"That must be the source of the difference, yes."

"But we were talking about the map, not our species' reproductive quirks."

He points out geographic features and strategic considerations present in the rest of the territory.

At the end of which she is willing to tentatively conclude that Nevrast probably is the best location.

"All right. How do you want to convince people to come live there? The obvious approaches are 'build things, hope that people will then come live there' or 'go live somewhere else, make friends, persuade them to migrate' or 'ask someone to assign me people' but we're not doing that."

"Wasn't planning on it. Was mostly leaning towards the 'build things' option."

"In that case you still need enough people to do the building, or can you do it all with magic? Are you going to build a planned city or build public buildings and let people build their own houses?"

"I can design the place--possibly--okay, probably--with help, and then talk Odette into building it with magic. I was thinking planned city."

"Great idea. We have some books on architecture and city planning, let me find those for you."

"Sounds good. Okay, the region is fairly large, where within Nevrast would be a good place to build a city..."

And they spend the evening engrossed in the details of city planning.

City planning! Illia has opinions about city planning. Planned cities can have conveniences that organically-grown cities often lack, such as straight roads, things arranged to be located convenient distances from one another...oh, and obviously it needs city walls, because war.

Elves also have opinions on city planning. The books are pretty helpful.

Are any of the Elven opinions things that make less sense when designing a city primarily for humans?

A few of them, like Elves take much more extreme measures to keep noise down and can afford to be less careful about sanitation since they do occasionally get sick but they do not die en masse at young ages - "but you won't either, anymore," he observes.

"We won't, but better safe than sorry with sanitation practices."

"Cities for Men can also expect more growth than cities for Elves."

"So I'll want to make sure it can be easily expanded without suffering from infrastructure failure on the edges...and since I have the world's most convenient sister this doesn't preclude walls, either."

"Some cities do rings of walls, so it takes a long time for the Enemy to contest his way all the way through."

"Good point, that. I'll want to be careful about distributing things, of course, so it doesn't end up with an elitist situation where the wealthy all live in the innermost ring and the people who live in the outer rings are liable to be turned aside if they try to enter..."

"Land near your palace and well-defended is going to be the most valuable anyway, I'm not sure you can avoid that."

"I can at least try to mitigate the damage...and make sure that even the less-desirable locations are still adequate."

"Yes. Though you should keep in mind that wherever Men are currently living may be less well-defended than even the outer reaches of your city, so delaying it in the aim of perfection would have very real costs to them."

"Right. What I want, first of all, is someplace that can helpfully accept refugees...I'll want to leave space to improve things, later on, but good enough now is better than perfect later."

"Yes." And he pulls out maps on stone quarries, sources of supplies - "though I suppose you can just magic things, that changes the parameters of some of these problems..."