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It's crazy how much SimCity cities look like the cities we've built for the last 75 years. Our cities really can be simplified to a game "fun" for someone to di

It's crazy how much SimCity cities look like the cities we've built for the last 75 years. Our cities really can be simplified to a game "fun" for someone to dive in right away. My thesis is that cities are oversimplified and stratified into easily separable blocks because they're easier to "industrialize" that way. This is causing crazy transportation requirements and isolation. If we mixed uses up a bit we could save on transportation overhead and be exposed to more things. The driver of this SimCity pattern of development is undoubtedly the single occupancy automobile. Sprawl works best for the car and the car works best for sprawl. Denser, mixed up uses work best with walking, biking, and transit. Conspiracy theorist in me says the auto industry influenced city planning from the ground up because they could profit off of it. Who profits when you walk more? Well, everyone... healthier bodies, healthier minds, more efficient transportation, etc. etc. etc.

takk309 8y ago
You are not the only one that believes that the auto industry worked to change urban transportation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
duado 8y ago
The book you’re looking for is “Seeing Like A State”
leovander 8y ago
Judge Doom[0] explains it. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z75lu0wKbX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z75lu0wKbX8 Someone else posted the "General Motors streetcar conspiracy" already.
InitialLastName 8y ago
My biggest problem with both SimCity and City:Skylines (its spiritual successor) is that neither allows mixed-use zoning, forcing you to rely heavily on either cars or dense (expensive) transit networks. It's like they can't break the mold of the US suburban mindset.
- nkrisc 8y ago
  In the latter, while you can't build a building zoned for multiple uses, you can certainly very much blend zoning very thoroughly, alternating commercial and residential buildings as you go down the street. Of course, the simulation likely isn't sophisticated enough to make full use of that (people will travel across the entire map to go shopping). I can also understand from a gameplay perspective why this is the case.
  - FascistDonut 8y ago
    Maybe the shops in that part of town have better stuff.
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    There's the issue you mention, but IIRC there are also some big stat hits (happiness, noise, land value) from that sort of pattern. The game really pushes towards districts of distinct zoning as an optimized solution.
  - DonHopkins 8y ago
    It's very much because of gameplay issues. Theoretically the computer can simulate whatever model you can dream up, but the much harder problem is the user understanding, visualizing and editing that model with an easy interface that feels fun like playing a game, not tedious like doing your taxes in Excel or rigging skeletons in 3D Studio Max. Think of the number of extra user interface panels and gizmos and views and pop-ups and menus that users would have to wrangle in order to build, edit, query, visualize, and maintain 3D multiple story mixed use buildings in a city simulation, instead of having a simple 1:1 correspondence between space on the 2D map and zone type. The closest thing SimCity comes to mixed use zoning is multi-layered Arcologies, and the interface to those is pretty complicated and unwieldy. Imagine if every building and skyscraper in the city were that complex! Sim Tower supports mixed use zoning (with different discrete rooms in the same building), but just within one high rise tower, not a whole city. It's as much a game about pedestrian traffic, elevators, queuing and congestion, as an economic simulation. The Sims is whole a game unto itself at a different level of abstraction, that lets you build multi-story residential and commercial buildings with walls, doors, windows, furniture, etc. But it doesn't simulate "urban dynamics" between zones, just "personal dynamics" between the people and the architecture and contents of the buildings. The Sims 3 was scaled up so you could seamlessly walk around small towns, but The Sims 4 went back to focusing on houses or apartments in individual lots or flats, instead of expanding to simulating entire cities.
CalRobert 8y ago
The designer behind sim city (in the early 2010's) discusses how they just ignored parking because it makes cities ugly. https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...
CalRobert 8y ago
There's no conspiracy needed, the push towards stealing roads from people and horses and taking them for cars is pretty well documented. Once we decided it was ok to tell kids they couldn't play in the street, our cities were lost. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/1837/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/invention-jay...
logfromblammo 8y ago
I recall that one of the "optimal" designs for one version of SimCity (2000?) was to place street intersections--without connecting streets--at regular intervals, and build a connected subway station next to each. Certain features were hard-coded specifically for surface street intersections. So you couldn't simulate a Kowloon Walled City level of density, unless you count the arcologies. The car assumption is as built in to the game as it is to real cities. Power was supplied exclusively by perpetual-motion hydropower dams, enabled by the terraforming tools: flatten, raise land, add water, build dams on the falling-water squares. Anyway, the point is that if city planners these days are simplifying their task anywhere near SimCity levels of abstraction, the ensuing disaster won't be one that can be selected from a pull-down menu.
nostrademons 8y ago
People have certainly built Cities: Skylines cities with mixed-use developments, quaint mountain towns, little enclaves built around a park or monument, car-less cities, pedestrian-only cities, modular cities connected by mass transit, etc. I think the problem - in SimCity, Cities: Skylines, other video games, and real life - is that if you're building for aesthetics, there are many right answers, but if you're building for efficiency, there's only one right answer. The reason so many mid-size American cities have converged upon 1/4 acre lots with a road hierarchy, 3-lane boulevards, commercial strip malls on the boulevards, office parks, and freeways to link suburbs is that that's the most efficient way to satisfy the constraints of 2-3 child nuclear families who want privacy and a patch of greenery that's all their own and have varied destinations that each support too little traffic to be worth building mass transit to. The reason many megacities (I'm thinking particularly of NYC + Asian megacities like Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc.) have converged upon high-rise condominiums with street-level retail taking up whole city blocks with abundant bus & mass transit routes is because at a certain population density the suburban model ceases to work, and this becomes the only feasible way to move people to work & shopping. Interestingly, both models show up in Cities: Skylines, and the transition point between them is usually a painful inflection point in your city's development.
- alexfringes 8y ago
  This might be the one reason that makes the F2P Sim City worth mentioning, in which where I’ve found it much more challenging to achieve aesthetics while growing at a reasonable pace. Having grown up with the original Sim City series, I naturally have a dislike for the F2P version, but in the context of your post I appreciated the irony of F2P enforcing a certain realism as a side effect of, well, a realistic economic factor. Ok, now somebody take this and work in a proposal for a blockchain hybrid of the two.
- zanny 8y ago
  Its not just a space optimization but a locality optimization. Segregated neighborhoods from 50 years ago are still likely to be largely minority and gated communities adjacent still largely white. A tremendous amount of the demand that goes into urban sprawl is the desire to live distant from those deposed by the society the homeowners often perpetuate and instigate. The quarter acre of manicured grass, the per-working adult car, the maximum occupancy limits, the minimum square footage requirements, zoning in general all work to keep the "riff raff" out economically. Nothing about sprawl housing is efficient. Its almost maximally inefficient - you get the worst of everything, the traffic and congestion problems of density without any of the actual density because the people centralize on an urban core and surround it in extraordinarily wide expanses of cloned stick houses. But that inefficiency is baked in by design to push out those who cannot afford to participate in such inefficiency. You don't need gates on your community if the area is unlivable for the working poor for miles around.

takk309 8y ago

You are not the only one that believes that the auto industry worked to change urban transportation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

duado 8y ago

The book you’re looking for is “Seeing Like A State”

leovander 8y ago

Judge Doom[0] explains it. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z75lu0wKbX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z75lu0wKbX8 Someone else posted the "General Motors streetcar conspiracy" already.

InitialLastName 8y ago

My biggest problem with both SimCity and City:Skylines (its spiritual successor) is that neither allows mixed-use zoning, forcing you to rely heavily on either cars or dense (expensive) transit networks. It's like they can't break the mold of the US suburban mindset.

nkrisc 8y ago
In the latter, while you can't build a building zoned for multiple uses, you can certainly very much blend zoning very thoroughly, alternating commercial and residential buildings as you go down the street. Of course, the simulation likely isn't sophisticated enough to make full use of that (people will travel across the entire map to go shopping). I can also understand from a gameplay perspective why this is the case.
- FascistDonut 8y ago
  Maybe the shops in that part of town have better stuff.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  There's the issue you mention, but IIRC there are also some big stat hits (happiness, noise, land value) from that sort of pattern. The game really pushes towards districts of distinct zoning as an optimized solution.
- DonHopkins 8y ago
  It's very much because of gameplay issues. Theoretically the computer can simulate whatever model you can dream up, but the much harder problem is the user understanding, visualizing and editing that model with an easy interface that feels fun like playing a game, not tedious like doing your taxes in Excel or rigging skeletons in 3D Studio Max. Think of the number of extra user interface panels and gizmos and views and pop-ups and menus that users would have to wrangle in order to build, edit, query, visualize, and maintain 3D multiple story mixed use buildings in a city simulation, instead of having a simple 1:1 correspondence between space on the 2D map and zone type. The closest thing SimCity comes to mixed use zoning is multi-layered Arcologies, and the interface to those is pretty complicated and unwieldy. Imagine if every building and skyscraper in the city were that complex! Sim Tower supports mixed use zoning (with different discrete rooms in the same building), but just within one high rise tower, not a whole city. It's as much a game about pedestrian traffic, elevators, queuing and congestion, as an economic simulation. The Sims is whole a game unto itself at a different level of abstraction, that lets you build multi-story residential and commercial buildings with walls, doors, windows, furniture, etc. But it doesn't simulate "urban dynamics" between zones, just "personal dynamics" between the people and the architecture and contents of the buildings. The Sims 3 was scaled up so you could seamlessly walk around small towns, but The Sims 4 went back to focusing on houses or apartments in individual lots or flats, instead of expanding to simulating entire cities.

CalRobert 8y ago

The designer behind sim city (in the early 2010's) discusses how they just ignored parking because it makes cities ugly. https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...

CalRobert 8y ago

There's no conspiracy needed, the push towards stealing roads from people and horses and taking them for cars is pretty well documented. Once we decided it was ok to tell kids they couldn't play in the street, our cities were lost. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/1837/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/invention-jay...

logfromblammo 8y ago

I recall that one of the "optimal" designs for one version of SimCity (2000?) was to place street intersections--without connecting streets--at regular intervals, and build a connected subway station next to each. Certain features were hard-coded specifically for surface street intersections. So you couldn't simulate a Kowloon Walled City level of density, unless you count the arcologies. The car assumption is as built in to the game as it is to real cities. Power was supplied exclusively by perpetual-motion hydropower dams, enabled by the terraforming tools: flatten, raise land, add water, build dams on the falling-water squares. Anyway, the point is that if city planners these days are simplifying their task anywhere near SimCity levels of abstraction, the ensuing disaster won't be one that can be selected from a pull-down menu.

nostrademons 8y ago

People have certainly built Cities: Skylines cities with mixed-use developments, quaint mountain towns, little enclaves built around a park or monument, car-less cities, pedestrian-only cities, modular cities connected by mass transit, etc. I think the problem - in SimCity, Cities: Skylines, other video games, and real life - is that if you're building for aesthetics, there are many right answers, but if you're building for efficiency, there's only one right answer. The reason so many mid-size American cities have converged upon 1/4 acre lots with a road hierarchy, 3-lane boulevards, commercial strip malls on the boulevards, office parks, and freeways to link suburbs is that that's the most efficient way to satisfy the constraints of 2-3 child nuclear families who want privacy and a patch of greenery that's all their own and have varied destinations that each support too little traffic to be worth building mass transit to. The reason many megacities (I'm thinking particularly of NYC + Asian megacities like Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc.) have converged upon high-rise condominiums with street-level retail taking up whole city blocks with abundant bus & mass transit routes is because at a certain population density the suburban model ceases to work, and this becomes the only feasible way to move people to work & shopping. Interestingly, both models show up in Cities: Skylines, and the transition point between them is usually a painful inflection point in your city's development.

alexfringes 8y ago
This might be the one reason that makes the F2P Sim City worth mentioning, in which where I’ve found it much more challenging to achieve aesthetics while growing at a reasonable pace. Having grown up with the original Sim City series, I naturally have a dislike for the F2P version, but in the context of your post I appreciated the irony of F2P enforcing a certain realism as a side effect of, well, a realistic economic factor. Ok, now somebody take this and work in a proposal for a blockchain hybrid of the two.
zanny 8y ago
Its not just a space optimization but a locality optimization. Segregated neighborhoods from 50 years ago are still likely to be largely minority and gated communities adjacent still largely white. A tremendous amount of the demand that goes into urban sprawl is the desire to live distant from those deposed by the society the homeowners often perpetuate and instigate. The quarter acre of manicured grass, the per-working adult car, the maximum occupancy limits, the minimum square footage requirements, zoning in general all work to keep the "riff raff" out economically. Nothing about sprawl housing is efficient. Its almost maximally inefficient - you get the worst of everything, the traffic and congestion problems of density without any of the actual density because the people centralize on an urban core and surround it in extraordinarily wide expanses of cloned stick houses. But that inefficiency is baked in by design to push out those who cannot afford to participate in such inefficiency. You don't need gates on your community if the area is unlivable for the working poor for miles around.