Realistic Cities For Dummies

[smileymk]

Hey guys. It's time for Part 2.


Lesson 11 Part 2 - Power Lines


Even though power is distributed through underground cables in towns, that power still needs to get to the towns somehow - and it would be prohibitively expensive and impractical to bury the thousands of miles of high-voltage cables required to do so beneath the surface.


So we build the cables overhead instead, and connect them to transformers when they hit the towns, running them at lower voltages underground from there.


But this presents the problem of where to put the power lines. Like your transport networks, the routing of your power lines needs to be done carefully. We don't want a huge, ugly set of power lines running through the middle of a suburb or in the inner city. It's unrealistic, looks horrible and is a waste of space.


The solution I will adopt, and one you should consider adopting, is to run the main cables along main transport routes. This will keep them away from houses and shops.


So let's do that. You'll remember from Part 1 that there's an expressway that runs south of the power station and across our region, so it makes sense to route it along that:



Notice we have 3 sets of lines. Each set is going to go off in a different direction, so that the power station covers a wide area beyond our region.


You just need to continue the lines down this main road, keeping as close to it as practical - but at the same time, keep the lines as straight as possible:



Yes, the lines curve to follow the expressway, but notice how they stay dead straight either side.


We now come to the railway line, which you'll notice is electrified. It needs to take its power from somewhere! And we need to provide power to the north of the city, so it makes sense to have the northernmost set of power lines split off from the 3 and carry on north alongside the rail line:



Run that 'branch line' off to the edge of the tile. When that's done, we need to construct a transformer to connect the power line to the railway catenary wires, and to reduce the voltage to railway levels (anything from 600V - 25kV, depending on where you are):



Now we can just carry on the main set of lines, now reduced to 2 sets, until we hit the motorway, where the southernmost set of lines will split and branch off down the motorway, into our town, where we will build another transformer:



We'll focus our attention on the branch to the town now, the other branch being routed to the edge of the tile to be extended later. Continue the town branch down into the town.


When you reach the end of the motorway (or at some suitable point not too far into your town), stop the line and flatten a 4x4 area for a transformer:



Then build the transformer and run lines into the adjacent tiles to provide them with power (ideally we'd make these connections 'underground' but there's no way to do this):



And that's the power lines done for this tile. Time to move to the next one, to the east, where we have an instant problem:



We want this line to curve to the south, to cover that tile. Now we could just drag from the easternmost pylon, but that would leave a 'hole' of space which we can use for a couple of houses. So instead, we're going to drag down from the first pylon:



THEN you can demolish that pylon on the right:



If you try to do this the other way round, i.e. demolish the rightmost pylon first, you will demolish the first pylon as well, taking the connection out with it. So you'll just have to build it again and do it the correct way round.


That's done, now to complete the lines we just have to carry our main set eastwards along the expressway, but we again hit on a problem:



We have a needless pylon in the third tile, with just 2 tiles between the 2 edge pylons. It's not far enough.


The solution: just take out that middle pylon and rebuild the connection by dragging from the 10th tile to the edge:



Looks much better doesn't it? Now we can just continue the line along the expressway, all the way to the eastern edge of the tile where it will leave our region for other towns:



One last step - you need to arrange the neighbour deals so that all of the tiles in your region receive power from the tile with the power station:



For this 4-tile region, you'll only need to go into 2 tiles (the power station tile and one connected tile) to set up the  arrangements to send power to all 4 tiles.


And with that, you should be able to create a realistic power distribution system in your region.


In Lesson 12 we'll learn how to do something equally important - water systems.


Until then,
Chris

[art128]

This is excellent, Chris! And by far one of the most useful tutorial ever. Really inspiring and well done. Everything presented is looking fantastic and realistic.

And congrats on 200+ replies, you really deserve them. Now up to many more!

[smileymk]

Hello.


art128: Thank you very much. (I should have known I wouldn't get away with passing the 200 barrier unnoticed...)
And up to many more indeed! Only 299 posts to the Classics section...


...which now becomes 298 with this lesson.


Lesson 12 - Water


In this lesson you'll learn how to construct a reservoir to supply your region with water. You'll then learn a realistic way to lay out water pipes.


We'll start with the reservoir - and the first thing you need to know about these is that they need to be huge. We're talking anywhere between 50-100 tiles long and 15-25 tiles wide. They should also be flat, else they won't look right at all.


So you need to find a suitably large flat-ish area, and flatten it completely with single road tiles. It's best to start with the edges:



You should use the grid to determine where your reservoir boundary should go. You don't want big cuttings or embankments.


And if this looks small to you, it is. We're going to pretend that the reservoir extends north of the tile/region boundary, enabling us to use an area that is outside of the town itself (the town being everything south of the expressway), and also to give the impression that there is a world beyond the boundary, creating more realistic results.


Now fill in the gaps and create a road border around the flattened area:



Then you need to place the water itself, for which you need a suitable water MMP, such as the PegPond set or Jeronij's transparent water. The choice, as always, is yours - I've used Peg's set but you don't have to.


The technique for plopping the water is as follows:


- Demolish the single road tiles but NOT the border.
- Keep the gridlines on.
- Place 1x1 water MMPs into every complete grid tile inside the road border. Click once and only once in each square.
- Place additional lots as necessary to fill in any small gaps.
- Demolish the road border, taking care not to take out the water with it (i.e. single-click on the road tiles only).
- Use 1/4 tile MMPs (again with single clicks) to smoothen out the edges.


When done, you should get a result like this:



Oh yeah. You can (and should) detail this further with other MMPs, but this is something for another lesson entirely. For now our focus is on making this reservoir a useful source of water for our city.


To do this you need to place a suitable lot adjacent to your reservoir. The lot needs to function as a water source in the game, and it should look the part. I found this lot from Somy to be a good tool for the job:



Oh yeah - don't forget to a) flatten out the right area of ground beforehand unless you really want massive concrete retaining walls, and b) make sure that your water source is connected to the power grid, otherwise it won't work.


You then need to prepare the terrain for a water treatment facility and a 3x3 electrical substation. These should be adjacent to the water source itself. You also need to provide road access, and if you used a lot that doesn't incorporate car parking unlike this lot, a small car park:



Then you need to place down these facilities:



And that is your water source complete. (You can, if you want, also add a security fence.) Now it's time to connect it to the region.


The strategy for laying water pipes is to lay them down along roads. This makes them easy to get at for maintenance, and saves you money because you only lay down water pipes as you build roads, so you only build pipes as and when you need them. Don't forget to take the pipes outside the regional boundaries, remembering that this source will serve a good few towns as well as our own:



Notice that I haven't laid pipes along the expressway. Imagine the chaos that would be caused if the expressway had to be dug up to maintain the pipes. Digging up lesser roads should have a less profound impact.


This next image illustrates laying pipes down in the city - you need to follow roads and streets, building pipes only as you build roads:



Once your pipe layout is complete, finish off by setting up the neighbour deals to supply the other city tiles with water:



And that is your water supply completed.


In Lesson 13 we'll look at waste disposal facilities - i.e. recycling centres.


See you then,
Chris

[jmyers2043]

Makes sense. I also like the Somy bat but have only used the Fukushima plant for power. Hadn't thought of using the other bat for water until now.

- Jim 

[mike3775]

I really wish someone would make a lift station lot, as that is about the only realistic thing missing from the game.  Lift stations come in handy where pipes are used in hilly area's and keep the water/sewage flowing up hills before gravity takes over again.

This is looking great smiley, and congrats on 200

[gf_bay]

Looking forward to the next update. As a newbee, I love your tutorials - they sure helped getting started.

[smileymk]

Hey guys. I know, it's been a while, mainly because of a holiday, getting a place at university and a soon-to-be-replaced non-compliant laptop which takes all day to load a city have been getting in the way... thanks once again for your unwavering patience and your very nice comments, which I will respond to now.


jmyers2043: They are very good BATs indeed, although I'm not sure if the water lot would look that good on its own... it certainly works best placed as part of a reservoir.


mike3775: Thanks. Personally I've never seen a lift station in the flesh and didn't know they even existed until you mentioned them, so it certainly wouldn't be the first thing I'd think to make. Maybe we could make it in Project 4, when we learn to make BATs? Mind you, by the time that happens someone will probably have made one. As always, we must be patient.


gf_bay: Well, you need look forward no more! I'm very happy you like the lessons - if they're helping then that means that this whole thing has been successful, which is very good news indeed.


Time now for our lesson.


Lesson 13 - Recycling Centres


This lesson will cover constructing a recycling centre as the waste disposal service in our city. You might remember that in Project 1 we learnt how to build a landfill. Well this is another way to reduce city garbage, and it's a lot cleaner too.
It's also a lot simpler to build, and because of that this is a very short lesson. However, you do need to give some thought to where you put it.


If you look at our plan from Lesson 1 then you'll see that we plan to place our recycling centres in industrial areas, and this reflects how things are in real life. It should be fairly obvious why this is the case.


We also need to provide good road access for our centre. We want people to use it, so it has to be easy to get to. With that in mind we start by building this road access:



You need at least two access points from main roads, as shown here (the one to the south is off-shot), and the route from these access points should be very simple and straightforward - our centre will go in the middle next to the curve, so you can see how easy it will be to get to it.
Also, avoid kinks and excessive turns in the road - remember that this will become an industrial estate and we will have huge lorries coming down here as a result, so build the road to suit them.
And finally, notice that we've dressed up the street with SAM asphalt textures. You should be very familiar with using SAM because we used it extensively in Project 1. If not, you need to go back and have a look before continuing on.


You also need to add turn lanes on your main roads where the access streets branch off - again, we covered this in the Utilities lesson in Project 1, so you should know how to do it:



Now you can prepare the terrain ready for your recycling centre. You first need to find out how big it is, and then flatten out the correct area of terrain (in this case it's 4x3 tiles):



Those curves on the main roads also need smoothing, but that can wait for when my laptop can be bothered and isn't really relevant to recycling centres, so we press on and leave that for improving some other time.


Right, now we can replace that set of single road tiles with our lot.
Surprisingly, there isn't a huge choice of recycling centres on the main exchanges. One that does exist, and is very good indeed, is the BLS Recycling Centre, which we use here:



Why is it good? It looks very much the part, it's well detailed, it's attractive and it has a security fence around it, so we don't have to build one. Therefore, after setting up the neighbour deals with the other city tiles in the region, we are done.


Next time we will look at building landmarks - football stadia, lighthouses, statues and other interesting things to put in your city.


See you then,
Chris

[art128]

Hello Chris!

Sorry to have missed the last update.. I have no real reason.

Really nice work around the water reservoir and the recycling centre. They both looks really good, the water reservoir is well done as well. I don't know if we have such plant here in France ( I really have no idea).. but it might be a good idea for my MD...


It's a shame you don't have more comments, you really deserve them. 

[Reform]

It's a shame you don't have more comments, you really deserve them. 

I came out of lurking mode just for that note. 

[mike3775]

mike3775: Thanks. Personally I've never seen a lift station in the flesh and didn't know they even existed until you mentioned them, so it certainly wouldn't be the first thing I'd think to make. Maybe we could make it in Project 4, when we learn to make BATs? Mind you, by the time that happens someone will probably have made one. As always, we must be patient.

I have to go by one tomorrow, I will grab a couple pictures of one, and I think once you see the pictures you will realize you have seen them before just never really noticed them, because if they are landscaped properly, you really never see them.

I agree about the lack of comments, this guide is very useful to anyone who plays the game, and I will say it again, there are things in this that I have started to incorporate into my playing the game, and I never really thought about recycling centers(I usually just use the CSX Waste to Energy plant), but I may just start using them, as that BLS center looks pretty snappy

[smileymk]

Good news! My new super-fast, ultra-modern laptop is now up and running with SC4 installed and working outstandingly well, which means that the wait between updates should now be measurable in days rather than weeks.
The less good news... you always forget something when doing a big job like a 4GB file transfer and in my case it was to transfer the first few pictures for this lesson over. It shouldn't affect the lesson too much, but it will mean there's going to be a bit more talking at the start. Just an advance warning.
Now to business.
art128: You have absoutely no reason to be sorry. Nobody can be on SC4D all the time. Occasional casual reading is very much appreciated, I assure you.
If you're unsure whether or not something exists in real life, and hence whether to include it in your MD, the only way to find out is to do the appropriate research. Search for a reservoir in France on Google Maps, for example.
With regards to the comments, I don't want to start badgering people for comments because that will just annoy everyone. I might occasionally ask for a little assistance in hitting a milestone, and will point out if we have hit a milestone, but that's it. Even just one comment is appreciated and is enough for me to know that there is sufficient interest in this for it to be worth continuing.
Reform: Firstly, welcome (back, if appropriate) to active membership. I hope you enjoy it :). Secondly, thanks for choosing to 'de-lurk' on this MD. It's very satisfying to know that people are taking the time and showing the courage to make that post to show their appreciation for RCFD, so thank you.
(NB. I'm not saying in any way that lurkers are cowards. I'm just aware that making that first post can be very hard, because I've been there myself and I'm sure all of you have too.)
mike3775: You're probably right. I'm guessing lift stations don't look too obvious and are easy to dismiss as unimportant buildings. I should really investigate them on Google Maps or something like that, because they are clearly more important than they seem and would be a nice inclusion in our next projects.
Now, time to build ourselves a couple of landmarks.
Lesson 14 - Landmarks
What was wrong with the town we built in Project 1? You might be struggling for answers. After all, it was well landscaped, properly planned, had schools, a hospital, all the facilities you'd expect to have in a town, good transport connections and it looked OK. It was a nice town, right?
But it was just that - a town.
There was nothing special about Faulkner's Bridge. It had nothing to make it stand out, make it special, nothing to give reason for people to come there. It was just a place to live and work, and it was little more than a dormitory town.
The way you give a town that uniqueness and special nature is to put things of interest in it - landmarks. Things like stadia, statues, museums, concrete cows... They all give a town a particular identity, something that, if replicated in SC4, will result in much greater realism.
In this lesson we'll learn to build two landmarks for our city: a football stadium and a lighthouse.
(NB. By 'football' I mean the sport that is called 'football' in England, which those west of the pond call 'soccer', with Lionel Messi and the falling over and the whining at referees. Just to avoid any confusion.)
We'll start with the football stadium. Now I said there was going to be a bit more text because I managed to forget to transfer the first few pictures to my new laptop. So I'm going to summarise in bullet point form the steps to get from nothing to this:

- Select a site that is a) large, b) relatively flat and c) near a lot of main roads.
- Flatten out a large area (about 30x30 tiles), using the single road tile method.
- Demolish the middle tiles to leave a 'border' of tiles to work with (in a similar way to what we did for the reservoir).
- Build the stadium. The exact stadium you use is, as always, down to personal choice. (It doesn't have to be football.)
- Build streets around the stadium for access to it, the ancillary buildings to be built later, and the car parks.
- Construct lots of access roads like you see in the picture, to enable as smooth a flow of matchday traffic as possible. Use the single road tiles as anchors to prevent the edges of the large flat area from becoming sloped.
- Demolish the now-redundant single road tile border.
You now need to add SAM to these streets to properly simulate car parks and access roads. Use SAM-1 (car park textures) and SAM-7 (asphalt textures) to do this:

(I may have said this before, but any street you build should not be considered complete without SAM textures. Ever.)
Now this picture raises a question. How did I manage to get the two SAM textures to work together like they do to the left of the stadium? A closer look ought to help us find out:

Basically you place starter pieces at every 'branch' out of the junction between the two SAMs and drag streets as appropriate until the junction becomes clean and tidy.
(WARNING: This gets messy with more complicated setups. Until a SAM equivalent of P57 comes out (which won't be for a very long time), you'll just have to try for the best result you can get.)
Right, now we can focus our attention on the things to go around the stadium. Many stadiums have commercial outlets next to them, which provides places for fans to go before and after the game and provides extra income for the football club. We include them here, using buildings like kevdan25's McDonald's and Burger King outlets, the Kiloutou building from Krio and PEG's Krispy Kreme police station:

Notice that I've built a temporary power connection and a permanent water connection to stop these buildings abandoning.
Now we will construct car parks. It's the same procedure as always, and you need to fill the entirety of the large flat area:

This will take you a while, purely because of the sheer scale of what you're doing, but as you can see, it's worth it.
To finish off, we're going to a) connect the ped mall around the east and north of the stadium complex to the car parks, and b) use MMP trees to create a border around the stadium:

Oops! Almost forgot part c) - adding turn lanes to the junctions between main and access roads where appropriate:

And that is our stadium complex complete. And it looks rather impressive.
Now we move on to the lighthouse. It's fair to say that building one of these is a much simpler matter.
All you have to do is to flatten a small area of land by the sea:

Now you just replace those single road tiles with a lighthouse and a small car park, which in this case are done using the Flat Holm lighthouse and the SAM-1 textures respectively:

And that is your lighthouse, and the lesson, complete.
In Lesson 15 we will learn to construct a historical district - the 'old town' which has existed for hundreds of years.
Now if you'll excuse me I need a shower and some sleep as I've got a nasty feeling I'm in for a 3am fire drill tonight, so see you next time.
Chris

[Durfsurn]

Really nice Chris!

[Terring7]

Very inspirational . My suggestion is to build mass transit, like bus stops and subway stations. This will bring more Sims to the landmarks and reduce the need of car and parking garages.

[mike3775]

Very inspirational . My suggestion is to build mass transit, like bus stops and subway stations. This will bring more Sims to the landmarks and reduce the need of car and parking garages.

I agree with that, but really, most stadiums still require acres upon acres of parking because 90% of the fans tend to drive to the games.

Looking good Smiley

[yochananmichael]

Fantastic update Chris!!! I too would say that it would be realistic to add mass transport to get to landmarks such as your Soccer (Football, sorry I'm from the US) Stadium. Perhaps your going to cover this when you get to a lesson on mass transit, maybe? Anyway great update and cant wait till you come out with your next one.

[smileymk]

Hey guys. Yes, it's time for another lesson already. I did say that my new laptop was fast.
Now, before I respond to your comments, I've noticed recently that this MD has racked up quite a lot of views - well over 30,000 in fact. In the Best Sellers section, that view count is second only to an MD which is very close to being promoted to the Classics section.

This does not mean, of course, that this MD is the second-best in the section. Far from it. But what it does mean is that lots of you are taking the time to have a look at it, and I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who has contributed to those 30K+ views. It means an awful lot, trust me.

And now I will respond to your comments.

Durfsurn: Thank you![/font]

Terring7: Thank you. I might well add a couple of bus stops in the Improvements lesson, but there won't be any 'mass transit' systems (tram, rail, etc.) from this stadium. From my experience stadia are typically poorly served by public transport.[/font]

mike3775: Very true. I'd say the true figure is more like 95-100% (in most UK stadia anyway), but the point is still valid. However, many people don't park in the stadium car park, instead preferring to park in whatever nearby place they can find. So you don't need acres upon acres of parking, but you do need a bit. [/font]

yochananmichael: With the exception of buses, we won't be covering public transport systems in this project. However, in Project 3, we will construct a fully integrated transport system, which will include roads, rails, buses, light rail/underground lines, trams, airports, the full works. The city we're working on at the moment isn't really large enough to justify that sort of big-daddy transport network - but the city we'll build in the next project will be.[/font]

I also have something else that I want to discuss with you guys, but I'll do that after the lesson.

Lesson 15 - Historical Districts

In this lesson we will learn to construct an old historical area in the southeastern corner of the city, in this little triangle of roads:

We suppose that this was, until the industrial revolution, the entirety of Troon, and that it dates from medieval times. So let's begin with one thing that any city which was of any importance had in those days - a city wall.

These walls were built for one purpose - to guard against what was in those days the very real threat of invasion. Access into the city was provided by gates, and the wall would be manned by guards around the clock.
To build these walls we will be using the BSC Raised Parks - City Walls set[/b][/url]. Of course, if you have a preferred set in your Plugins folder, then use that instead. We will start with some street gates.

You need to place about 4 or 5 of these around the edge of the area of your district (more for bigger areas, less for smaller). The lots you need to use are dependent on where exactly you put the gate. On a straight the arrangement is as follows:

Diagonals are a little more complicated, as you also need to add corner pieces:

You should also add a couple of pedestrian gates. We're going to put a couple in the top-left and top-right corners. The arrangement of lots for these is pretty similar:



Notice that, in all cases, the stairs go on the inside of the wall. Remember that the wall was built as a means of defence. It'd be pretty useless if all the invaders had to do was to climb up the stairs.
Right, now you can complete the wall using the straight and corner pieces as appropriate:


You'll see from the above picture that we have some gaps in between the wall and the main roads. We use the Plaza pieces that are included in the Raised Parks set as fillers to deal with this:

We will also build a few bus stops on the main road around the edge of the wall to enable tourists to access it quickly and easily:


Right then, now we've got the outside of our historical district completed, it's a good time to think about what needs to go inside it.

One thing that really does need to go inside the walls is a large church or cathedral. In medieval times, religion was taken extremely seriously, the concepts of heaven and hell were very real to most people, the Church was an important part of society, and Church officials were understandably important people. The lot to use is your choice, but I've gone for the Havoc Holy Cross Church, which is, in my opinion, very much in keeping with the stone walls:

Now would be a good time to build the streets in our old city. They should connect each of the street gates to each other, and, in order to properly represent an old, historical town, they should be textured using the SAM Cobblestone textures:


That looks like an old town already! The next step is to add a market:


Now to fill in gaps where necessary, use the plaza pieces together with the Sandstone Ped Mall piece. This will provide functional access where needed to the buildings we will build, and will look in keeping with the whole scene:


As a guide to where to place these pieces, you need to leave suitably sized areas for you to place commercial and residential buildings on - anything from 1x1 to 3x3 and rectangular shaped. These untouched areas can be right next to each other, as you see above.
Now it's time to place your buildings to fill the old city. Obviously you want the end result to look at least a little bit historical - and to that end you need to choose your buildings VERY carefully.  They need to be old buildings that look like they could have been around for a good couple of hundred years or more. You also need to ensure you get some variety in your buildings - otherwise the end result will look boring and repetitive.

This is one of the few occasions where I would recommend using ploppable RCI lots, as that will ensure you get the right look.
You can also access appropriate growable buildings by using the LotPlop cheat (CTRL+X, type 'lotplop', Enter, then select your lot from the list that appears, and close the window to place it):

The one thing you must NOT do is zone for RCI. That will give the computer control of what buildings get placed, and you can bet your house on those selected being totally inappropriate for what we're trying to do.

Anyway, once you're happy with your buildings and you've filled the district, you're done, and as we're at that stage, we're done with this lesson.

Now before I go, I said at the start that I wanted to discuss something - so I will.

Now that I have my new super-fast computer to hand which is more than capable of recording media without being painfully slow, I've had the idea to occasionally do some video tutorials.

These would be recorded, uploaded off-site and then embedded into an update, and that would form the lesson for that particular update. This would only be an occasional thing, done as and when I deem it appropriate, and most lessons would still be delivered in the usual text-and-pictures style.

Please let me know what you guys think of this idea. If you need me to make a trial video to help you decide then I'm more than willing to do so, so please tell me.

The next lesson (which, for the record, will be a text-and-pictures lesson) will be about marinas.

See you then,
Chris

[Flatron]

Nice, but I have to say that one can zone medieval districts by using a tileset with historical buildings only and mark them all historical. Btw, a different, bigger, more gothic styled church could have looked better. This tutorial seems to be helpful when building Milton-Keynes like New Towns, but...

[yochananmichael]

Another great update Chris. I thought that your historical district looked great and is very appropriate for a European style city. My question is what would you do for historical districts for non-European city like exists in the US where we did not have walled cities? In response to having embedded video that would be great if done right. I like to have a variety of learning modalities and seeing, hearing, and reading would be great for me and others because we can see exactly how something comes together in real time.

[Durfsurn]

Pleasure adding to those 30k views! A video sounds nice but may I suggest to [u/]Not[underline/] use music but use your voice? Haljackey does this well so look at his videos for some examples. A couple of reasons is that 1) You may choose copyrighted or music that could land you in trouble in your videos and 2) People may be deterred by the music if it is not to their taste! Just some suggestions and i woudl much rather a voice over (If possible of course) than a music background!

[mike3775]

Another great update Chris. I thought that your historical district looked great and is very appropriate for a European style city. My question is what would you do for historical districts for non-European city like exists in the US where we did not have walled cities? In response to having embedded video that would be great if done right. I like to have a variety of learning modalities and seeing, hearing, and reading would be great for me and others because we can see exactly how something comes together in real time.

Look around ST or the LEX.  There are plenty of "older" buildings that could be used.  Things like the old north church( I wish I could find it again, lost the link), and the liberty bell are available that I know of, and there are other older buildings on ST that can be used. 

If you are going for a US historical feel, you need to have a church in the center of the "historical" area though, because from 1500-1750 or so, religion was a very big part of town/city life in the US at the time.  If you are not going for that old of a historical area, a courthouse at the center of a city square would be appropriate, as after the Revolutionary War, religion played less of a role in the lives of citizens so many towns/cities made a courthouse instead of a church the focal point of the center of town.