Introduction

So, the fandom seems to have settled on "Our Town" as the name of the village started by Starlight Glimmer, which features in S5E01 and E02, The Cutie Map. Works as well as any other name, and it's actually the one sung by the inhabitants, so it's not a bad name. Let's examine the place.

Location, Location, Location

According to the MLP Wiki entry "Our Town," based on the Cutie Map itself (Twilight's castle's holographic map thingie):

Though overviews of Equestria generally do not note the village, the Friendship Rainbow Kingdom castle's map points it out north-northwest of Manehattan.

Now, we know it has to be fairly far from Manehattan, at least on a provincial scale. This is because Manehattan is a big sprawling city, of the sort which would obviously possess suburbs and exurbs -- you don't need motorcars for either; historically the first suburbs appeared outside the walls of cities the moment the first multi-city kingdoms appeared, and exurbs (long-range commuter suburbs) -as soon as the first regular rail services started. Functionally, Our Town can't be too close to other Pony towns and villages, or Starlight's actions would have been noticed (and gotten her into trouble) long before the Map sent Twilight Sparkle there.

We also know from the episode that the Mane Six take the train through a mountain range, ride the rail line to its end in the midst of an eroded desert, walk beyond that, cross a huge canyon on a rope-and-boards bridge, and finally look down on a valley from the top of a cliff in a heavily eroded desertscape to behold Our Town. The terrain looks like a desert, similar to parts of Nevada or Utah, and not at all what you'd expect to find in the equivalent of northwestern New York State. It's fairly close to mountains sufficiently high as to be snow-capped, which if you think about it is probably why Double Diamond was wandering through in the first place.

Now the official map of Equestria (which really needs updates; there have been a lot of towns visited since this was put out) shows the Crystal Mountains bordering the Frozen North; beyond them is what some fanons call the Ice Wastes, a dreadful realm haunted by Windigoes, Ice Giants and other nameless horrors. If Our Town is nestled into the mountains which on their far side overlook such a realm of inequine terror and bleak despair, this would be all the more awesome (as Rainbow Dash would doubtless point out).

It's quite possible that Our Town was built in the shadow of the Crystal Mountains, in a cold area which gets little water (similar to the Gobi Desert) and which is thus thinly populated -- which suited Starlight Glimmer just fine, as it lets her have much more effective control over her
flock. There are probably no other Ponies within a dozen or so miles, and there may be no other sapients, for all we know, at least not ones particularly friendly to Ponykind.

There's another nice little historical-analogy here. Not north-northwest but west-north-west of New York City lies a region known as the Burned-Over District, so-called not because of forest fires or wars, but because it was in the nineteenth century heavily influenced by the Second Great Awakening (around 1790-1850) and the population there had been so heavily-evangelized that -- by 1876 -- there was very little "fuel" (unconverted individuals) to "burn" (convert to one's own sect). The interesting thing about the Burned-Over District is that it had previously been fertile ground for not only mainstream religious sects, but also a number of strange and bizarre cults -- some of them proto-socialist in nature.

The writers of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic may have had this precise piece of history in mind when they put Our Town in an analogous position in Equestria.

lSize and Population

Our Town is a small place. It consists of just one street with six two-and-a-half story houses per side, and one at its end. A dirt road stretches out of town (presumably back to the rope bride over the chasm) and leads to the last house: Starlight Glimmer's.

Now, Starlight Glimmer's house has a population of one (and probably contains the records, reference books, and supplies which Starlight needs to manage the town). After Our Town's liberation, this probably becomes the official Mayor's House or Town Hall.

So there are twelve houses which may (and probably do) house residents. Though we see that Sugar Belle is using one as the town bakery, and others seem to have clothing and other sorts of stores in their lower levels or in stalls in front of them (with the stores probably) we may reasonably assume that the houses are multi-functional structures dedicated for both business and residential purposes -- the town is really too small for things to work any other way.

The society is some form of socialism or communism, and it's originally being micro-managed by Starlight Glimmer with Double Diamond's assistance, so it's reasonable to assume that as new Ponies join the town, they are simply assigned available rooms in the houses and given jobs, with the "pay" taking the form of a claim on the resources of the stores and manufactories -- "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need ." A house of the size depicted could be home to something like 5-20 Ponies in varying degrees of comfort: we may assume that when the houses get crowded, Our Town builds another one along its main (and only) street.

This determines the population -- from around 60 to around 240 Ponies. By comparison, Ponyville is a sizable community -- it has around 2000 Ponies at the start of the series, and probably many more due to rapid growth by Season Five. Ponyville is smaller than my own South-Dunnich (population 300), and much smaller than Sketcha-holic's Nickerlite.

Architecture

One very obvious thing about the houses in Our Town is that they are very solidly constructed, with thick walls, only a few high narrow windows, and steeply peaked roofs. There are two obvious reasons to build that way -- cold weather (the nights in that place must be fierce, if they're right over the mountains from the Ice Waste) and defense (maybe the occasional creature from the Waste wanders into town). Another consideration is that the houses may be very over-engineered, since under Starlight Glimmer literally nopony has any talents for construction or engineering. Building really thick walls and few windows is a good way to make a house that will stand up even if amateurishly raised.

They are also spartan, uniform and utterly cheerless. Rarity is horrified by how dull and depressing the place looks when she first visits Our Town; it combines all the charm of a line of factory buildings with the spontaneous hedonism of North Korea. Were it not for the fact that the residents are all brainwashed and weakened by the loss of their Talents, the decor alone might drive them slowly mad. Notably, after the overthrow of Starlight Glimmer, one of the first things the residents do is redecorate. The results are still dismal compared to a place like Ponyville, let alone Canterlot, but it at least looks like a town, rather than a prison.

Economics

An interesting question is "How does Our Town survive?"

This is more than a trivial issue, as they are located in the midst of a cold desert, far from any other equine habitations, and are laboring not only under the normal economic disadvantages of socialism, but under socialism exacerbated by having absolutely nopony with any Talents, save for the one whose Talent is magic and whose specialty is the Spell of Sameness itself. Yet, while they're obviously going mad with boredom, they're not actually starving to death. (They've got North Korea beaten there!)

There are several possibilities. One is that Starlight Glimmer's talents include administration and charisma (she's very obviously charismatic, as she's convinced all these Ponies to follow her, most of them probably without using violence) to the point where she just organizes them to work hard producing something which she then trades for sufficient supplies to obtain the necessities they can't make locally. Maybe they work seasonally, growing enough grain for their own needs during the (relatively short) planting, tending and harvesting seasons, doing other work including production for export during the rest of the year. Unlike free Ponies, they could work almost all the time they didn't absolutely need to rest.

Subsistence agriculture would be possible for them, though not for equivalent-tech Humans in that environment, for one big reason. They have Pegasi, and even untalented Pegasi can move clouds and cause the rain to fall on crops. The soil can't be at all that fertile in this environment, but it might be fertile enough for a crop here, a crop there, rotating or opening new fields each planting season. They'll exhaust the local soil in the long run, doing this, but then socialist communes are notoriously poor at providing for the long run. They've clearly been doing this less than a decade so far.

Starlight Glimmer might have somehow gotten her hands on something worthy of export. That ancient desert, its hills riddled by cave networks, sounds as if there might be objects of value obtainable by somepony who knew where to look. Starlight's obviously mapped out a lot of places beyond the town -- she knew where to run when the town turned on her. Alternately, some of her followers might have been rich before they fell into her hooves (real cults often work like this). In my fanon, all this territory belonged to the Crystal Empire from around 3500-2500 years ago, and there might be whole ruined towns somewhere out there in the desert, complete with treasure troves.

Trade with the outside would have been possible on a small scale. Most likely, it was entirely handled by Starlight Glimmer herself, because she would have feared having outsiders contaminate her followers with dangerous thoughts. She might well have brought along one or two trusted assistants (perhaps Double Diamond) to help her with the heavy hauling, though as we saw in the second episode, Starlight herself is no slouch (for a Unicorn) at pulling a wagon.

What will the town do now that Starlight Glimmer is no longer their leader? They are small enough that they could still maintain a socialistic economy, for a time, though in the long-run integration into the more advanced economy of Equestria is likely. They don't have her organizing skills or whatever secret troves she may have uncovered and not let them visit, but they do have something valuable ...

... they have their Talents back. And some of them are quite Talented. They are now in a much better position to earn money by export, in addition to what they can make for themselves by subsistence agriculture and local industry.

Conclusion

Given its location, the town is probably doomed to dry up and blow away unless they find something of value in their vicinity. But it many not die all that fast, and there's no reason for its occupants to die.

What do you guys and gals think? I'd love to hear your headcanons for Our Town ...

4292552

"Why no, Mr. Bond ..."

Maybe the town will become a tourist trap.

Honestly, I have no idea. I love world-building and stories which go into lots of detail on it -and, as a side note, let me add that I love your elaborate world-building for the Shadow Wars series- but it's not something which I, personally, am good at. It's why I, personally, am a lot more interested in writing the character side of things than the "how does this work?" part.

I have to say, it seems difficult to imagine how the town could be stable- but part of that is because we don't really know how Equestria's economy works. They seem to have a national currency -though I'm starting to wonder if we've ever seen bits used outside of Ponyville- but the show doesn't show a whole lot of emigrating. The fact that the Equestria Games compete with teams from local levels (like Cloudsdale and Ponyville) rather than National ones (Griffon Kingdoms v Equestria) gives me the impression that towns in Equestria are more like city states; it seems like most of the money in Ponyville gets passed around amongst the citizens of Ponyville.

Of course most isn't all, and we know that they do have income and purchase things from other places, like Rarity having to purchase fabrics from Canterlot. And you gave very good reasons as to why they would have to import goods from other parts of Equestria to survive; in fact, if they tried to excel, they'd probably have to get higher grade materials than what they have available, so they'd be importing a lot of stuff.

I suppose it could be possible that, by restoring their cutie marks, we might have some ponies who are particularly skilled at working the Earth. It would probably take a while, but assuming that the spell of Sameness dampened everypony's natural powers, after they were restored we might see a surging growth in agriculture. It would take some ponies who were exceptionally talented to turn virtually-dead land into fertile land... but as you point out, some of the ponies of Our Town seem to be quite talented. Party Favor seemed to have, if not Pinkie-level powers, then certainly a very powerful and unique ability at Balloon-shaping.

My take on the setting is that at least a few of the ponies who joined the town had to have been super-talented; it just makes Starlight a more effective villain if she managed to persuade ponies whose talents were personally beneficial that her cause was just. It's why I like to think of the group at the end as the Elite Four.

I still think the location out in the middle of now are isn't the smartest idea