Look, we're idiots: None of us knows what, exactly, goes into city planning, but we assume it's probably a lot of distinguished gentlemen emailing each other about math, statistics and blueprints. But somewhere along the line, somebody accidentally CC'ed the insane asylum, and we wound up with the following civilizations that simply should not be:

6 Neft Dashlari: A Hacked Together City in the Middle of the Sea

Via Skyscraper.talkwhat.com

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Back in 1945, the USSR discovered oil just off the coast of Azerbaijan. The problem was that, at the time, no one had ever built an offshore oil rig before, so if they wanted to tap that ocean-bottom booty, they had to figure out how to do it from scratch. Not to be deterred by minor considerations such as reason, the USSR went ahead and built a massive multiplatform oil rig right out there in the middle of the ocean. When even more oil was discovered right next door, they didn't bother with a whole new platform; they just retired a boat, bolted it to the existing platform and started working on it. The Russians continued in this fashion until they wound up with Oily Rocks, a gargantuan city of oil workers, with over 120 miles worth of road built into the middle of the Caspian Sea.

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"If you find yourself plummeting into the sea, you've gone too far."

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Five thousand people live and work on Neft Dashlari, right there in the face of logic and Poseidon alike. But don't go thinking it's all bleak and inhospitable: Neft Dashlari is most of the way to a real city. Its features include electric power stations, a library, apartment buildings up to nine stories high, hostels for visitors/guests, hospitals, Palaces of Culture, bakeries and even lemonade workshops (leave it to the Soviets to append "workshop" to something as innocuous as "lemonade.")

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They went a little crazy on the swimming pool, though.

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But if there's one thing the Soviets weren't exactly known for, it was the reliability of their engineering; they always did prefer to glue things together with a combination of balls and aggressive optimism. As such, Neft Dashlari is now falling apart. Roughly 75 percent of it has rusted away, but the local citizens aren't leaving, because there's still enough oil to keep that bad boy running for another 30 years, or until the Splicers revolt. Whichever comes first.