What if we built a similar city to Hengsha in Deus Ex: Human Revolution? With the Pangu and everything. I think that would be pretty cool.
http://deusex.wikia.com/wiki/Hengsha
Plus it's a nice cross between mega structure and city.
One of the main problems with a vertically designed city is that you very rarely have enough space for it, and with something as tall as Hengsha (effectively two cities stacked together, each one very tall by their own merit), you're going to run out of space even going from bedrock to skybox.
This can be worked around through
Robinton's Cubic Chunks SMP mod, but it's still rather unpolished. It's still usable, so if there's enough interest in this, it's possible.
The second hurdle, however, is that cities are very hard to create with a unified design (as OJ and Henge have pointed out). Sure, you can come up with a dozen excuses as to why that won't matter (such as "Old cities are pretty patchwork anyways!"), but ultimately, it'll still look butt-ugly without design conventions.
If we were to, say, draft design specifications and conventions and make enough of an effort to follow them, a unified style is possible, but that will most likely take the fun out of simply building (this is, after all, a gaming server and not a server populated by architects and designers, no matter how much we want it to be). This is one of the main reasons that I'd rather not do another city, because it will either be sub-par or too stressful to make.
People have suggested detailed blueprints, of course, and that's a way around all of this, but I don't know if we have enough good designers here to sit around and make a thousand blueprints for all the major buildings in a large city. It doesn't seem like something a server our size is equipped for.
Thinking about it I'm not sure a dedicated project server is necessary. I’ve seen other servers get good results by just declaring theme areas. The Neogaf server springs to mind. Perhaps participation drops off due to the strict rules of the project server as it now stands?
There aren't really any strict rules as-is, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there. If you mean block claiming, it was just a mechanism to prevent the kind of utter chaos you'd see normally.
The main reason is as PTTG said. It's a good reason, in my opinion, since we don't have the benefit of being able to undo griefings or rebuild easily (It's called WorldEdit, PTTG :p).
Project Creative Server: Creative mode minecraft, accessible to people who prove reasonably responsible, and with a new world- with the exception of a nice separate area around the city itself. The rest of the map, including parts that have already been explored, would be regenerated... assuming I can find a utility for that that works in any map format.
I'd also like to insert the clause "accessible to people who know their way around a build", purely for the sake of keeping headaches to a minimum.
>.>
<.<
They're lies I tells ya! LIES!
*dons tinfoil hat*