Aslington is easily one of the more well-known parts of Vodeo. Embassies jostle for space among all manner of stores, apartments, and Adelaidean-era houses. Latinian ex-pats wave at their Myrcian neighbours, while the local Mauroi population sit in front of the YemYem! and scream at passers-by. And to top it all off, there sits Parliament upon the riverbank, anchoring the Dominion and providing somewhere for politicians to blow off some steam at each other.
But all is not perfect in Aslington. The suburb wasn't designed with angles in mind, and as a result, the grid is lopsided and doesn't form nice angles. It might sound like a minor thing, but it means that buildings (a lot of which are just too small) don't easily align to the streets, and that just annoys me. I've tried to tinker with it in the past, but there's only so much I can do given the number of buildings that have locked the streets in place. So, I'm planning to tear it down and start again. Here's what I'm thinking:
Almost the entire suburb will be deleted and re-built around a realigned grid that will meet at nice angles. Not everything will go; some buildings and parks that I'm quite fond of will be moved temporarily, and then once the grid has been fixed, move them back and rebuild around them. The plan will involve the demolition of a few embassies, but this gives the owners the opportunity to design new ones once the grid issues are fixed. At the same time, I'll put the railway line back through Aslington; in the past, it was shoehorned in between Cooper Terrace and Dent Street, and you can still see its remnants there. The look of the suburb won't change greatly, it will mostly involve the grid being tightened and a few small squares being scattered about the place. One thing that I've added to the plan since making that map is adding in a new street that breaks the grid, running diagonally from Parliament Street to Godley.
I'm planning on starting work in a day or two, but I'd like to hear your feedback first. If you have any ideas or suggestions for things I can put into Aslington, or changes you think would benefit the plan, then let me know. Aslington is one of Saviso's oldest suburbs IRL, and is basically my "showcase" suburb - it's the most densely-mapped part of Vodeo, and part of that is because of the contribution of other users - so you can probably understand that I want to make it look fantastic.
As usual, rum and bananas are on the house once the dust settles.