One city, fourteen districts, and a wealth gap you can read off a map. Everything below comes out of the studio lore bible.
Mid-class Genesis City, where the cameras are.
Downtown is where most of Genesis City actually lives. Mid-class generatives, working heroes and the celebrity tier share the same blocks, the same trains and the same complaints about rent.
It is the part of the city the rest of the Frontier pictures when it pictures Genesis City at all: bright, loud, filmed constantly, and quietly harder to afford every year.
Where the next League is being built.
New Hope is a university district built around one idea of Kato's: that he and the League will not be here forever, and somebody has to be ready when they are gone.
Students train in simulations and drill for the day nobody comes to help them, because the point of the Academy is to produce heroes who can hold the city alone.
At its centre stands a statue of Rory, the bird who was Kato's first partner before there was a League. Rory died in the gang war. The belief he argued for, that the next generation carries the city after you, became the school's motto.
Seven to eleven, around the clock.
LD Industries, Boom Corp and most of the city's heavy manufacturing sit in The Dip. Hundreds of laborers work it around the clock, and a large share of the Genesis City economy comes out of it.
Most of that workforce commutes from the Up Roar, a district that grew up beside the factories. Business owners once pushed cheap rent there to keep labor close. The population never stopped growing, gentrification pushed more people out of Uptown and Redlands, and the Up Roar became a dense, unplanned neighbourhood nobody ever designed.
The same warehouses that make the city run are useful to people with other business. Hidden storage and quiet offices are easy to come by here.
Where the warrants never arrive in time.
Genesis City Harbour sits at Shadow Bay: warehouses, ships and cargo, and a jurisdiction problem the police have never solved.
A legal ruling from a judge nobody wants to name means the League and the GCPD can only investigate the Docks with a warrant, and warrants here take a long time. Smuggling followed the paperwork.
Night Ape does not recognise that ruling, which is precisely why Griff keeps sending him down here for anything the department cannot touch. The warehouses hide a great many doors, and more than one person believes the entrance to the villains' lair is somewhere among them.
The prototypes nobody announces.
Saint Midas is where the money and the technology live. Its think tanks are rumoured to be building on synthetic Alpha, with hoverboards and force fields among the prototypes that have leaked.
There is a real current of feeling here, especially among lower-powered generatives, that the city will eventually need defensive technology capable of stopping a legendary. Very little of that work is discussed publicly. What Uptown puts on shelves instead is holographic television and expensive vehicles.
It also holds the best apartments in Genesis City, which gives a certain kind of villain a long list of reasons to visit.
Suburbs, and then the gates.
Vermillion Hills is the comfortable middle of Genesis City: suburbs for mid-class generatives, a few working heroes, and the occasional celebrity who wanted a lawn. Xerido, now an executive at Boom Corp, keeps a house here.
Behind it sits Koalapan, where the suburbs stop and the mansions begin. Lord Duma lives there. So do Boyle, the Influencer, and most of the people the city calls Alpha billionaires.
Where the Frontier was made, and where the war ended.
The Twin Mountains sit at the centre of Genesis City and carry more mythology than any other landmark. Some legends hold that the Frontier itself was created here.
What is not legend is that Kato stood on this ground to declare the war over and the Grand Alliance begun. That is why the League's headquarters was built here.
The Monkey Temple statue, formally the Unknown Palladine, is the city's most photographed view.
