City Building Game

otvgame

City Building Game

the-grey-tribe

I like the idea of making a game based on your city planning prototype, however I don’t think your game will be a great vehicle for your city-planning ideas.

Modelling The Interesting Stuff

In order to make your city-planning ideas work in a game you would either have to model incentives based on individual in-game agents, and thus give agents complex AI for long-term decisions like when to buy or rent or move or renovate or change jobs, how much money to save or to invest with some risk or to spend, how many children to have and so on. You would have to model trust and civic engagement and social cohesion. Or all these factors would just be variables in an abstract cellular automaton based on a system of differential equations, like the original SimCity. In that case, you would have to make simplifications and judgements that look like begging the question.

The middle path would be putting agents into a grid-based world in which they make some decisions individually, but are influenced by grid-based environmental factors. On every grid update, grid cells are first updated based on the aggregate of agents living in the cell, then grid cells update based on surrounding cells. On every decision, an agent consults the values in the current cell it is in, or a weighted combination of the cells it was in most often over a period of time.

You probably want to model trust, safety, length of commute, crime levels, civic engagement, savings, disposable income, taxes, rent and rent controls, property developers, landlords, homeowners, family…

Communicating With The User

You need a way to make the player see what the agents are thinking, when they are making important decisions, and why.

It is important for two reasons:

If things happen but you can’t see them, the game feels boring
If important things happen and you don’t know, the consequences feel unfair

otvgame

I like the idea of making a game based on your city planning prototype, however I don’t think your game will be a great vehicle for your city-planning ideas.

I agree, but in this case I can use some of those ideas as starting places to give more depth to the simulation, so there can be some simulation of those ideas that isn’t feasible in existing city builders, without the kind of in-depth total simulation we might do if this were a university research project.

Thus, the OTV Game can be differentiated by support for mixed-used buildings where the bottom is commercial and the upper portion is residential, zoning regulations with more potential control, rent bidding, etc.

The middle path would be putting agents into a grid-based world in which they make some decisions individually, but are influenced by grid-based environmental factors. On every grid update, grid cells are first updated based on the aggregate of agents living in the cell, then grid cells update based on surrounding cells. On every decision, an agent consults the values in the current cell it is in, or a weighted combination of the cells it was in most often over a period of time.

This is essentially my plan, along with a goal of 1,000,000 agents and 64km2 of area. Decision trees can be manageable for each agent if they are very small, and various heuristics will be used to make the simulation feasible, including use of grids and hierarchical routing.

Initial simulation will be simpler and focus on the core economic elements, and more complexity will be added over time. For instance, once basic markets are implemented and tested, more industries and specializations can be added and simulation load and difficulty observed.

You probably want to model trust, safety, length of commute, crime levels, civic engagement, savings, disposable income, taxes, rent and rent controls, property developers, landlords, homeowners, family…

Yes, some of that is definitely on the initial slab of what I want to develop, and how to rig up property developers will be one of the interesting questions, since I plan to track firms’ profits and accumulated capital.

However, I think sufficiently complex behavior can be obtained with fairly simple rules - for instance, that firms have a base cost and marginal cost, and scale up production when they make a profit and scale down production when they fail to make a profit, and that when they accumulate enough saved up capital and are profitable, they move to a bigger building to expand.

This pent-up capital accumulated for bigger buildings could then be part of the heuristic used by property developers. (Which probably would skip being physically represented as owning offices in the city, unlike other businesses.)

You need a way to make the player see what the agents are thinking, when they are making important decisions, and why.
It is important for two reasons:
1. If things happen but you can’t see them, the game feels boring
2. If important things happen and you don’t know, the consequences feel unfair

Yes. This will require combing the grid for issues and representing them as visual cues for the users. The form that takes will have to depend on magnitude and kind.

The stylized aesthetic provides plenty of room to provide visual cues in addition to cues such as floating event bubbles above businesses going bankrupt. It also provides room for some interesting overlays.

Ideally, we could also access individual citizens at their home or workplace and get more detailed information about them, but in practical terms this isn’t efficient for a city of 200,000, so there must be other ways to display this data.

mitigatedchaos

Preparations are now in motion. I will be evaluating the difficulty of the development path I want to pursue, level of interest, and so on.

Source: the-grey-tribe one thousand villages otv game

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Culture Concepts for City Builder GameOne of the issues brought up in One Thousand Villages was that of cultural formation, drift, and separation, and of different communities (and different individuals) having different preferences and needs. This... — Culture Concepts for City Builder Game
One of the issues brought up in One Thousand Villages was that of cultural formation, drift, and separation, and of different communities (and different individuals) having different preferences and needs. This brought up the possibility of the nerds all moving to one community within a city, which brought up the possibility of zoning wars between jocks, otakus, and hipsters.
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lockrum

mitigatedchaos

One Thousand and One Villages

Follow-up to my post One Thousand Villages, separated out so Tumblr won’t harm my precious, precious PNGs, so let’s tag some people from the last one. @wirehead-wannabe @mailadreapta @bambamramfan Let’s also tag @xhxhxhx in case he finds it interesting or discovers some glaring flaw or something.

We’ll borrow Mailadreapta’s word here and refer to the new model as a Quad - it’s a 250m x 250m area as part of a larger 1km x 1km pattern. I decided to revisit the subject and get a better sense of the scale and proportions, and in doing so, I realized that 1km x 1km is just too big for a single unit (and also too big to start with as an experiment if someone were to attempt this). We’ll call the collection of four quads a Klick.

In the above images, green is residential, blue is mixed-use/commercial, yellow is light industrial, white is civic buildings, and orange is public transit.

Noting some feedback from @mailadreapta

I think the biggest problem is employment: there’s just no way you can ensure that everyone works in their own quad, so most people will still need to leave in order to work. I assume that a high-speed thoroughfare lie along the boundaries of the square (with transit) to accommodate this.
For a similar reason, I would put the commercial and civic buildings (except for the school) among the edge: these are these are places that will be visited often by people from other villages, so keep them away from the residential center.

This is, in fact, exactly the plan. Although I did have the civic center in the middle last time.

Now then, now that that’s out of the way, let’s do some uncredentialed urban planning!

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xhxhxhx

I worry you’re a bit between two stools on the traffic thing – if you plug these into an existing North American urban environment, your grid will be overwhelmed by the traffic – you’d need to emphasize the park-and-ride bits, and break from your higher-level grid to accommodate the American need for more-hierarchical traffic patterns, and loop in some freeways – or your suburb will depend on whatever mass-transit network the urban area happens to have, which might not be great

but if you build these grids outside a metro, I think it’ll end up as a strange and perhaps-inefficient bedroom community – relative to replacement-level suburban plans, which have, you know, garages and lawns and cul-de-sacs – and with traffic problems comparable to those on your metro grid

I think mailadreapta highlights the real problem, which is the coordination problem – it’d be difficult to draw both residential tenants and employers at the same time, I think, without the state capacity and influence that American suburbs don’t really have – and it’s difficult to build grids that rely on transit infrastructure that most American metros just don’t have

I’m also enough of a liberal that this sort of detailed land use planning makes me uneasy

anyways, the thing that really creeps me out is that this all feels like social housing, complete with overbearing, overpowered social workers – in an ideal world, everyone will have enough money to avoid social workers and cops, but I certainly hope that I will have enough money to avoid social workers and cops

lockrum

quick questions for @mitigatedchaos while im on a plane about to take off:

It seems like these communities are insulated enough that you’ll quickly have people sort themselves into tribes, like “I’m gonna move to Silicon Klick because they’ve got computer nerds like me!”. What will stop communities from devolving into factions that are actually hostile to outsiders?

For schooling, staying in the same K-12 school with the same people would suck. Your ex is with you in three of your classes. Everyone knows about the time you pissed your pants during a math test. Your childhood bully still kicks your roller backpack.

What will we do about the kids who grow up different? It seems like from your original post that you don’t expect much movement between communities, which would suck more than it has to for any black sheep.

i have more questions but we’re about to start taxiing

edit: OH GOD sorry for the unreadable wall of text. i was on mobile and forgot to disable markdown formatting.

mitigatedchaos

It seems like these communities are insulated enough that you’ll quickly have people sort themselves into tribes, like “I’m gonna move to Silicon Klick because they’ve got computer nerds like me!”. What will stop communities from devolving into factions that are actually hostile to outsiders?

By law, the development boards managing each klick or quad are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, nationality, sexual orientation, etc.

Not touched on in this post is that, to promote additional development and stave off NIMBYism causing mass urban sprawl, the ownership of the of the quads would have to be structured differently than one might normally do, such that net influx into the community involves a payoff to the existing residents.

Given how people actually handle home buying, I just don’t think it’s going to hit the point of being too hostile, unless you get into issues that you aren’t supposed to talk about under Liberalism.

Additionally, allowing variation on the architecture/events/etc within the quads increases municipal-level cultural diversity, even though it decreases quad-level cultural diversity. This is because culture is not individual, but networked.

Why should one set of rules rule over every community? Diversity, real diversity, means real differences.

As such, while I might limit the external architecture on the outside of the klick for the benefit of the city, I’d like to see some flexibility on aesthetics and some other things.

Let us suppose the Neo-Edo Development Group obtains a quad and builds it out in a faux traditional Japanese architectural style for otakus. It still has its civic center, but the layout contains fewer exercise machines and instead has a little movie theater. As the population density of geeks is higher, a dedicated gaming store opens in its commercial outer zone, which normally would not have met critical mass.

The Flatsville Athletic Association also develops a quad. They install more bike paths in their quad, more athletic equipment in their civic center, and a gym in their border zone called the Flatsville Sports Dome.

The Flatsville Commerce Association builds a gorgeous complex of shops and apartments called Le Petit Paris, including a miniature Eiffel Tower.

If they all have to compromise, they won’t be as satisfied with the outcome. And if they all just have no architectural rules, the network effects of having a whole block of one architectural style won’t be present, and they’ll all fight each other to install zoning rules to protect their property value.

By allowing them to separate, they don’t have to fight to prevent each other from building copies of foreign architecture.

For schooling, staying in the same K-12 school with the same people would suck. Your ex is with you in three of your classes. Everyone knows about the time you pissed your pants during a math test. Your childhood bully still kicks your roller backpack.

I should have added more qualifiers in my response to @mailadreapta. A lot of school location depends on density, and the appeal of putting the elementary school in the same quad is that children can walk to and from it safely and parents can be nearby if needed. I’d let people send their kids to schools in other quads/klicks. At the middle school level, schools would tile outwards recursively more, and ideally I’d sort them on performance, but that’s something for another post (and probably not part of my one thousand villages series).

What I think people like Mailadreapta are after is actually a political issue.

The reason school vouchers are gaining enough marginal popularity in America to become a real deal is that they are a way to bypass disruptive students, because public schools are not permitted to exclude or punish them. Some urban American school districts are spending enormous amounts of money and getting abysmal results. Actually acknowledging some of why this happens would damage the ideology of certain political factions, so it won’t be solved, and instead people will engage in an arms race to move to “good school districts,” which exclude people with nothing to lose because people with nothing to lose don’t have money. That creates suburban sprawl

I think Mailadreapta’s reasoning here is that it’s feasible for regular people to solve some of these issues at the neighborhood scale, but it just isn’t feasible for one determined neighborhood to solve them in the entire city.

What will we do about the kids who grow up different? It seems like from your original post that you don’t expect much movement between communities, which would suck more than it has to for any black sheep.

Actually no, I expect people to move between communities, particularly when they move housing. My goal isn’t to stop movement, but to create friction.

That probably sounds kind of weird, but there are thresholds, rates, that sort of thing when it comes to culture and policing and development, where the result of X+1 is not linear relative to X.

Source: mitigatedchaos one thousand villages urban planning

mailadreapta

mitigatedchaos

One Thousand and One Villages

In the above images, green is residential, blue is mixed-use/commercial, yellow is light industrial, white is civic buildings, and orange is public transit.

Noting some feedback from @mailadreapta

I think the biggest problem is employment: there’s just no way you can ensure that everyone works in their own quad, so most people will still need to leave in order to work. I assume that a high-speed thoroughfare lie along the boundaries of the square (with transit) to accommodate this.
For a similar reason, I would put the commercial and civic buildings (except for the school) among the edge: these are these are places that will be visited often by people from other villages, so keep them away from the residential center.

This is, in fact, exactly the plan. Although I did have the civic center in the middle last time.

Now then, now that that’s out of the way, let’s do some uncredentialed urban planning!

Keep reading

mailadreapta

we segment off an inner residential ring using a wall of 5-10m in height

That is way too high, taller than most houses, and living with that sort of thing hanging over me would make me feel like I lived in a prison. A 2-3 meter fence should be sufficient for most purposes, and much cheaper; if the crime problems caused by people from other quads is significant enough that you actually need a 5m wall, then I don’t know what to tell you.

You don’t specifically mention schools, so I’ll throw one thing out there: every quad absolutely should have its own K-12 school, possibly more than one depending on density. Crossing quad boundaries to attend school should be a rare exception. You might have quads within the same klick that share a high school or some amenities (especially large space-eating things like football fields), but again it’s important that the school feels like it belongs to the quad, and each quad should have its own “school district” or something similar.

I don’t think you should have any through traffic in the quad. Access to parking should be the only roads in the place.

Quads should have names, so that residents can say “I live in Fairview” or whatever, and nearby people know what that means.

mitigatedchaos

That is way too high, taller than most houses, and living with that sort of thing hanging over me would make me feel like I lived in a prison. A 2-3 meter fence should be sufficient for most purposes, and much cheaper; if the crime problems caused by people from other quads is significant enough that you actually need a 5m wall, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Well, 3m is probably enough. If it’s only 2m then tall people with actual upper body strength can climb over it. Mostly though I originally made it that height for noise suppression. If that isn’t an issue at 3m then 3m is fine.

You don’t specifically mention schools, so I’ll throw one thing out there: every quad absolutely should have its own K-12 school, possibly more than one depending on density. Crossing quad boundaries to attend school should be a rare exception. You might have quads within the same klick that share a high school or some amenities (especially large space-eating things like football fields), but again it’s important that the school feels like it belongs to the quad, and each quad should have its own “school district” or something similar.

At the 500 density it isn’t dense enough (because we don’t know how many children there will be), but once it gets high enough that’s feasible. I was thinking of an internal school mostly in the sense that the young children can safely walk to the school unsupervised and play outside in the park. I imagined the civic building in the lower right middle of the klick as a high school for the surrounding quads.

You also seem to have something else in mind with this. School as a method of increasing community cohesion?

I admit, if I were building one of these as an ideological group rather than because I’d convinced the city or a developer to do it, I’d definitely want my quad to have its own school.

I don’t think you should have any through traffic in the quad. Access to parking should be the only roads in the place.

Maybe. Aside from maneuverability for exiting the quad in the morning, and going 5kph on the pedstreets to move furniture, because I hate moving furniture, I wanted faster access for emergency service vehicles.

Quads should have names, so that residents can say “I live in Fairview” or whatever, and nearby people know what that means.

Absolutely. It’s a branding thing.

And now for some @xhxhxhx comments.

I worry you’re a bit between two stools on the traffic thing – if you plug these into an existing North American urban environment, your grid will be overwhelmed by the traffic – you’d need to emphasize the park-and-ride bits, and break from your higher-level grid to accommodate the American need for more-hierarchical traffic patterns, and loop in some freeways – or your suburb will depend on whatever mass-transit network the urban area happens to have, which might not be great

If we’re building a new quad by itself, we should ideally place it right next to a light rail station, or some place we can convince the government to install a light rail station.

But yes, the grid would need to break at higher and higher levels for even thicker thoroughfares, particularly in America where the mass transit is anemic. I’d recommend building many of the roads outside the quads with medians with trees and buffers of lawns, both of which can be bulldozed later if necessary as density increases. (Our sample klick edge roads are six lanes, but I was going to reserve the outer lane for either parking or trams.)

A lot depends on who is building the quad and why. If it’s a corporation building housing for a facility in China, they can just install a bus route and let the rest of the commuters sort themselves out. If it’s an American city that gets a Singaporean-style Housing and Development Board, they can buy up land at the edge of the city’s light rail network and develop several kilometers at once, then extend the light rail network to meet it. If it’s an American private land developer, they could hire a bus to travel to the public transport network but they’ll also need to install a lot more parking and build near a sufficiently large road.

but if you build these grids outside a metro, I think it’ll end up as a strange and perhaps-inefficient bedroom community – relative to replacement-level suburban plans, which have, you know, garages and lawns and cul-de-sacs – and with traffic problems comparable to those on your metro grid

This is actually something for future consideration, which is, can these be built at low density in such a way that they can and do scale up to higher densities? And I think the answer is yes, which may be the subject of a future blog post.

Anyhow, there’s a reason the outer edge is mixed use and not purely commercial-zoned, so I don’t think it would be too much less efficient.

It would also be possible to convert an area of a city without a lot of demolition if you have a long-term-thinking administration. You’d build the wall and the parking areas, convert over some of the streets, add a park or queue one for the first building to be vacated, then rezone the outer perimeter and wait for commercial development.

I think mailadreapta highlights the real problem, which is the coordination problem – it’d be difficult to draw both residential tenants and employers at the same time, I think, without the state capacity and influence that American suburbs don’t really have – and it’s difficult to build grids that rely on transit infrastructure that most American metros just don’t have

Part of the outside being mixed use in this case is that I’m only assuming that shops will be the outer commercial layer at first, rather than offices, and thus that some of the rest will be filled in with more residential units that are later flipped as development increases. While this doesn’t reduce the daily workday commuting, it does reduce some shopping commuting.

I’m also enough of a liberal that this sort of detailed land use planning makes me uneasy

Fair enough. But that in itself involves unsolved coordination problems. Fortunately, if the quad plan doesn’t work out, it isn’t particularly destructive and you can just knock the wall over and refurbish the civic center as shops, offices, or apartments.

anyways, the thing that really creeps me out is that this all feels like social housing, complete with overbearing, overpowered social workers – in an ideal world, everyone will have enough money to avoid social workers and cops, but I certainly hope that I will have enough money to avoid social workers and cops

As Scott pointed out in comparing homicide rates while investigating gun crime, America has an astonishing level of crime. This approach isn’t really needed in places like the town where I grew up, which was full of self-selected professionals and had a population of only a couple tens of thousands. Likewise, that town didn’t need a school voucher program to maintain the quality of its schools, because all the parents there would punish their children if they were disruptive enough to be an issue, or else at least raised them such that they didn’t attack the teachers in the middle of class.

However, for the cities, I am willing to go to almost Singaporean lengths to get the situation under control. The terrible situations in some of our cities are not only costing the nation some of its potential, but also all those people living there having to suffer through the crime, the failed city services, and so on. If it becomes possible to simultaneously lower crime and police brutality, there are costs I’m willing to pay.

Or, to put it another way, hinted at by your very paragraph - rich people can already afford functional communities. How can we bring functional communities, safe, happy, and healthy communities, to the poor? The dominant thought seems to be that it’s just a matter of wealth transfer, or “reducing discrimination,” but I think there are structural issues and cultural issues that need to be resolved for all that spending to have the desired effect.

If it helps for context, the original reason I pondered this was in the design of a fictional Pseudo-East Asian Police State that I use as a sort of a storage place for my ideas. (Though there, like in many of its other aspects, the future is rooted in the past and they’d built walled villages for environmental reasons for millennia.)

Source: mitigatedchaos urban planning one thousand villages

Bus Tracks

The One Thousand Villages series continues, as we return to the suburbs of Flatsville, our new town in the state of Arkowa.

Wanting to avoid the sins of past American cities and avoid creating a sparse and energy-inefficient sprawl that we may become unable to maintain, our Metropolitan Planning Authority has decided to plan with an eye towards public transit from the beginning.

At this point it becomes very tempting to just put trams in everywhere. They’re reasonably quiet, they don’t emit fumes, people love riding them, and property developers view them as a long-term investment.

Unfortunately, trams are quite expensive. And, quite frankly, it would be highly irresponsible for the MPA to build such heavy public transit without knowing where the densest areas of the city will be! We can’t just dedicate an entire zone to only hotels - what do you think this is, Brasilia?

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One Thousand Villages@wirehead-wannabe I recall you talking about wanting a college-campus-like environment with activities and whatnot as a living area, but outside of a college campus.
@mailadreapta I recall you talking about the difficulty of... — **One Thousand Villages**
@wirehead-wannabe I recall you talking about wanting a college-campus-like environment with activities and whatnot as a living area, but outside of a college campus.
@mailadreapta I recall you talking about the difficulty of getting people to go for medium-density housing.
And I guess @bambamramfan I think I’ve mentioned a similar idea already. (Though it was a low-trust mechanism, I’m of the opinion that high trust is an equilibrium state which can be achieved through various mechanisms.)
There is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, which is to borrow an idea from computer science for resolving the challenges of urban areas by recursively reducing the size of problems until they can be adequately resolved. Thus, the city is reduced to a bunch of villages/towns.
The above render is for a rough sketch design that spans one kilometer and houses a population of around 5,000 or more, assuming an apartment is about 100 sqm (based on the size of an average apartment in the US). After reviewing it, I can’t help but think it should perhaps be about ¼ the size, but ah well. Grey is civic buildings, light green is residential, light blue is commercial, and light brown is footpaths.
Mixed use development has a lot of advantages, including reductions in commuting, but for various reasons people don’t like it.
People seem to find themselves feeling less connected to, and less trusting of, others.
Crime continues to be a problem for many cities.
Childhood obesity is on the increase, and children most likely need to get outside more.
Police violence is a problem in many cities.
Greenery is important for human psychological health.
High levels of traffic congestion.
My proposal, then, is to create a smaller community within the city with several key elements:
Semi-permeable membrane - Outer wall reduces noise. Security and level of surveillance can be adjusted according to local crime levels. As crime rises, all visitors can be tracked, or access can even be limited.
Quick access to public transportation (orange areas) - the average human walks at 5kph, and is therefore never more than about 700m and ~10 minutes from a public transport stop.
Quick access to local shops - reduce unnecessary transport usage and make goods available easily to the locals, also it’s directly next to the transit stop.
Community Center - Common facilities for exercise, social clubs, social events, and so on are near the center. All residents own a share of the Community Development Board (or something) which hires personnel to clean up the neighborhood, maintain the facilities, and puts on community social events on the regular. This is very local, direct political involvement with a high share of control per person.
Community Support Officers (CSOs) - (I only recently discovered UK has something with the same name.) Trained not only in police work, but also emergency medical care, fire suppression, and social work. Part of the idea here is that CSOs will engage almost entirely in foot patrols when not doing other support work. They will know who is an actual threat, vs who is mentally ill, possibly be able to deflect bad paths before they become permanent, and pick up on crimes using high-context detective work. The people of the block will be real people to them and they will see their consequences as they happen.
Low-velocity roads - Borrowed from Barcelona, encourages and enhances walking, discourages car use, but still lets cargo move in and out. Safer for children.
Ample foot/bicycle paths, ample green space for exercise, sports, and letting children outside to play.
Probably this needs to be revised a lot more, starting with a reduction to 500m.
I think something like this might have the potential to lower crime and police violence, while reducing the opposition to medium-density living and increasing psychological and physical health.
But you know, I’m not an expert. There’s probably something terribly wrong with this.

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In the Suburbs of Flatsville, Arkowa

Our field trip to the suburbs continues in our One Thousand Villages series of wildcat city planning.

Arkowa is a state in the American Midwest, where the legislature has graciously agreed to give our new Metropolitan Planning Authority control over an area of land to build a new city, off of a major highway. According to the news this is somehow tied into a scandal involving a group of climate vigilantes holding thousands of tractors hostage using a backdoor in hacked Ukrainian tractor firmware, but the news hasn’t been very reliable lately, so such suspicions can be safely disregarded.

Here we have a suburban klick, broken into four quads of various densities.

With American development comes the American love of the automobile. Many of our new residents are commuting to the neighboring city of Springfield for work, travelling along the highway, and there are limits to just how far we can stretch our city’s public transport infrastructure!

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One Thousand and One Villages

We’ll borrow Mailadreapta’s word here and refer to the new model as a Quad - it’s a 500m x 500m area as part of a larger 1km x 1km pattern. I decided to revisit the subject and get a better sense of the scale and proportions, and in doing so, I realized that 1km x 1km is just too big for a single unit (and also too big to start with as an experiment if someone were to attempt this). We’ll call the collection of four quads a Klick.

In the above images, green is residential, blue is mixed-use/commercial, yellow is light industrial, white is civic buildings, and orange is public transit.

Noting some feedback from @mailadreapta

I think the biggest problem is employment: there’s just no way you can ensure that everyone works in their own quad, so most people will still need to leave in order to work. I assume that a high-speed thoroughfare lie along the boundaries of the square (with transit) to accommodate this.
For a similar reason, I would put the commercial and civic buildings (except for the school) among the edge: these are these are places that will be visited often by people from other villages, so keep them away from the residential center.

This is, in fact, roughly the plan. Although I did have the civic center in the middle last time.

Now then, now that that’s out of the way, let’s do some uncredentialed urban planning!

EDIT: Got a couple of numbers wrong. That’s what I get for being so desperate to post this at 5AM in the morning.

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Anonymous asked:

I want you to know that your weird, detailed, obsessive hypothetical city planning series is relatable to me on a very, very deep level and that even if I understand nothing about city planning it still provides me with a deep feeling of calm and belonging to be reading them. Thank you so much for writing them! (If you've ever played Cities: Skylines or the like, I and others would probably love to see your creations.)

My dear anon, be on the lookout for a new blog sometime in the next week or so.

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theonion:
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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.