![]() ![]() No drinking holes, no learning hubs, no culture nor leisure. There are no fairs nor demonstrating unions here. Desperation looms over its silent squares and roads, and only the words of administrator Breen are echoed through crumbling alleys. Looked at this way City 17 is seemingly all but dead. Sections of the road and highways network have also remained functional.Ĭities are more than the sum of their buildings, plans, and infrastructure, and are actually defined by the civic life they nurture. At least the power plants are still operational, and, unlike the tramways, most parts of the railroad network did survive, and are connecting the city to the rest of the occupied world. Whole districts have been broken up, and most of the economic and productive activities of the city have been eliminated. Not only has most of the town's infrastructure been left to crumble, but massive walls now cut through roads and buildings disrupting the urban fabric for purposes either unknown or defensive. ![]() Unsurprisingly, accessing the surviving branches of the city's complex canal system is also looked upon with suspicion. Its industrial outskirts are still linked via rail with the urban core but considered off-limits to citizens. Under Combine rule most residential buildings have retained their use, even if the standard of living has plummeted, and the population massively shrunk.īefore the occupation the city must have been able to provide for a decent, even pleasing, life and, among other land uses, sported hospitals, cafés, hotels, restaurants, shops, a once-vibrant harbour, and a service sector fossilized in the now abandoned office buildings. The bulk of the built environment consists of wall-to-wall buildings organized around courtyards, mid-rise housing units, a relatively rich network of squares, and several specialized districts with the industrial one being the most prominent. When it comes to spatial organization City 17 adheres to the historically popular but versatile gridiron plan, which is broken up by a select few diagonal avenues, and is currently in the process of re-arranging itself around the Citadel. The heavily fortified Overwatch Nexus, probably an old museum or government building, now protects the Suppression Device, and is the most evident hub of Combine military and police activity. ![]() It is of course neither the only alien construct in town, nor the sole centre tasked with controlling civic life. This Combine tower is roughly four times the height of the Empire State Building, known to house the current government's most delicate functions and rumoured to be hiding a portal of pure dark energy. The gargantuan Citadel utterly dominates the urban landscape and sits at the new epicentre of City 17. It is they who chose to erect the greatest of the Citadels in City 17 turning it into their de facto global capital, where Wallace Breen, former head of Black Mesa and Earth's current appointed Administrator, has his headquarters. It is they who constructed imposing Citadels in major cities. The unconditional surrender of the unified human government has turned the devastatingly powerful extraterrestrial forces of the Combine into the planet's new absolute rulers. The architecture that still stands, itself a monument of better days, allows a simple reconstruction of the city's evolution from the neoclassicism of the 19th Century, to early modernism, to the Soviet functionalism that followed World War 2, to postmodern styles, to a truly alien, cold, and monolithic version of Brutalism.įollowing the Seven Hour War, along with the rest of Earth, City 17 is no longer under humanity's control. With its exact location remaining a mystery, not much can be known of the place's early history, beside the fact it wasn't always called City 17. The direction of the sunlight, and the widespread use of the Cyrillic alphabet suggest Eastern Europe, most probably Bulgaria, yet one can also find a few signs and graffiti in Greek or even Scandinavian. Despite the soft daylight and long, almost romantic shadows, City 17 is neither a happy nor a vibrant place.Įven pinpointing its exact location is tricky. Many of the city's buildings are crumbling, and even more have been empty husks for years. And it's not just the playgrounds that stand abandoned either. The dilapidated playgrounds are devoid of life, and will remain so for as long as the all-encompassing Suppression Field keeps on preventing human procreation. Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Android. ![]()
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