While GTA 6 City of the Week looks at one location in the USA and evaluates it as a possible setting of the next installment in Rockstar Game's popular open-world action adventure franchise every week, Foreign City of the Week, as the name suggests, looks beyond the borders.
Having written about Rio last time, riding the hype around the Olympics, we were a bit stumped as to which city to pick this time. For Foreign City, we wanted to look at cities which are currently in the news — but pretty much all the news these days is negative. Maybe next week there will be some kind of scientific breakthrough achieved in Tokyo or Sydney or something so we can look at a city with a positive media footprint.
In the meantime however, we're going to look at.
Moscow
The Russian capital is a true behemoth of a city to behold. The largest city in all of continental Europe, categorised as an Alpha Global city, the ninth most expensive city in the world to live in, the northernmost and coldest "megacity" on Earth and among the fastest growing tourist attractions in terms of popularity. It is the largest and most populous landlocked city in the world. It is home to the tallest freestanding structure in Europe and the tallest Skyscraper in Europe. It is considered to be the economic, political and scientific hub for not only Russia but the entirety of Eastern Europe. Now, this last statement does depend on where you draw the border of "Eastern" Europe, but it mostly holds true.
The city has acted as the center of Russian culture throughout history, having been the capital of pretty much every nation that ever encompassed all of or most of what is today the Russian Federation. It is home to a wide array of famous buildings, notable for their architecture. This includes the Kremlin, which is the seat of power in the nation, housing the State Duma and Federation Council, as well as (one of) the residence(s) of the President.
Moscow, being such a monstrosity of a settlement, needs a strong transit system to rely on. Between four international airports, nine railway stations, countless bus and tram-lines and a monorail system. Add to this the largest, deepest and most famous metro system in Europe, servicing over 200 stations which has been featured in popular post-apocalyptic fiction extensively, and you have a public transport system large enough to make travelling through the city viable without a car.













