Don highlights a thread at the Old Home Bulletin Board that attempts to map the town of Glie. The basic data are estimated walking speeds and times of travel. It’s a pretty laborious task, but I think that the end result (while surely consistent with the data) is just not a good fit with the essence and basic symbolism of Haibane Renmei.
The main issue is that the Wall clearly must be circular. I have been exploring the circle symbolism in my ongoing series of posts on the topic; that the Wall could be anything other than a circle would break the integral symmetry in a fundamental way.
Any attempt to map Glie simply must begin with the basic assumption that the Wall is a circle, and that the town is near the center. I don’t doubt that reasonable estimates can be attained, but I also note that Glie is not a three-dimensional universe – Glie is fundamentally a two-dimensional plane. Steven has also noted that time itself doesn’t seem to be truly linear, in Glie it is always what time it needs to be. The spacetime topology of Glie may not be continous enough to map!
UPDATE: Shamus has a nice screencap that shows the apparent curvature of the wall from the inside is much tighter than it would appear from the outside. More evidence that Glie is strange, topologically speaking.
I don’t know if it has to be a circle, although I like the symbolism so like you, I’ll think of it as a circle. Speaking of the wall, I wonder why nobody has tried to build something tall enough to look over the wall. Before trying to climb it, at risk of life and limb, I’d really want to know if there was anything on the other side worth the effort.
Quorlox, ever hear about what happened to the Tower of Babel?
Seriously; if Kami-sama wanted you to know what was outside the walls, Kami-sama wouldn’t have built them so tall.