Friday Morning Ruminations

Again, I wonder sometimes about the SimCity AI computation.

I think one of the hardest lessons for most designers to learn is restraint. So many times my firm will get into trouble because we love to design till the cows come home. We keep revising and adding and scrapping and adding and revising. We love designing soooooo much that our projects run over budget and we dangerously push the limits of our project schedule. Don't get me wrong... our designs are always of the finest quality. Apparantly we thrive in tight situations though.

I think all of us fell into this trap in our initial cities. It was the desire to build the bestest greatest city and a genuine love of designing.

Restraint. It's not just a river in Egypt.

Suburbia

For my slow second city I wanted to experiment with what is more accurate to our current model of American cities. IE a suburban residential network outside of a downtown industrial and commercial district. I will intersperse a few residential clusters into the downtown area to represent areas like the North End that has mixed use, but i will keep the majority of the residential at a commute away.

This city which I will name "Fairhaven" will use the following design constraints:

residential clusters on outskirts
"downtown" commercial/industrial areas
1 new zone every 5 years

I'm hoping this city will grow slower and more organically. I will try to be less rigid with my block design.

Fairhaven in 1905.

Fairhaven in 1915.

Centralized?

Okay, after commenting on others' blogs, I noticed that my SimCity was in fact the opposite of what I said I wanted. So as I expanded westward, I tried to keep my original intention more defined.

Here is a centralized city. From west to east, there are outer residential zones, then a strip of commercial zones (as well as other support spaces), then a swath of industrial zones. My population is currently 92k.














I also started a second "slow" city as Chris suggested. So therefore I'm going to call this large big city "Bartertown".

Undeveloped zones

As I was reading most people's cross posts, I noticed that a few of you have the common theme of zoned areas not developing.

I had that problem too, and then realized that all the new zones need access to at least some road or else they have no way of getting there. I know this is just a computer simulation, but this also seems true to most red blooded Americans (and their need for gas guzzling cars). So while a utopian city (or Shangri-La as I call it) would probably only a fantastic T system, it really wouldn't be a functional city with out road.

How many of YOU have cars?