Hey! I'd been meaning to start compiling some of the descriptions of Haven City too for awhile, so I figured now was as good a time as any...
I've looked around for drawings of Haven, but I haven't found too many...
Here's a couple from the graphic novels (I think just right click and hit 'open image in new window' to see the full size):
Also, I see this image come up a lot when I do a search for 'Haven City Artemis Fowl.' It comes from a website in another language (maybe german or dutch, I'm not sure), so I'm not sure if the image is a fanart or if it's just been selected because it looks how the website maker(s) imagine. I kind of like it too. (Though you'd have to replace that sky with a cavernous ceiling.)
I did a search for 'underground city' on deviantart (unrelated to AF) so here are a couple of those that I liked:
http://julian-faylona.deviantart.com/ar ... -264869848 I like those large columns, they could be like the chutes...though I doubt Haven is that dark, or has those spots of magma right in the city.
http://orig01.deviantart.net/0a96/f/201 ... 7ji62z.jpg
If you want a more canonical description from the books, I've started pulling together a list.
Main description from book 1:
Holly grabbed the remains of a nettle smoothie from the cooler and drank it in the tunnels. As usual there was chaos in the main thoroughfare. Airborne sprites jammed the avenue like stones in a bottle. The gnomes weren't helping either, lumbering along with their big swinging behinds blocking two lanes. Swear toads infested every damp patch, cursing like sailors. [...]Holly battled through the crowds to the police station. There was already a riot outside Spud's Spud Emporium.
Here's a summary based on what details I've compiled so far (I can include the specific quotes where I'm getting these if anyone would like, but I decided to leave them off for now since this post was unmanageable as it was. XD):
As far as I can tell, Haven is located somewhere in the earth's mantle, either close to or right on the edge of the outer core. (I've never been too clear on this, but based on TOD information, the Zito probe being aimed for the outer core, I tend to think in that direction.) The chutes (also seemingly called pressure elevators, if I'm understanding that right) are tunnels that lead out of Haven to the surface and exit at various locations around the world. I assume the chute entrances are somewhat close to Police Plaza, as Foaly and Holly go there from the Operations Booth, and there's no mention of using other vehicles to get there, though I'm not sure.
Haven is the largest fairy metropolis in the Lower Elements (with a little less than 10,000 inhabitants), but has become overcrowded with fairies being driven further underground with human mineral drilling. It has vehicles that run on an automated magnetic rail system (also called magnastrips; the strips have slow lanes and fast lanes, and police cruisers are equipped with magnetic shields that can force other cars into these slower lanes in emergencies), which provides power to the vehicles. (Vehicles in Haven include police cruisers, old vans as Foaly has, and magna bikes driven by police officers [LEPtraffic officers are nicknamed “Wheelies”]). The magnastrips are also responsible for steering and navigation. The city center, on the other hand, is pedestrianized. (*Note, I've always thought that Police Plaza is in this pedestrianized zone, but in TLG, Foaly runs to his van located in a multilevel carpark, so I'm not sure.) It's comprised of a network of tunnels which are lit by sun strips, which simulate sunlight at various times of the day.
References are made to stalactites hanging from the ceiling, so the city likely has a very underground feeling, (without a holographic sky, or the fake sun in the Eleven Wonders amusement park in TOD) and as the top of police headquarters is bolted to the ceiling, the cavern roof is likely not extremely high. (Headquarters is four floors high.) This would explain some fairies' almost claustrophobic feeling in the city, and the desire to see the sun again.
In the city, the Stick is a series of conveyor belts all over the city that helps pedestrians move quickly one place to another, similar to airport walkways, some going in and out of tunnels, each with a bulbous handhold to grip as you ride. Green cabs also provide taxi service.
[TLG]The Stick was the street name for a series of conveyor belts that ran in parallel strips along Haven City's network of blocks. It was an ancient and reliable mode of transport from a less litigious time, which operated on a hop-on/hop-off basis similar to certain human airport-walkway systems. There were platforms throughout the city, and all a person had to do was step onto a belt and grab hold of one of the carbon-fiber stalks that sprouted from it. Hence the name Stick.
Notable Locations: (if you want some more details to throw into a potential description)
- -Spud's Spud Emporium (where the goblin rebellion took place)
[...]a high-angled view of downtown Haven. A tourist district, outside Spud's Spud Emporium. Generally, this area would be thronged with Atlantean couples taking photos of each other in front of the fountain.
-The line of chute bays/pressure elevators, where shuttles travel to the surface, and officers ride the hotshots. Shuttles/titanium pods travel on a rail into the chute mouth, then proceed up the surface.
-Holding cells with stone walls in LEP Central. (I assume LEP Central is another term for Police Plaza, so this may be under the headquarters or somewhere in that vicinity.)
-Chute E37, which leads straight into Paris, France. Once a thriving suburb, it was largely abandoned due to increasingly high concentrations of humans in the city. (It seems that each chute entrance is located throughout Haven in different places, though Holly's references to chutes in plural in book one makes it feel more like all the chutes are in one place [and as mentioned before, near Police Plaza], a sort of hub of transportation, much like an airport. Otherwise we have to assume that they have to go to a variety of different places to get to E37, E1, E7 among others.)
In the area outside the chute, there is rusted out delivery shuttle, a statue of King Frond, and inside the building there is a check in desk, a turnstile gate, and an escalator that leads to up a second floor. In the departure area there is row of coolant tanks (all old and non-functional, except for one new one of a black oblong shape), and blast doors that come down automatically when a flare is coming.
-Koboi Laboratories:
Koboi Laboratories was carved from the rock of Haven's East Bank. It stood eight stories high, surrounded by a mile of granite on five sides, with access from the front only. […] The Council had gone so far as to grant the company special weapons permits. If Koboi went under, the entire Haven City defense network went under with it.
-Police Plaza: Police Plaza was a cobbled crest into which the shape of the Lower Elements Police acorn insignia had been painstakingly paved by master craftsmen. It was a total waste of effort as far as the LEP officers were concerned, as they were not generally the type who were inclined to gaze out of the fourth-floor windows and marvel at how the sim-sunlight caught the rim of each gold-leafed cobble and set the whole arrangement a-twinkling.
On this particular day it seemed that everyone on the fourth floor had slid from their cubicles like pebbles on a title surface and gathered in a tight cluster by the Situation room, which adjoined Foaly's office/laboratory.
[post destruction in TLG]
Police Plaza's basement collapsed, causing the bottom three floors to sink into the depression. Fortunately the upper floors were bolted to the cavern room, which held firm and saved the lives of many officers who had elected to remained at their posts.
[...]Police Plaza was eighty percent rubble now, with only the top story left clinging to the rock ceiling like a flat barnacle. The lower floors had collapsed onto the reserved parking spaces below, forming a rough rubble pyramid that steamed and sparked. Luckily, the cover bridge that led to the adjoining parking structure was still relatively intact. Foaly hurried across the bridge, trying not to see the gaps in the floor where a hoof could slip through, trying not to hear the tortured speech of metal struts as they twisted under the weight of their overload.
[...]enough room for Foaly to squeeze through and collapse, panting, on the fourth-story floor.
-Section Eight headquarters: [Entrance] They had pulled into a multi-story car park several blocks down from Police Plaza. The stretch armored vehicle followed the curve of the arrows up to the seventh floor, which was stuffed below the craggy ceiling. The driver parked in the least accessible, darkest space, then switched off the engine.
Section Eight is well hidden and protected by several layers of security
-Holly and Mulch's office during TLC. It has a plaque on the door that reads: Short and Diggums. Private Investigators.
Other places mentioned:
- -an insect delicatessen (a deli run by a dwarf; Holly captured four goblins there)
-the Northern Tunnel, where a two-hundred thick blast door comes down during times of emergency (emergency lights revolve around its lower edge)
-Opal's greenhouse lab where the clone was grown (constructed far from Koboi Industries)
-Howler's Peak, goblin correctional facility/prison
-J. Argon clinic
-An Italian piazza, which is along the way on the Stick from the Argon clinic
-shopping district, toward the south. The area heading into the shopping district used to be a goblin ghetto, but is getting revamped at the time of TOD. There's a vole curry kiosk in the area, along with a twenty-four hour movie theater.
-Crystal Street: a narrow service lane for the main shopping plaza, consisting mostly of delivery bays, with the rest of the units rented out for storage. (Doodah Days lives in one of those storage units.)
-Stirbox coffee shop, a trendy java joint in the Jazz Quarter.
-Boulevard of Kings, across the river from Westside Stadium. Corporal Holly Short was on traffic detail on the Boulevard of Kings. Lower Elements Police officers were supposed to travel in pairs, but there was a league crunchball match being played across the river, so her partner was patrolling the sidelines in Westside Stadium.
Holly raised her visor. “Please land, sir. Flying is restricted on the boulevard. There are signs.”
[To the sprite fish smuggler Eloe Phyber]
-Southern suburb residential area (where Foaly and Caballine live) The ARClight buzzed beyond the central plaza to the southern suburb, which had more of a rural feel. Genetically modified trees grew in small copses, and there were even controlled amounts of woodland creatures that were carefully monitored and released aboveground when they multiplied to nuisance levels. The dwellings here were modest, less modern in their architecture, and outside the evacuation zone. Foaly and Caballine lived in a small split-level with adobe walls and curved windows. The color scheme was autumnal throughout, and the décor had always been a little back to nature for Foaly's tastes, though he would never have dreamed of mentioning it.
-Weather Park In actual fact he [No1] did have a tail, but it was stubby and not good for much except making snow fans in Haven City's artificial weather park.
-The Fountain of Youth (tourist attraction)
-An aquarium: Once, in a fit of frustration, he [No1] had accidentally shattered the magnifying wall of the city's huge aquarium. Fairies were still finding minnows in their toilet ponds.
Another feature of the city seems to be that fairies have toilet ponds in their backyards.
-Haven's Market District, which contains the pixie fish bar Happy as a Clam, and a dwarf bar down the street.
Mulch Diggums strolled through Haven's Market District, feeling more relaxed with every step. The Market District was a lowlife zone, as much as you could have a lowlife zone on a street that boasted two hundred cameras and a permanent LEP cabin on the corner. But even so, criminals outnumbered civilians here eight to one.
[...]The most likely place was the fish bar across the street. Pixies loved fish. Especially shellfish. Especially protected shellfish, such as lobster. […] Mulch […] barged into Happy as a Clam as if he owned the place.
This isn't a comprehensive list (I just sort of skimmed through the books and looked at what I'd highlighted, and also just hunted out places I remembered specifically, and I left out a lot of things that I noted down that didn't have as much to do with Haven's physical description, or had more to do with inside buildings rather than the city outside), but it's a start. Once I've done a more thorough job looking through the books and noting down the descriptions, I'll probably try to reorganize this information in a more concise and presentable way, then put it up somewhere as a resource... (I've been meaning to do this forever to get ideas for drawings. Drawing Haven is tough, there's so many details to remember and it's hard to find the right source material... I think that's why there seems to be so little fanart for it. I started to draw a map a while back, but I didn't get very far, lol, at least not yet.)
Anyway, hope this helps! Can't wait to see more of your musical. :3