Can You See Your City Geographically Situated Elsewhere?
 

This is just a fun exercise in imagination.

For example, I've always envisioned Winnipeg as a prime Great Lakes city candidate. Perhaps on the North Shore of Lake Superior. To me, it just seems like it has the dna to be one.

Any others?..Chicago as a coastal city, or St. Louis also as a Great Lakes city perhaps?

Can't really see it for chicago.

It's the very embodiment of where the great lakes met the great prairie.

Corn and Lumber and Pigs and Iron.

Boats are slow, let's build railroads!

Nature's Metropolis

The interior alpha could've been at St. Louis, that's about it.

st. louis has some great-lakes related attributes but really takes on a sub-tropical feel in the summer - rumbling cloudbanks and a city-wide obsession with growing banana trees in the front of houses...

i could see it somewhere upriver from buenos aires if argentina or paraguay had industrialized more extensively - an old, new world city thats seen some shit...hard to picture it anywhere but on a river although I could picture it as an industrial el paso type thing - a chunk of brick sitting on a river/ditch in the desert.

i mean these down-continent south american river cities are the same deal - a mix of people eating tons of grilled/bbq meat and drinking german beer styles in sweltering humidity waiting for the thunderstorm to pass as it sweeps the chaco

https://i.ibb.co/BNz4jj8/286-B26-C5-...643-A4-D84.jpg
polarsteps.com

Chicago is not "my city" in that I wasn't born there and don't live there but I think of it as my adopted North American city for a variety of reasons but mostly the epic skyline.

I agree 100%. For me Chicago is all about those rail lines ranging across the pancake-flat prairies. Driving or rail travelling in and seeing the towers gradually appearing as if in the middle of nowhere and that is part of the point of Chicago. It is in the middle of nowhere.

yeah, you’d have to geologically/geographically reorder and downsize the continent - make it narrower or something and chicago could have been on the lake AND at the end of the columbia river or something crazy like a massive puget sound. its not entirely unusal for cities to be sandwiched by two seperate bodies of water - new orleans and auckland, nz come to mind.

but otherwise of course chicago is wholesale a product of the vast wealth extracted from the massive northern half of the interior from lake huron or whatever to the rockies.

Toronto could definitely be somewhere else. It isn't really a product of its surroundings. It's on a Great Lake, but it barely has a port and never relied on lake-bound shipping or shipping-reliant industries for its bread and butter.

Toronto would have to be in Canada, though. Toronto is unmistakably Canadian. And it would have to be in Ontario. Pretty much right after it was founded in the wake of the American revolution, it was clear that Upper Canada (Ontario) was going to eventually be the most populous province. It already had more people than Quebec by 1850, and the power and size of Canadian cities are more a function of their provinces than of the country as a whole.

Not Kansas City. It's in the ideal east-fading-into-west location and wouldn't be the same if it were somewhere else.

Defintely not LA, SF, SD or Vegas.

I could see Houston somewhere in Florida.

ive never been to cdmx but i’ve always thought LA might have a similar soul.

I can see Toronto being located in the Sunbelt: very new, mostly post-war, sprawling and auto-oriented. Basically one giant suburb. People constantly compare Toronto to New York or Chicago because they are nearby, but in reality Toronto is more akin to Los Angeles or Las Vegas.

History aside, Chicago's lakefront would be completely different if an ocean or river.

In 20 million years or so L.A. will be a suburb of San Francisco
 

The San Andreas, L.A. moving northwest on the Pacific Plate. The Gulf of California could keep rifting open and extend northward into Nevada. The part of California west of the San Andreas could become an island moving north, including L.A. and San Diego and all of Baja CA.

That sounds like Rosario.

People compare Toronto to New York and Chicago because it's a big, urban city with a dense core of late 19th, early 20th century walkable neighbourhoods, high transit usage and an enormous skyline and downtown core that looks and like feels a hell of a lot more like New York and Chicago than it does like LA or god forsaken Las Vegas. Its pre-war core is completely intact, contains over a million people, and bears next to no resemblance to almost every sunbelt city maybe the oldest, most urban parts of downtown LA or New Orleans. Oy vey, man.

Winnipeg could've been in the US. It looks Midwestern and has the manufacturing industry that other Prairie cities lack. It could've been somewhere around Fargo or Omaha or Minneapolis or perhaps Kansas City. Alternatively, it could've been where Edmonton is - they're similar as it is and also have similar climates.

Winnipeg can't be in the US, it has no limited-access highway destroying its downtown. It would be by far the largest freeway-less urban area in the US.

It's more about the feel of the place. There are other more "Canadian" aspects to Winnipeg too, but there is something about it that just feels Midwestern at times. Freeways aside, it also looks the part. Lacking freeways, it has turned its main streets into hostile stroads not unlike what you'll see in the US. That, and the whole thing about keeping Portage & Main closed. The transit system is also very subpar for a Canadian city.

huh. funnily enough Rosario is a sister city to St. Louis now that I look into it.

theres sort of a new world archetype of an 18th century colonial, humid, inland river port city with some evidence of past wealth and a large agricultural catchment in a volatile climate. interestingly the last ocean-going vessel that i know of to dock at st louis was from latin america (Cuba).