Is a city like Canterlot possible? Where is the most fitting place to build it?

[LeonShi500 155]

I've been thinking about this for a while. in MLP, my favorite setting has always been Canterlot. This is a city that could technically be the a possible blend between a dreamlike fairytale and realistically doable with Earth's limitations. A city built not on top of a mountain, but built alongside one, on a very high elevation.

Would it be possible, ignoring resource constraints, to build a functioning, safe, and densely populated Canterlot-esque city? A large city that has a design I could describe as a mixture between Saint Petersburg & Ashgabat, harboring hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people. (this isn't just MLP anymore, we're thinking big, like NYC, London, Berlin, etc) built along the edge of a mountainside with a very high elevation, overlooking who knows what kind of scenery below.

Where would such a city in the world be built to match the setting of MLP the closest? A beautiful city in the mountains, overlooking villages miles below. Europe? North America? What specific country and where in it would be the most fitting place? Pick where on earth you'd think would work the best to match the show's setting! I also know that the city was based on Minas Tirith, but that's wasn't really built alongside a mountainside, so much as it was built on a flat edge of land located near a mountain, so not quite as unrealistic, imo.

Edited October 5, 2020 by LeonShi500

[RDDash 18,867]

Canterlot is a bit misleading. What we think as Canterlot is some kind of weird towers thingy. Who would build it like that.

[LeonShi500 155]

11 minutes ago, RDDash said:

Canterlot is a bit misleading. What we think as Canterlot is some kind of weird towers thingy. Who would build it like that.

How about something like this?

Same general idea, large city built on the side of a hill, held in place by some solid equestrian support beams.

[SharpWit 2,472]

Big like NYC, London, or Berlin and housing hundreds of thousands to millions? Not a chance.

The nation best known for its mountain settlements is Switzerland, which has multiple examples of towns high up and even famed buildings carved into cliff faces or founded on peak like locations. However, a quick comparison of a population and topographic map will show you that even the Swiss prefer to live at lower latitudes. Life simply becomes more difficult the higher up you go, because acquiring resources is a never-ending uphill battle. There's no reason that you couldn't carve out a mountainside and use the material to build a city, but you're going to be limited by the mountain's size and people's willingness to constantly bring up resources and live there. Tourists towns work because they can bring in a rush of business, but they're a niche market. Don't expect to get more than a few thousand realistically.

If you want a large population at a high altitude, it'll require a plateau, but there's no reason you couldn't find a mountainous location for a castle to look over everyone at the base. For existing locations, you can opt for the Northern range of the Andes in South America and the Southern Rockies in Mexico.

For closest as possible to match MLP, you can go off the fact that Equestria was originally based off of North America, and look for suitable ground in the state of Colorado.

Edited October 5, 2020 by SharpWit

[Goat-kun 2,500]

You'd need a bunch of gigantic subterranean structures that could tether an artificial platform to the mountainside. Suffice to say, the true Canterlot would be located inside the mountain while the current day city would be just a gated garden for royalty.  Fanon time: Unicorn mines are the true Canterlot city, but something terrible had happened down there that forced the horned vermin to abandon their glittering tunnels. It also explains why such a city would have so many "secret" passages and springs that appear from nowhere.

 

Big human cities are unsustainable abominations. Fanon or not, Canterlot was probably not built with population density in mind. It's more like Dubrovnik and other old walled cities. If you're gonna construct a massive modern human city on a rock then you should design it to go all around the mountain and inside too like some sort of a giant pipe network.