Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. And sometimes truth can inspire fiction.
Crypts serve as people's capsule homes in Manila's North Cemetery.[1]
Coober Pedy is an underground mining town built right into the mine. [1]
In video games, a town is supposed to be a safe place. So why are there bottomless pits? To protect the town from criminals. The village al-Hajjarah was built into a cliff.[1]
A tulou is a ring-shaped apartment building where all apartments face a central courtyard.[1]
In China's Shaanxi province, people live in holes dug into the side of a hill and farm the land on top.[1] (I would have gone for a reference to Tolkien's hobbits rather than Wells's Eloi and Morlocks here, but whatever. Perhaps the authors of this article had used up all their "Tolkienesque" capital earlier for a bit about a city built under huge boulders.)
For Energy: Termites make hydrogen.[2]
Street frontage design for a small town[1]
Why do computer RPG item shops make the user order from a menu system like a restaurant or a vending machine? They're simulating pre-Piggly-Wiggly grocery stores, where all products were behind the counter.[3][4]
In one trip to a city somewhere in Noen, a scout reports seeing a "road toboggan" motorcycle, a rowbike, a round 2-seat scooter looking like a bumper boat, and some other land transport contraptions that never took off in the real world.[5]
In the American West, the bank, general store, and saloon tended to be located near the sheriff's office.[6]
Vikings had accurate sundials with light-concentrating prisms, and ancient China had saltwater and natural gas pipelines.[7]
Dumpster diving is a living in Manshiyat Naser, a slum whose residents live off Cairo's garbage.[8] The same is true of Cateura, a village built on the landfill of Asunción, Paraguay.[9] But searching trash dumps for valuable things to sell happens even in industrialized countries,[10] and not just the socially disadvantaged parts.[11]
The city of Austin, Texas, held a campaign to rename its city dump. Austin turned down a name involving Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst and went with "Austin Resource Recovery". The name was said to sound like landfill mining.[12]
And some scrappers enter abandoned buildings illegally to steal metal.[13]