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| - The City Planet is the equivilant to the City in Animal Crossing: City Folk. It is a sphere shaped planet that has various shops and attractions, as well as 3 moons, one of which is where Redds Shop is located.
- A City Planet is a Sub-Trope of Single Biome Planet and Mega City, in which said biome is said city. In other words, this is what happens when someone takes Planetville a little too literally: there is only one "city" on the planet, and it covers the entire planet. Alternately, the trope will be subverted, introducing the audience to a seemingly endless city, and only later revealing that there are, in fact, vast areas of truly rural or wilderness areas remaining, the locals just don't like to talk about it.
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| abstract
| - The City Planet is the equivilant to the City in Animal Crossing: City Folk. It is a sphere shaped planet that has various shops and attractions, as well as 3 moons, one of which is where Redds Shop is located.
- A City Planet is a Sub-Trope of Single Biome Planet and Mega City, in which said biome is said city. In other words, this is what happens when someone takes Planetville a little too literally: there is only one "city" on the planet, and it covers the entire planet. Sometimes referred to as a planet city, world city (However, world city has also been used to mean other things), completely urbanized world, omniopolis / omnopolis, or ecumenopolis. While most examples are recent, the concept dates as far back as the nineteenth century work of Thomas Lake Harris, and the term "City Planet" dates at least as far back as the first draft of the script for Star Wars: A New Hope. This trope occurs as the apparent result of a civilization, presumably over centuries of expansion, converting the entire surface of a world into one vast city. To be sure, many City Planets are divided into "administrative sectors" or other such local government institutions, but for all practical purposes, it's all the same city. Generally, this trope implies that for all practical purposes, the only biome of importance on the planet is urban jungle. Taken to an extreme, it may be implied the locals even paved over volcanoes and oceans in the process of creating the City Planet. In works not all the way to the less realistic end of Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness or the Sliding Scale of Realistic Versus Fantastic, such a world can present a Mega City - sized ball of Fridge Logic. Perhaps most importantly, how do people eat if there is no farmland? Often it's simply handwaved, but other times it's revealed that:
* The local Starfish Aliens don't need food as we might understand it.
* Food and other supplies have to be imported from elsewhere at great expense.
* Much of the "city" actually consists of vast recycling, processing, manufacturing, etc., plants where everything people need (including food) is made or grown to order in highly controlled environments. Because Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, City Planets tend to have implausibly low populations. An Earth-sized planet with the population density of Manhattan would have 14 trillion people, while a world covered with miles-high buildings would be far denser than that. But it's rare to see a planet with more than a trillion inhabitants. However, this assumes a near-universal population density throughout the planet and no large, minimally populated areas of automated processing for the population (as the third option mentioned above might imply). Alternately, the trope will be subverted, introducing the audience to a seemingly endless city, and only later revealing that there are, in fact, vast areas of truly rural or wilderness areas remaining, the locals just don't like to talk about it. Another Subversion can be that the city, despite covering an entire world, is no bigger than an "ordinary" city - because the planet is so small. In the past, such stories seemed more realistic than they do today; however, many serious hard - Sci Fi tales involve colonizing an asteroid or a city - sized space station. In recent decades, computer image manipulation technology has resulted in these occasionally showing up in video games or humorous images. Finally, in some settings, a city occupies not a planet, but an entire plane of existence, a layer of a Layered World, or other planet - like... thing.
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