Further thoughts on the use of Public Infastructure as Worldbuilding Tool
Much has been said about the benches in Hallownest vs. Pharloom, but now I want to talk about the transport systems.
The Stagways were explicitly public transport available to anyone, & we're explicitly told the King mastermind & financial backer but actually the architect who designed them.
This is used to characterize Hallownest in its golden age as a place that would have been relatively fancy & modern and that brought convenience and progress to its sphere of influence, where you would find unusual wealth and convenience (at least compared to its near surroundings like wherever Cloth, Zote, Ellina or Cornifer would be from, from whose PoV its this lost ancient wonder)
The trams, meanwhile, example of Hallownest's technological marvels but were also explicitly something reserved for the upper crust, probably relative novelty & costliness of the technology - the Old Stag seemed a bit worried that the "ghastly contraptions" could've put him & his fellows out of business (one of the few notable example of someone not being 100% happy with the King's policies), so it's conceivable that eventually they would have become more broadly accessible if the catastrophe didn't hit when it did.
Still, as it was, he reserved the right to veto who gets to buy a tram pass, although we get no concrete examples of who may have been excluded. It would have very different implication if it was, like, known troublemakers, vs following some more discriminatory or capricious pattern. (eg. if it had been something like no tram pass for you if you drew a critical cartoon of the king) - the information we go have suggests mostly rich people got to ride it.
The locations are also noteworthy - one goes between the crossroads & the resting grounds (maybe as a reward for the Moths, as they had been the first outsiders to join him?), the other goes between Deepnest, the Ancient Basin and Kingdom's edge (near the entrance to the Hive) - it makes some purely pragmatic sense as Deepnest became an important trade partner in the late days of the kingdom & the collosseum is noted to have been a huge attraction, but its probably not a complete coincidence that this route would've been very convenient to a certain princess.
Still, while there definitely were some class divisions & it's likely that some of the poorer citizens weren't ever going to see the inside of a tram in their lives, it wouldn't have been a great disadvantage since 'cheaper' transport existed. It was just less luxurious.
The Bellways, meanwhile, were less like a public bus or train & more like a motorway for cars - we're told the citadel high ups used to travel in golden carriages.
You need your own vehicle to use them & the ones who could afford them were the ones who could also afford them to be golden, so yeah... (who would've had a non-motorized carriage in the olden days, not who might afford a car today)
Meanwhile, it's considered a sin for the pilgrims to use convenient forms of transport, they gotta walk, often through dangerous extreme environments.
Hornet of course circumvents this by acquiring not a golden vehicle, but a cool adorable mount.
The "golden" architecture is generally associated with the Conductor Era so presumably they built it, although their use as transport may have been precded by the Weavers designing all the bells as a component of the seal on the Monarch.
The fact that such golden carriages havent been seen in a while hints that she's breached containment, haunted everyone in the citadel & thereby effectively put herself back in charge.
(there's such a juicy irony there: The Weavers could easily disappear her because the people never saw her anyway, this distant idealized presence, the orders kept coming from on high, but then later she could disappear the citadel high ups because they were also such removed, unseen rulers who sent orders down. the exploited peasants barely noticed the changes in government they were just all terrible/ concerned with putting themselves at the top rather than making anything better. )
There's also a second fancier transport system, the ventricas.
The trams were just a few experimental thingies that were cut short by the kingdom's fall; The ventricas go through the whole citadel, but are only available there. (much more High Tech than Hallownest ever was - it was ultimately a big fish in a small pond and only impressive in relative terms), but it's also a raging dystopia.
Well. A video game needs plot & problems bad enough you have to solve them with Action Scenes so you're gonna see pretty places that are ruined or still standing places that are terrible. )
It's implied use of the Ventricas was banned cause people kept using them for suicide to escape the state-enforced immortality, which is... a fun bit of environmental storytelling horror. Like, juicy juicy.
The player actually needs to use these so it's possible to make the audience feel their impact a little bit & therefore get a sense of the places (see also: you're constantly out of rosaries until you get to the citadel), which was kinda clever of the devs.
This is less possible for the sewers (you can't smell through the screen xD) but in that case the story gets it across by giving them a "face".
Hallownest has the Royal Waterways - another ingenious construction. It keeps the big city nice & clean (sanitation or lack thereof was a huge QoL issue in victorian era cities), it utilizes the natural rainfall (still kinda working after half an eternity without maintenance), it appears to be a compost sewer using plants & compost piles, and after all the junk is filtered out, the rest drains into the fungal wastes as fertilizer for the mushrooms. (one man's trash is another Shroom's fertilizer... in any ways a clever solution to reconciling the different needs of the various citizens). - slapping 'royal' on the sewers implies some pride in the ingenious construction. (in the Wanderer's Journal, the Queen's station is also noted to be ingenious because it's built to be remarkably pretty & spacious while disrupting the different landscapes it borders as little as possible, as another example of the environment being considered.)
Also, who's guarding it? One of the most decorated knights!
As much as he's stuck in the past & in denial about the death of his comrades & his arcis about coming to terms the glory of the past is gone & won't come back, he's one of the nicest wholesome do-gooders around.
Meanwhile, Pharloom has Bilewater and the Putrified Ducts. The names are self-explanatory. Despite all the advanced tech they have, the idea of environmental friendlyness has not occurred to anyone here (except maybe the Memorium? A bit of a too little too late, drop on a hot stone kinda thing, or even comes off as a British Museum War Trophy kinda thing.), instead we see rapacious resource extraction & exploitation all around. The Stilkin are super duper mad at having all the trash dumped in their home. Bilewater is made super unpleasant for the player to be in so we feel it, too.
There's a big distinction to "Gross" / "scary" environments like Deepnest or the Waterways that are just... naturally like that. There are voracious scary creatures adapted to scary environments but they just live there, minding their business. They're "supposed" to be that way. If you were one of the locals, you'd like it there. By contrast, no one likes Bilewater. It used to be nice & they ruined it, & the locals are very, very mad. (just one example of many; The Skarr & Craw for example were likewise displaced etc. etc.)
The Citadel's trash disposal also has a guardian who also has much to say in terms of characterizing the local ruler, but, uh... yeah.
Poor Phantom. Much has already been said of their plight that is largely independent to their being in charge of waste disposal so I won't rehash that here, but what is relevant here is that their job seems to be either a punishment or an expression of their being discarded, forgotten and unloved: You are trash, so you will handle the trash. They're all alone & neglected, and it's explicitly a low-status job.
They're trying to find some meaning in their lonely disgraced existence by being artistic, sort of establishing their own identity & going out on their own terms but it's pretty clear they feel like they were created just to suffer.
It says much about GMS what the thinks a scathing punishment is. There's the "Infertility curse for traitors" (she is obsessed with wanting to be a parent, so maybe she thinks that'll show them how she feels over their ingratitude) "you will do peasant work all alone for eternity".
Hallownest was not at all free of weaker, poorer members of the society being looked down upon (eg. False Knight and his brothers - no such thing as a 100% perfect utopia) & some of the upper class were snobbish (eg. Emilitia - she seems to have bee disgraced/ punished for something, but we don't know if she did something bad or something good that other ppl didn't like.) but ultimately, even the non-rich side of the city is still clean and pretty enough to dazzle visitors. We don't see any huge decrepit slums or anything. Also, the one put in charge of the city was Lurien, where one of the few things we know about him is that he was beloved by his staff & underlings, presumably cause he would've treated them well, & that he was ready to effectively give up his life to protect the city's people.
The official position seems to have been that ppl were encouraged to donate what they didn't need, (see the tithing fountain) but it's also abundantly clear that not everyone did. Certainly not the guy who ended up as the Gorgeous Husk! (there's only one, so, individual eccentric rich person doing a Lady Gaga meat dress stunt) - also probably intended as a reference to IRL golden beetles.
His whole gimmick is that he's for individuality & free will, some are gonna use that free will to encrust themselves with gold or build the Colloseum of Fools - laissez faire isn't always a good thing...
It's also implied that part of PK's motivation was desiring companions (eg. Kingsmould journal description), so, I wonder if on some level he'd promise ppl everything they wanted (including bullshit luxuries) so they'd like him. Like somewhere underneath the uptight stoic exterior is something like "Play with me! I'll share my fancy toys if you do!" - the whispering root in the city of tears also tells of the inhabitants of the city being "promised plenty", & while it's not necessarily canon the full version of the opener poem seems to portray him that way like he was never done granting all his subjects' wishes & desires.
Some would always want more, there would always be more dreams, even in some approximate utopia ppl would still dream of more... & the Radiance used those dreams to wreck his shit.
Certainly reflected in how she seems to have looked for useful idiots with grudges against him, & it was mostly ambitious tough guy types & glory hounds: Xero seems to have been wanted to solve everything with strength, Traitor Lord doesn't seem to have liked that they're at peace now & that his daughter is dating an outsider, Soul Master isn't satisfied with just having a longer lifespan than most the surface dwellers & wanted to be full on inmmortal (one also gets the sense that he was kind of envious of the KIng himself & wanted to be him)
Poverty was clearly a much more widespread issue in Pharloom where you get several entire areas of sickly, overworked serfs that drop pitiful amounts of currency, explicit mentions of ppl going hungry or the food being dystopian etc.
Several characters also express surprise to see Hornet doing "peasant work" after clocking her as a Waver and/or nobility, which tells you ppl in Pharloom aren't used to seeing the high ups lifting a finger. Lace trying to make fun of her for getting dirty & not being graceful enough is also indicative of prevalent attitudes, or those Lace was raised with.
