VITAS was a thing that they never really went anywhere with. Basically, plagues hit the world super hard so that population in 2050 was about the same as population in 1989. The conceit was pretty much carried forward, so the population numbers of 2060 were supposed to be about the same as the population numbers in 1999, and the population numbers in 2070 were supposed to be about the same as those of 2009. Certainly a useful conceit, because it means you could always default to "present day" demographics rather than trying to come up with a plausible sounding future history of birth rates and migration.Stahlseele wrote:VITAS alone killed about . . what was it? 20 to 33% of the worlds population?
To an extent, however, it was a crutch that encouraged lazy defaulting to modern social norms. Place books like Seattle Sourcebook really fail to get across the idea that you're talking about a place where basic services don't exist for more than half the populace. The fact that the population of the Sea-Tac metroplex was neither a teeming, starving morass of overpopulation nor was it a post-apocalyptic wasteland with population levels fallen far below critical threshold to maintain basic division of labor let authors fall back into describing the familiar. But that was horribly, horribly wrong. While the Sea-Tac metroplex wasn't depopulated, all the suburbs sure as hell were! People had moved into Arcologies, with a population density of ten thousand to the city block, suburbia had to have been a ghost town.
Where the ball was most obviously dropped was Los Angeles. Los Angeles has eighteen million people in it, but it's nearly fifty four thousand square kilometers. It's a city more populous than two thirds of the nations on Earth, but it only has about 333 people living per square kilometer. That's like one fiftieth the population density of a place like Athens. Most people have their own homes. Most of those homes are one story. And most of those homes have space between them and the next building to put like lawns and shit in. That's insane. And with Shadowrun's posited turn to Arcology living, it's also over. All those people who live in LA suburbs today simply don't in the Shadowrun future.
Right now, LA looks like this:
But in the Shadowrun future, 90% of the people have moved into walking distance of that chunk with the big buildings. The rest is just a vast sea of emptiness. Los Angeles of the Shadowrun future has fifteen million abandoned buildings. A vast moat of decay that is ever so slowly being reclaimed by the desert.
And yet, when LA got written up, at no time was that really remarked upon. Various authors called out various random restaurants and theaters and gated communities and shit as being still around, giving the reader the impression that LA was just sort of chugging along like it was the 1970s instead of the 2070s. And that was wrong. The truth is, none of the LA landmark eateries are still functioning in the Shadowrun future, because the entire strip mall culture they were based on has fucking died. You can go to Slim's or the Chinese Theater or whatever the fuck, but those places are abandoned because potable water and electrical power are no longer delivered to those neighborhoods.
-Username17
