To plan a lawful-evil city, I find it easier to start with a lawful-good city with planning values based on antiquity where power is centralized and the rulers have a mandate to rule over their subjects. Really, the only difference between LG and LE in this model is that in LG the ruler is benevolent and wields power and brings order for the good of the people, whereas in LE, the ruler does it for the sake of power itself.
I've always liked the ancient Chinese myths and philosophy on this. Heaven was often depicted as an orderly kingdom and ancient Chinese urban planning would try to build heaven on earth.
I remember seeing pictures of heavenly cities that Xian was supposedly designed from and similar discussions in Hangzhou and Suzhou, when I visited those places, but I can't find images of those paintings online. I did, however, find something even more interesting. The
Wikipedia article on Ancient Chinese urban planning goes into detail on a book from the Western Han,
The Artificer's Record which gives a grid plan for an ideal city:
The carpenters construct the capital city, which is a square of nine li [my note: one li is about 1/3 of a mile] on each side. On each side there are three gates. Within the city there are nine north-south and nine east-west roads; the north-south roads are as wide as nine carriages side by side. The ancestral temple of the ruling house is to the left of the palace, the temple to god of the soil is to the right. The palace faces the court in front and the market is behind it. The court and the market are both one fu in area.
This section goes on to describe the structure and dimensions of important buildings (as well as their historical precedents), and the heights of the towers surmounting the palace, inner city wall, and outer city wall.
There are several cosmologically significant features of this basic urban outline, including cardinal orientation, square shape, (implied) centrality of the ruler’s palace, grid structure, and the prominence of the number nine. The nine-by-nine grid has led some scholars to suggest that the plan is based on the cosmological belief that the Earth is a square divided into nine sections. This structure is reproduced by the magic square, a tool for divination.
In the article they give images of the original notation and modern notation, but easier to understand is the Plan of Chengzhou, which is given as an example:
Further googling led me to a great book titled
The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China. The book is
available in Google Books as a limitied preview and it is full of illustrations. While fascinating and a good source of inspiration, there isn't anything that can be easily lifted and made into a map easily used for gaming purposes, but, still--worth a browse.
A serviceable map of Luoyang, which was built on top of Chengzhou is available from Wikipedia:
But it is not as starkly orderly as the nine-sector "magic square" design. The following map of
Chang'an (now Xi'an) better demonstrates the principle and could be easily adapted for gaming purposes:
Another more modern approach that could still inspire your LE medieval fantasy city is Le Corbusier's "dwelling machines" (he proposed "the demolition of a large part of old Paris to erect sixty-story cruciform towers" see
LINK).
Also, check out maps of the Forbidden City in Beijing. There are plenty of maps readily available online. Just do a Google image search for "forbidden city map".
If you want something geometrical and orderly, but not square, check out maps of Palmanova, and Italian fortress-city built during the Renaissance designed to follow utopic ideals. It is star shaped and can be reskinned to give it an ominous feel:
That's all I have time for now. Hope it was helpful or at least interesting. Looking forward to other ideas posted to this thread.
