system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[DC] Do the fictional cities replace real cities, or add to them?

I always thought that:

Metropolis = New York (Statue of Liberty is there)

Gotham = Boston (a seaside metropolis near Metropolis--Batman often fights at "the docks" and can get to Supes quickly)

Central City = Chicago (central, but also not southern (only because CC is portrayed has having a more northern culture), and also has sea ports--Flash has run bombs into the ocean--Lake Michigan?*)

Star City = San Francisco (the closest metropolis to San Jose aka Silicon Valley where you'd expect Star Labs to be)

Then I read that Metropolis is in Delaware somewhere. Now I'm second guessing myself.

* In both TV series**, Flash's top speed is about than Mach 1 (much less than comic book or animated Flash speed). You'd have to be already near a body of water to run a bomb there and escape the blast.

** Never watched season 2 of the newest Flash show.
gpt
Add to them. DC Earth is explicitly larger than our Earth to accommodate for the extra cities. Gotham is in Jersey and shares a bay with Metropolis near New York, and IIRC Star City is slightly south of San Francisco, with Central City and Keystone City being somewhere between Pennsylvania and Missouri (depends on the continuity) separated by a river. Interesting to note is that the real cities in the DC universe are also quite different from their real world counterparts. For example, New York, "the Cinderella City", never got quite as big as its two "stepsisters", Gotham and Metropolis. As such, the history of the city is slightly different, and a bunch of architectural stuff that was planned but never executed in real life has already happened in DC's New York.


[This is only true for the comics and, presumably, the DCEU, since they've already shown Gotam and Metropolis to be in the same location as their comic counterparts. The Arrowverse cities might be in different locations.]