QUOTE: Originally posted by jkeaton Tatans, your experience of small towns is the diametric opposite of mine - having personally experienced people rallying together "after the barn burned down", and people "getting involved" - so much so that the chief complaint of newcomers was that there was no privacy, everybody knew everybody else's business and lives too well! As to free food and medicine - doctors who treated people and didn't bill them, and casseroles and sacks of groceries that turn up on doorsteps fulfill the same functions, in a less public way. European cities don't decay in the centre because they don't have freeways running through the centre of their cities - the same effect can be seen in Vancouver, Canada, which is the only major North American city without a downtown freeway - and has only a very small "wrong side of the tracks" - which doesn't have abandoned buildings or dereliction in the way most US cities do. To take this back to modelling, I do agree that Sellios is often "over the top" - but I always thought that was the charm of his version of selective compression, wherein he picked the memorable scenes and selectively compressed the more boring bits of his urban landscapes. We do tend to remember the unusual, and including the unusual or cute makes our layouts all the more memorable. Doing the details in this way can be negative - like the dog peeing on the bum - or positive if you prefer. I want to have a scene where the wife is kissing her husband goodbye on the station platform - or at the front door - where there's a guy in a pick-up stopped to help a motorist with a flat-tire - and where two neighbours hanging out laundry are chatting over the fence, or from one balcony to another. Such micro-scenes make our layouts more "real" - we just have to chose what we find intriguing.
QUOTE: Just an observation, but European cities haven't decayed from the inside out since the 20's because during WWII, the Alies started the first phase of Urban Renewal, "Bring down the old".