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"…[The] great rigidity in allowed uses per zone in North American zoning means that urban planing departments must really micromanage to the smallest detail eve
by smcl 10y ago
"…[The] great rigidity in allowed uses per zone in North American zoning means that urban planing departments must really micromanage to the smallest detail everything to have a decent city. Because if they forget to zone for enough commercial zones or schools, people can’t simply build what is lacking, they’d need to change the zoning, and therefore confront the NIMBYs"
Oh my word - when playing the SimCity series as a kid I always thought "well, this is a kinda weird way to work but I guess it's just a game..." when laying out the little squares of green, blue or yellow (SC2K colors iirc, can't remember the others!). I had no idea that this was a relatively accurate abstraction for real-life city planning in the USA.
- vertex-four 10y agoWhereas in games like Pharaoh, they were designed so that you had to have many things within a certain (close, but not too close) distance of your population in order for your people to be happy and avoid crime, fires, etc. Zoning is non-existent. This is much closer to how planning permission works in my country - there's no specific zoning (though you're unlikely to get planning permission to put an industrial estate in a city centre), and people enjoy having shops etc nearby.
- m_mueller 10y agoYep, Japan is much more like Pharaoh than Sim City. If is probably my favorite aspect of living here. Living on the periphery of Tokyo we pay 900$/m for a 2.5 room and have more train stations, restaurants, shops, hospitals and parks nearby than any other residential place I've seen outside of Japan.