Dystopian City Name Generator

Dystopian cities tend to be named by whoever controls them, and that tells the reader who is in charge before a single character speaks. Authoritarian states strip identity away with numbers - Orwell's Airstrip One, Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, the Districts of Panem, THX 1138's nameless levels - because a citizen who lives in Sector 12 is easier to manage than one who lives in Bristol. Corporate dystopias name cities after the company that owns them (Weyland Heights, Arasaka Tower District), or hide control behind real-estate cheer: Prosperity Gardens, Harmony Towers, Utopia Ward. Post-collapse settlements go the other way, taking honest names from what is left - Ashfall, Rustwater, Bartertown, Gastown.

A second common move is the 'New' or 'Neo' prefix. Neo-Tokyo (Akira), New Babylon, and New Detroit imply that an old city fell and something harder was built on the ruins, and biblical doomed cities (New Sodom, New Nineveh) add irony. Definite-article nicknames - The Sprawl, The Sump, The Stacks, The Undercity - are what residents actually say, and pairing an official name with a street name is one of the quickest ways to make a setting feel lived in.

The best dystopian city names are short and slightly wrong: a number where a name should be, a hopeful word in a hopeless place, or a bleak word said plainly.