How 'SimCity' Inspired a Generation of City Planners (latimes.com) 128
Jessica Roy, writing for LA Times: Thirty years ago, Maxis released "SimCity" for Mac and Amiga. It was succeeded by "SimCity 2000" in 1993, "SimCity 3000" in 1999, "SimCity 4" in 2003, a version for the Nintendo DS in 2007, "SimCity: BuildIt" in 2013 and an app launched in 2014. Along the way, the games have introduced millions of players to the joys and frustrations of zoning, street grids and infrastructure funding -- and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living.
For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, "SimCity" was their first taste of running a city. It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone's job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go.
For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, "SimCity" was their first taste of running a city. It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone's job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go.
Cities Skylines is better (Score:5, Interesting)
Grew up on Sim City. Started on C64.
Thank you Maxis, and screw you EA.
Re:Cities Skylines is better (Score:5, Informative)
No mod points, but I absolutely agree. Skylines is the spiritual successor to SimCities of old, and it's amazing.
Re: Cities Skylines is better (Score:1)
This is correct. The AI is a little wonky but simulating 50,000 citizens is no easy task
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Bullshit. It's the "master planners" who decided to create zoning prohibiting mixed use building which led to the change into carefully segregated industrial, commercial and residential areas and the inevitable need to drive in and out of the first two from the third. As a bonus, they also decided they knew better than builders how many parking spots were needed, so we also have a vast landscape of unused asphalt with white markings on it.
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True. And the cities they didn't know how to plan speak for themselves.
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"For many urban and transit planners, it was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned."
You must be one dumb ass urban planner to not know towns, cities, and neighborhoods needed to be "planned."
When they were children oh dumb ass AC.
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They got the eminent domain thing right - >>BOOM
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this doesn't change the fact that one very effective and inexpensive (tax-wise) solution to crime is to just drive out the poor.
That's not a solution as it doesn't solve crime, it merely transports it (and most likely you will have increased net crime at the new location as compared to the original location due to lack of contacts/support/job prospects/housing/etc for the displaced).
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this doesn't change the fact that one very effective and inexpensive (tax-wise) solution to crime is to just drive out the poor.
That's not a solution as it doesn't solve crime, it merely transports it
It does solve crime locally and if you are honest this is exactly approach used everywhere. "Location, location, location" is rarely about vistas or you would have a lot more rural living, but about other people living in the area. Solving crime globally is an orthogonal problem to making sure you are not a victim of crime.
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Another solution would be to stop subsidizing poverty through welfare and housing vouchers. Subsidize what you want to grow, not what you want to go away. If the poor were working instead of living off of taxpayer money, they would have less time and incentive to commit crime.
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Gentrification is a concern of the poor, and for good reason: it fucks them out of their homes.
Correction: it fucks them out of the place their renting. The poor who own their house (more common than you may think) benefit from rising prices, and proportionally more so.
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That's such a small percentage it isn't even worth talking about.
Let's displace 4000 people, but 100 of them will be home owners so they will benefit.
Depends where you live. I've been through plenty of very poor neighborhoods that were all houses. Tiny houses built long ago, but still. That includes parts of the SF Bay Area.
For what? A 25% increase in a house that you still have 25 years to pay off?
More like 5x in some places. And you pay it off the moment you sell and pocket the difference. Still sucks to have to move, but if your $80k house becomes a $400k knockdown and you keep the $320k, that does soften the blow.
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Streets of Sim City does...
I learnt a lot from Sim City (Score:5, Funny)
I learnt a lot from Sim City, I know all cities on earth will inevitably get destroyed when the town planners get bored and call on all sorts of disasters to wipe the slate clean and start again.
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I learnt a lot from Sim City, I know all cities on earth will inevitably get destroyed when the town planners get bored and call on all sorts of disasters to wipe the slate clean and start again.
When you combine this observation with the Simulation Hypothesis, the world starts to make a lot more sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
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Re: I learnt a lot from Sim City (Score:1)
I learned that you could make an entire city with double width columns over the enire map. That you could have all rails, served by ONE tiny train. Power plants can be connected with just a telephone power line. Also, if you build just one patch of road, there will be a traffic jam on it.
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but it takes so much longer to instantiate the disaster when the only buttons you can press are "release more greenhouse gases", "let the miners frack the ground", and "clear the land"
Skimming the headlines (Score:5, Funny)
How 'SimCity' Inspired a Generation of City Planners
(Player adds infinite cash) Mmmmmm...gonna get me some kickback action!
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You do realize that you couldn't handle even a tiny fraction of that much cash, right?
Uh huh... (Score:1)
and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living.
Then why don't they turn off disasters IRL?
Godzilla (Score:1)
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Actually, it was to imitate Paris. And Paris did that so that the army had nice long firelanes for their cannon when they were suppressing riots.
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Thats why modern cities are designed with long straight boulevards. Not to be architecturally pleasing, but to give the kaiju a clear run across the landscape without running into buildings.
Joseph Smith Jr used the grid system in Nauvoo in the 1830s. Brigham Young continued it in Utah Territory in the 1840s, but the stipulation he wanted the streets wide enough that an ox cart could do a U-turn. I think both these example predate SimCity. The grid system used by Smith and Young make navigation super easy: chose the city center, street numbers increase by 100 as you move away from the center and include the direction (200N 300W is 2 blocks north and 3 blocks west of the center point); 8 blocks
And if you enjoy the transport network part (Score:2)
City Planners are crazy (Score:1, Insightful)
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there is no such thing as parking in sim city. therefore there is no such thing as parking in urban planning
Re:City Planners are crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
No, city planners have just realized what you have failed to realize: we can't solve traffic unless we get rid of the cars. You can't build enough highway lanes to solve traffic congestion. Building wider streets and bigger highways just ends up spreading everything out more and more, and thus necessitating more and more car travel. It's a positive feedback system.
Planners have realized that we need to go back to building cities for people, not for cars. Bike lanes are just one part of that. Slowing down traffic is another.
Re:City Planners are crazy (Score:4, Interesting)
No, city planners have just realized what you have failed to realize: we can't solve traffic unless we get rid of the cars.
Citation?
Planners have realized that we need to go back to building cities for people, not for cars. Bike lanes are just one part of that. Slowing down traffic is another.
While all of these planning moves are clearly anti-car, it doesn't lead to "building cities for people". It just leads to more misery, short and long term. The least affected population by this is childless single hipsters working in tech, who can afford in both circumstances and income to live in a tiny condos downtown.
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First hit on Google - plenty of supporting information and real science out there if you are actually interested:
https://usa.streetsblog.org/20... [streetsblog.org]
Re:City Planners are crazy (Score:5, Informative)
The reported data clearly indicates that building more highway capacity is both short and long term effective solution to traffic.
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So building more roads solves traffic issues. Reducing lanes increases traffic. Who knew, right?
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It's one of many studies. Do the searching and read up please. You are forcing an interpretation that matches your incorrect perception, not the actual facts.
I understand it's counter-intuitive, but more roads and lanes leads to more traffic congestion, not less. The primary reason is because more road capacity encourages people to increase the number of trips they make and to do so in a car instead of other modes of transportation, thereby negating the very short term capacity surplus that was introduced.
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We can agree that original claim is BS, or you can provide some evidence that could survive even superficial critical reading.
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I gave you a link with proof, and a google search reveals many more similar studies (this is an area I someone actively maintain an interest in).
You are the one who needs to prove their unsupported claim at this point.
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I didn't put words in your post when you stated:
So turns out it isn't at all clear that "demand can more than use up the extra capacity".
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It just leads to more misery, short and long term.
Driving a car in a city is about the single most miserable experience imaginable. Free youself from your car and bask in a world free from undiagnosed clinical depression.
live in a tiny condos downtown.
Huh? What does a tiny condo downtown have to do with anything? We living in a sensibly designed cities where this isn't a requirement to not own a car would love to know.
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A better way to put this IMHO is that automobile transportation just isn't scalable enough.
I came to this realization that this is really a scale problem a few months ago. I generally citibike (bike share) to work, and was feeling pretty smug about it for a period of time. I still use mass transit on occasion though, and one time I was on a packed train and some dude comes on with a bike. It took up the space of about 4, maybe 5 people. Biking, while far better than a car-which I also noticed that 5 bikes t
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It's really not terribly complicated to figure out. Roads and highways have a non-zero width. Space occupied by the highways is space that isn't being used for productive uses. Some parts of the interstates through major cities carve canyons through the area that are between 350 and 500 feet wide. Parking lots needed to store all the cars on those highways create endless expanses of paved areas. With more and more lanes and wider roads, it means destinations are farther apart because there is more paved spa
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It is harsh winter 5 out of 12 month here, yet they keep eliminating lanes by adding bike lanes.
I don't understand. Do they not sell studded or winter tires for bicycles in your country? Or do you not own jackets? Or do you just not put the maintenance in? I mean where I live the ploughs ensure the cycle paths are done before the roads. I don't quite understand your problem.
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My problem is that I view bike commuting as impractical and unsafe in good weather, and outright idiotic in the winter. I don't have a death wish and don't appreciate you trying to dictate how I should live, you righteous SJW dipshit.
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Connecticut legislators don't seem to have ever used SimCity. They still think that if you quadruple the tax rate, it will bring in 4 times the money to the State
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We need SimResources too (Score:2, Insightful)
I wish there were also SimFood, SimEnergy, SimWater etc. Maybe it could all be covered under SimResources. Perhaps it would give millennial urbanites, who think that food, water and energy just magically show up at their local Starbucks, Trader Joes and so on, a clue as to where that stuff comes from and that the values and livelihoods of the people in other parts of the country who provide their food and energy actually matter.
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I miss SimAnt. Ants actually matter, most of this people stuff is silly.
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Food is already Centrally Planned (Score:3)
No Developed nation would be able to grow its own food without centrally planned subsidies. Farming is simply not that high value , the land and people can be used for something more economically viable . Food would all be imported from the third world if we didn't have central ministries of agriculture centrally planning we nned to have this much corn production capability in case of war hence we need this much subsidy.
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Food would all be imported from the third world if we didn't have central ministries of agriculture centrally planning
And the problem with this would be...? Higher employment rates leading to higher wages in the third world, lifting people out of poverty there while delivering cheaper food here? And a world less likely to go to war since the potential disruption to the food supply makes the prospect more dangerous to governments? How terrible.
Anyway, the subsidies you're talking about refer to NATIONAL food supply planning, not city-level.
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SimFood was actually called Sim Farm, it was released in 1993. It taught me that the best profit results were to be had by filling up square miles with storage silos, then filling them with strawberries. Once the market for strawberries spiked you sold the entire stockpile all in one go and then had the funds to do absolutely whatever you wanted to the rest of the map.
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In the real world of course you can't stockpile strawberries in silos.
SimCity taught me an important lesson (Score:5, Funny)
When I was young and playing SimCity 3000, I loved building up cities and solving all of the problems. So after a while I had built up a "Utopia" city, virtually no crime, close to zero pollution, parks everywhere, rails to take you anywhere, etc... And to top it all off I had taxes set at 1% across the board, I even had a surplus of cash being generated at 1%. So I checked the city for complaints (Shouldn't really be any), and I found that people were telling me taxes were too high. Since I couldn't go any lower but 0%, I decided to set it at that for a year to see what would happen. After one year in game passed I checked it again and guess what, the people still said that taxes were too high! They were paying no taxes and living in a damn perfect city and still wanted more.
That game taught me that no matter how good you do something or how perfect it is, people will still complain.
It was a great lesson to learn.
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In the 2013 Sim City game the zero tax trick actually works. You can create a libertarian paradise with no electricity, no water, no roads, no refuse collection, no services at all and 0% tax. People will be 100% satisfied.
It really wasn't a very good game.
Learning Consequences and Balance. (Score:3)
One of the biggest learning experience from Sim City is the idea of balance, and consequences. This is a lesson that a lot of people really don't get anymore, they are so stuck on a theory that they want to Min/Max their lives to fit their social/political ideas.
Sim City really prevented the ability to Min/Max game play and forced a balanced approach.
Those Industrial zone which pollute and lower the nearby Residential value, however they are needed to support the Commercial districts, and if they are too far away from the Residential areas, then they will not be utilized thus lowering commercial value.
Your choices have a trade off, but not making a choice is often worse, then when you have your consequence in action, you will need to then see if there is a way to mediate it, and then have its own sets of trade offs.
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Sim City really prevented the ability to Min/Max game play and forced a balanced approach.
This fellow disagrees with you, and min/maxed his way to a 9+million person city.
https://youtu.be/NTJQTc-TqpU [youtu.be]
City planners - ha! (Score:2)
UNPLANNED vs PLANNED (Score:2)
Nobody mentions Tropico? (Score:5, Insightful)
The real successor to Sim-City.
Secret police, wiretaps, and rigged elections! Art imitates life, eh Presidente?
If this is true... (Score:2)
Let's anniversary play the DOS version (Score:2)
SimCity only tied with Ultima 5 as far as favorite (Score:1)