Springfield is somewhere in the United States. This has been confirmed. The precise state has not been, despite the sustained investigative efforts of its own residents, an interested viewing public, and at least two academic papers that took the question more seriously than it probably warranted. It is in a state that has both mountains and coastline, an NFL franchise and a professional hockey team, an active nuclear power plant and a world-class natural history museum, a monorail that worked briefly, and a tire fire that has been burning since 1975 and cannot, for regulatory reasons that the relevant authority declines to explain, be extinguished.
Springfield is, in short, every town. Or the specific town that contains all towns within itself, which amounts to the same thing.
Character
Springfield is a mid-sized American town of approximately thirty thousand people, depending on how you count and who is currently in prison, visiting, or inexplicably present without explanation. It has a downtown, a residential neighborhood of single-family houses with yards ranging from well-tended to aspirational to completely given up, a commercial strip on the edge of town where the national chains have established their standard-issue outposts, and an industrial facility that is both the town's primary employer and its most recurring civic challenge.
The People
The Simpsons, Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, are the town's most representative family. Homer works at the nuclear plant in a role whose specific responsibilities have never been entirely clarified but whose consequences for the plant's operational integrity are a matter of record. Marge maintains the household at 742 Evergreen Terrace with a competence and emotional intelligence that the household does not consistently deserve. Bart is a student at Springfield Elementary in the way that weather is a feature of the atmosphere. Lisa is the family's conscience. Maggie observes everything and commits to nothing, which may be the wisest position available.
The Landmarks
Moe's Tavern (ahem, Joe's Tavern, definitely not Moe's, we've never heard of Moe's) is the town's emotional center, not because the town is defined by its relationship to alcohol, but because the bar is the place where the town's men process, discuss, and occasionally misremember what is happening in their lives. Springfield Elementary School is where the next generation of Springfield's citizens is being prepared for the world, or something adjacent to it. The Nuclear Power Plant looms at the edge of town in the way that things that are both essential and alarming tend to loom, the subject of a mural in the town hall lobby that was commissioned to make it look reassuring and has never quite succeeded.
Springfield's Relationship to Itself
The defining quality of Springfield as a community is not its dysfunction, though the dysfunction is real and documented and occasionally catastrophic, but its persistence. The town has been through a great deal. It has emerged from each thing, slightly different, essentially the same. Springfield endures. Springfield argues. Springfield is, in the fullest sense, a community: a group of people who did not choose each other and cannot leave each other and have decided, mostly, to make the best of it.
What We're Building
The Springfield Diorama
Springfield draws from official LEGO Simpsons sets as its foundation, supplemented by alt-brand sets covering locations the LEGO line never got to — including a Joe's Tavern set (we're going with that name and we're sticking to it), a First Springfield Church, and Springfield Elementary School, each from different alt brick brands. We're building it with the specificity that Springfield deserves: the right shade of yellow, the right shade of blue sky, the right relationship between the neighborhood houses and the horizon. Every Springfield has its own Springfield. This one is ours.