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Boom Town: Difference between revisions
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== Literature ==
* Grantville in the [[1632]] series. Like many small, rural towns dominated by one industry, it was shrinking and withering during the 1980s and 1990s... until a [[Negative Space Wedgie]] transplanted the town to central Germany during the [[Thirty Years' War]]. The town suddenly found itself the most high-tech place in the world and its population mushroomed with refugees. Inhabitants have tried to maintain building codes and labor standards for all the new construction and industry, but the fact that they haven't always succeeded has been a plot point more than once.
** In the same series, Magdeburg is almost a boom town. Historically, the city was almost completely massacred during the war, but in the new timeline of the story it is being turned into a capital of a new empire.
* In ''A Town Like Alice'', the heroine turns a [[Ghost Town]] into a Boom Town with an application of money, enterprise, and motivation.
* [[One Hundred Years of Solitude|Macondo]] got trough this trope during its [[Banana Republic|Producer Town]] stage.
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== Live-Action TV ==
* ''[[Deadwood]]''! Unusual in that you get to actually watch the boom happening, on screen.
== Musical ==
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* [http://theblueprint.typepad.com/theblueprint/images/dubai1990_2003_1.jpg Dubai.]
* Sunomata Castle was built (or at least repaired to full functionality) in one night.
* Tombstone was a boom town around the time of Wyatt Earp, which is covered in many movies.
* St. Petersburg is arguably a subversion, since it was built over the course of several years; on the other hand, as soon as it became the capital, it was filled with many more people than it could support, including many, many construction workers.
* "Residence cities" (i.e. the seats of royal courts) throughout the pre-modern history of most of Asia. There were a lot of those; many of them were founded and abandoned overnight on the ruler's whim (some Indian dynasties preferred to abandon the old capital and move a new one whenever a new ruler arose).
* Shenzhen, China is probably the uber example. 30 years ago there was almost nothing there. Not a city, not a town, barely a fishing village. Today it's got 7 million people, is the third largest city in the entire country and, quite possibly, the richest. How you ask? Magic, of course!. The magic of being just on the mainland side of Hong Kong when China decided to open up as well as a pet project of the premier.
* The mining towns in the Klondike circa 1899.
** And the ones in California 50 years earlier.
* Ireland in the 80s was a million miles away from Ireland of the 00s. A lot the people who moved abroad to find jobs had by now come back, which attracted a lot of property developers. This led to an entire country almost solely based on a housing bubble. Suffice to say, we're not a boom country any more.
* Soviet "Monotowns". Basically, a manufacturing plant, factory or mine was built in the middle of nowhere, and then a town was built around it. Resulted in a lot of troubles in [[The New Russia]], with the industries dying out and the towns getting plagued by unemployment, since everybody was supposed to work at a single workplace.
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== Video Games ==
* One of the most extreme examples is Jeuno in ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]''. It's certainly longer in the time to grow, but you can't really complain when a small fishing village, in four years, became [[Capital City|the economic center of an entire continent and]] ''[[Capital City|an independent nation]]''.
* ''The'' most extreme example has to be New Town in ''[[Dragon Quest III]]'': If you time it right, you can turn a mostly-vacant patch of land a hundred world-map tiles from nowhere into the game world's largest and most-populous town ''and'' witness it undergo a revolution against the leader (whom you appoint). The game has an active day-night cycle, so all of this can transpire, literally, within a few ''days''.
** Featured again in ''[[Dragon Quest IV]]''. You help a young entrepreneur to develop a boom town in a patch of desert (which previously was a bazaar) by recruiting people from around the world. Completing this sidequest will turn the boom town into a castle. ''[[Dragon Quest VII]]'' featured this too.
* The town of Township (yes, that's its name) from ''[[Breath of Fire 2]]'' starts out as a ruined building that your friend Bow is forced to restore while he hides from the law. When the house gets appropriated by shamans, you hire a proper carpenter to build more buildings, while you recruit helpful people for the population. And it can fly, too. All over the course of one game.
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