is like. In a typical very large city in medieval times, what was the average population per building? How many of a city's buildings were housing as compared to businesses or other non-homes?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
 

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Lwaxy

Cute but dangerous
It really depends on your world. The poorer the country/region, the denser the population. In slum ares and other poor housings, you can very well expect a family of 12 to live in one room, with the houses 2 or maybe 3 stories high. The richer the area, the less people live in a room and house, with the rich housing their servants.

Maybe this will help, too.

http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
 

diaglo

Adventurer
and how old is the city?
often things like sewer, water, markets, and walls could have been built by earlier empires. heck they could be even buried under the current one and forgotten.
 

the Jester

Legend
and how old is the city?
often things like sewer, water, markets, and walls could have been built by earlier empires. heck they could be even buried under the current one and forgotten.

The city is several centuries old, perhaps a thousand years at most.

Its population is no longer as big as it once was, but at its height it had about 70,000 people in it (which included around 10,000 refugees).
 

Celebrim

Legend
I generally divide population by 12 to obtain domiciles, then add on 20% or so to obtain outbuildings of various sorts - barns, coups, silos, etc. Of course, a few of the buildings are going to be larger manor type dwellings, but I figure that sort of thing comes out in the wash. For every palace you make, there are probably a several buildings with few or no residents as well.

Exactly how you 'paint' those numbers depends on the style of city you are making. The current city the campaign is in is one of the 10 or so largest on the world at 140,000 inhabitants, but was originally founded by air genasi and so, long ago, before their empire collapsed had a large amount of flying technology. That technology is in decay, but the buildings and structure of the city still depends on it - it's one of the few places in the world with many residential buildings of more than 2 stories, and 7-10 story buildings aren't unknown. Many buildings have streets running over their roofs - streets seldom used any more because flying/levitating traffic is almost non-existent. All this creates an extremely high population density, and an increasing economic burden on the city that is part of the current stories subtext. The people need magic to continue to enjoy the lifestyle they are accustomed to, but they are running out of it and unable to repair what's getting broken.

That city looks nothing like a 'medieval' city.

For a more typical very large medieval city I might do a quite small dense urban center surrounded by a wall that was the original economic/political center, and then a patchwork of very closely spaced villages and hamlets extending about it for a mile or two in all directions with about 1/4 mile between 'villages' (16 little neighborhoods per square mile) and 60-80 buildings per village. That works out to about 10-11k people per square mile, not that different than some modern urban areas albeit with more 'yard' and less 'bedroom', and with about half the land still in some sort of cultivation. Outside the walls houses would have small garden plots, pig sties, small orchards, and so forth gradually being overtaken by less agrarian pursuits. I'd mess up the grid with a few small brooks and streams wandering around then gravitate nearby villages toward the streams, and line them with mills and mill ponds and the like, and add a major river or sea harbor. Keep in mind there is zero sanitation. The waste of all the people and their animals is flowing down the same stream that is used for washing, drinking, and powering the mills, although in medieval times this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that you've got this crop land sucking up manure everywhere. (Ironically, there are in medieval cities actually public baths, fed by springs or wells, were people can go to get clean water to bathe in. The medieval are generally cleaner than the early moderns, who didn't bathe - because all the baths get shut down by the black death and people don't start bathing again for 400 years or so.) Then I'd draw major roads between the villages, build an irregular grid around the intersections and sprinkle black squares everywhere, leaving a few big squares for churches, monasteries, and the like.

At this point in time, there is little distinction between 'place of business' and home. Economic production is centered in the home and distributed across the community, and businesses are generally in the home. The biggest factories/employers are probably also monasteries, which often have lots of both water power and man power. If you have a shop, you probably sleep above it or next to it in the same building. If you have employees, they probably sleep in the shop. Servants more or less sleep where they work - cook in the kitchen, stable boy in the barn, cinder wench by the fire place (which isn't all bad in the winter), maid outside the door to her ladies' chamber (in an antechamber or drawing room if she's lucky, in the hall if she isn't).

Beyond that zone we'd leave the city proper and thin out to one village every 2-4 miles with broader fields and pastures between them. Beyond that, we get truly rural, with villages spaced about every 8 miles - one days drive by ox cart. Big cities like that though would be importing food from not only a 30-40 mile radius, but probably by ship from around the world. Food production has been globalized a lot longer than is commonly realized. Rome for example couldn't feed itself without regularly wheat shipments from Egypt, and was really consuming excess crops from across the Empire - oil from Greece, salted fish and cured meat from Spain, etc.

As the things got less medieval, roads would get more paved, and the dense urban area would increasingly creep out around the old walls eating up the older medieval town.
 
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steeldragons

Steeliest of the dragons
Epic
Having been to a number of medieval cities throughout southern France and Germany, I would say the vast majority of buildings will have occupants.

The buildings in the city that would not, automatically, have people living there would include the church (in a D&D world "large city" I expect there would be multiple temples to multiple deities, but whatever suits your world's religion/s), a jail, chancery/courthouse, granaries (for the lord's/keep's food reserves, if not the city as a whole) and that about does it. Assuming a "large city" as you said, you would take into account things like theatres and arenas for public games/spectacles, warehouses, fortifications (toweers, a gatehouse, etc...), a library (depending on the size/culture level of this city)...places like that, that might have a few folks stationed there/caretakers/watchmen, but no one "living" there per se.

Just as a completely average/on the whole/guess, I would say make 1 building per 10 a non-residence building. Certainly no more (barring in-story reasons, see below). Maybe even 1 in 20.

The normal streets and shops and inns and taverns, assuming streets lined with 2 or 3 story buildings, are all dwellings for someone. Either in some back rooms attached to the shop or in the upper story(-ies). The smithies/forges probably abut the smith's family's dwelling, etc...

The number of actual persons, that's a matter of you to decide in your campaign world. Is this city affluent enough that average families/households are 10 or 12 members? Is there a culture of promiscuity? Worship/revere a fertility god? Does the city house refugees from the neighboring warring kingdoms and so population density has doubled in the last 2 years...tensions are constantly at a breaking point these days? Or simply overpopulated?

Is everyone crammed in with foodstuffs in constant short supply, so families over
4 are considered odd and/or reserved for/considered a sign of the wealthy? Is there a law forbidding [or demanding?!] families over X? Did a plague move through the region a decade ago, so you have whole streets of buildings that house no one (believed to still be cursed or some such) or a block of ten homes with only a few members of 5 (of the original 20) families remaining there?

And, of course, the style and construction of the architecture of your medieval city will also play into the possible numbers you can support.

The city may be constructed with 1 shop at street level, 1 room for the family on top...maybe a loft/attic third floor. Maybe buildings are crammed in narrow but deep (3 or 4 rooms along but no more than 10' wide) with alleyways behind/between them and the buildings from the next street over. Maybe, in a D&Desque medieval/magical world, maybe there were dwarf engineers helping in the city's construction and/or mages involved, so you have bent/unique/twisting/soaring/"impossibly tall" 6-10 story buildings housing dozens of families each - and the casting of Dispel Magic within the city walls is completely against the law/may cause collapses :devil: - (as in real world cities, where you have limited/run out of horizontal space, you build "up").

There's no real formula for this.
Soooo...yeah. This probably didn't help at all. lol. Sorry. More "stuff/variables to consider/think about" than "an answer."
 

SkidAce

Legend
Supporter
I use A Magical Medieval City as my go to. The author had a web page a long time ago were you put in the population and it generated city blocks.

Here is a page from the DnD Wiki with similar info. http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/A_Magical_Medieval_City_Guide_(DnD_Other)/Generating

That's if you want to go the detailed route. Some of the suggestions above are simpler and just as effective in play.

But if you like that stuff, I would recommend picking up all the pdfs in the series. Love them!
 

howandwhy99

Adventurer
Yeah, "A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe" is the best thing I know of too without asking a professional historical geographer.

My answer is: It's going to be what you want it to be, but you can account for all kinds of stuff you want accounted for.

So, cities are basically treated as fortifications of non-mobilized monster populations in D&D. How these are built depend on Alignment (culture, religion), race or monster type (including life needs), knowledge and classes, population size, time, available building materials, and plenty of other potential factors over time (history matters). In short, Lawful creatures build, Neutrals take what they can, and Chaotic ones kill others and move in.

The Jester said:
The city is several centuries old, perhaps a thousand years at most.

Its population is no longer as big as it once was, but at its height it had about 70,000 people in it (which included around 10,000 refugees).
So a lot of your buildings will be run down and empty. With a wealth of housing populations will more likely disperse by relationship then (family, marriage, friends) not just money and availability. I expect the poorer parts of the city are those evacuated by the civil population. A large refugee population means there was likely a large area of makeshift housing in parks, outside the city center, outside the gates, or wherever else they could be accommodated. But how long ago were the refugees there? Temporary housing doesn't last nearly as long and materials like wood are scavenged for their value.

A very old city like you have will almost certainly have many large buildings, famous locations, repurposed areas and buildings, varied architectural designs over time, several different population groups with lasting ties to the city, some serious cosmopolitan tastes either current or in aged traditions, a good deal of interbreeding and intermixing of other cultures into its own unique variety, and not least a ton of secrets built in over the years (many forgotten).
 

Zardnaar

Legend
Varies generally population density is crammed with some exception. Constantinople at its height probably had a population of around 300k, when it fell to the Turks it had a population of around 50k so the city was semi deserted by most accounts. There were some stats around for buildings in ancient Rome as well which was notoriously cramped.
 

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