Tips on 'organic' starter towns?

[Nekozji]

Hey peeps,

So having grown frustrated with the forever-jammed traffic and trains in my previous ~35k city on a complicated map, I dialled it back to a simple "two rivers" with lots of flat space and figured I'd take a bit of time to figure out more effective road and rail patterns without having to work around impassable mountains.

Thing is, when faced with all that flat land, I instinctively made squares. 40x40 each, they were efficient, with broader/faster roads running beside them and sensible roundabouts and such, but... they looked ugly as all hell. Maybe it's because I'm British, but square-grids aren't a thing I tend to encounter in actual towns and cities. London, for example, seems to be made up of triangles and trapezoids and no corner is ever at 90 degrees. Sometimes there are a few parallel roads, but only in small bunches.

Which got me wondering, what is it that leads to the variance we see in naturally grown cities? When I try for more randomness, I end up with funny looking zones that sit apart from each other, and always look unfinished. I feel like I need some lessons on urban development to latch onto the mechanics that went behind it all

Thoughts, examples and discussions appreciated ^^

 

[MotownCountry]

i never liked how you can have windy roads....but the zoning forces you to be griddy. i expect boxy pixelated city builder games to be chart toppers of the 90s. but this is 2017....and it's still boxy pixelated city builder games. i refuse to believe that they can't code the came to form odd shaped zones. houses with long windy driveways giving them huge front yards that need a team of john deer mowers to cut the lawn. or that oddly shaped corner and a building wraps naturally to it. parks that aren't square or rectangle......but oval or wavy...or a triangle!

 

[Smiles_]

s
Which got me wondering, what is it that leads to the variance we see in naturally grown cities? When I try for more randomness, I end up with funny looking zones that sit apart from each other, and always look unfinished. I feel like I need some lessons on urban development to latch onto the mechanics that went behind it all

Thoughts, examples and discussions appreciated ^^

This is a big question with a lot of a different answers.

1. Think about population movements and influxes via emigration and immigration. This one is sort of hard to model in CS, but you can do by modeling new developments to different sorts of populations. E.g. low in-come housing; urban sprawl and commuter cities; gentrification; expensive developments on beautiful landscapes; etc.

2. Industry and commercial pressures -- think about the boom and bust towns that pop up these types of areas. Maybe there is a central area everyone commutes to. Or, like in historical American cities during industrialization, mutli-story residential areas popped up around scattered local factories.

3. Other areas of the city are specifically and deliberately planned from the outset -- main thoroughfares or downtown areas with government buildings or other city services.

---

Take a look at various theories about how cities develop, e.g. Zonal, Sectoral, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_structure


Smiles

 

[MOK]

My tendency draws me towards symmetry and grids, too. It's tough to break that pattern. But worth the effort.

Right now I'm finding success in layout variance by paying closer attention to the topography than is otherwise necessary. Skylines doesn't force you to respect the terrain... But maybeyou should anyways. If you get down all the way to the ground, pan up, and scan the horizon as you move, the land becomes a lot more interesting and active than when you're looking from the top-down. Use this.

Plan your primary arterial routes according the crest of a subtle hill, for example. Curve it painstakingly with the ridge. Don't build collector roads until you have a broad idea of where the arterials will be, and what their strategic purpose is. Avoid steep grading, even though the game allows you to build over it anyways. A real city would pay a lot of attention to these topographical features, even though Skylines allows you to ignore them. If you plot your major roads in advance according to a topographical logic, it becomes much easier to have a varied, less boring layout. You can still be traffic-efficient when doing this, too.

Another element that this topic intersects with is traffic management. A major topic. Rather than give a few insufficient, partial tips, give this a read.

 

[muttonnoir]

In Europe many cities have grown and developed over hundreds of years, some were established during the industrial revolution and others were early 20th C planned "garden cities" or post war model new towns. A city like Edinburgh in Scotland has a medieval centre with the castle as the focal point with a Georgian planned new town and of course the Victorian period of rapid growth and later 20th century tenements and post war modernist/international style tower blocks. Think of the development/history/back story of your city. Growth as a result of a particular industry or trading routes, decline of the industry- redevelopment- new road layout etc

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

I think most of the roads around me were planned by wandering horses a few hundred years ago.

In-game, I often build winding roads along a riverbank, but still usually revert to grids before getting too far from the water.

I do try to build more organically. When I fail that (which I do a lot), I at least try to make the various areas have grids that are misaligned by 30 degrees or more. It's not all curvy, but at least provides some variation.

 

[Nekozji]

Wow, many responses, thanks folks

Good points about being over attentive to terrain and the slow development of cities around specific locations. I'm inclined to use the mod to unlock all the tiles at the start (without the money rewards from them) and have a more dispersed layout that slowly merges over time. I like the idea of having small industrial estates on the various resources, and maybe provide some blocks of apartments nearby, but I'm not sure how the Cims choose their jobs. Do they go for the nearest appropriate job, or will they drive 5km to an identical one because that factory existed first?

 

[TimW]

Could you post some screenshots of the 40x40 pods. Your description makes me curious as to what they look likle in-game.

 

[Nekozji]

Could you post some screenshots of the 40x40 pods. Your description makes me curious as to what they look likle in-game.

Sure, the aerial view is pretty ugly, but it does seem to be efficient.

Industry is all top right, with the commercial area bottom right. The left side and most of the bottom are residential units, with a road layout summarising to "divide and conquer". The wide road at the bottom ensures that the fastest route is always to stay on it, so the only vehicles on the residential roads are cims going/leaving home. The industry has a straight line to the commercial, and the motorway. There's pedestrian paths shortcutting all the dead-end roads, so in general, cims can walk a trip in less distance than they can drive it. It's only small, but it is very un-congested, and there's not a queue anywhere on it Big wide lane in the middle was for routing train tracks and placing large services buildings.

...but good GOD is it ugly. I just never want to load this city again :/

Of possible interest, this was the previous city that I eventually abandoned due to traffic issues. It wasn't gridlocked, but I couldn't grow it either. There were also some nasty issues with ships, as seen just northwest of centre. The one thing I got right was the rail interchange at the bottom; external cargo had to unload here, and mostly loaded up on the internal lines again. Result, I wasn't getting an excess of import/export trains clogging up my internal network.

 

[Promethian]

A good trick to help you get a feel for making curves and such line up is to just make arcs off of your straight lanes. Making roads around the arc will teach you how to get the distances and such right to maximize zoning fill. Eventually you'll be able to create curvy asymmetrical road patterns that have good zoning fill.

 

[Nekozji]

Putting concepts into practise, I have to admit I'm rather pleased with this residential/office estate. My sense of aesthetics likes paralleling the highways, apparently.

Still growing, but yeah, bit more varied than the circuit-boards I had before. Small HD commercial zone on the far right, will extend up the diagonal road a little as demand grows. Bike/footpath below it leads to the old industrial area, now all level 3. Two train stations, metro stop, and bus route seem to be keeping the traffic down thus far.

Also, Oil Town! Just because it's industrial doesn't mean it has to look like arse Left and top-right are small HD residential estates that serve the factories. Left was the first apartment building in the city to reach level 5. The other side of town is a bit scruffier, but that cliff is pretty narrow and there's not a lot to be done other than pack em in like sardines... The loop at the bottom leads to an external rail connection for export/import, thus keeping a lot of trucks off the highways.

Also... this game can on occasion be really pretty.

On the other hand... this behaviour is new to me. Where you goin' Annabel? You got a boyfriend, cute boyfriend?

 

[Nyanako]

My way of creating if not an organic city; but, rather an interesting city, is curvy arterial roads. Not twisty windy, but slight bends, with the secondary road off them also on a bend, and a grid behind it

This helps break up the boringness of the grid while keeping space at an efficient level.

 

[Thunderchief0]

On the other hand... this behaviour is new to me. Where you goin' Annabel? You got a boyfriend, cute boyfriend?

His parents aren't home...

 

[Rituro]

While I don't mind falling into the grid trap (symmetry is so calming and pleasing to my eyes), I do occasionally like trying to make something that looks like a unique district. I agree with the posters above who mentioned terrain. Emphasizing slopes to create plateaus, cliffs, valleys, etc. gives me plenty of impetus to make a more snake-y series of residential zones than my usual T-box layout. Building out from riverbanks fits this goal, too.

 

[grommile]

Which got me wondering, what is it that leads to the variance we see in naturally grown cities?

Growing from multiple centres (take a look at London to see what I mean) and having had much of their basic layout determined before the era of steam engines, high explosives, and cheap steel tools.

 

[TimW]

I am used to having an orderly grid, adding on, keeping some buffer space for highways and rail, and haphazardly adding on. The initial district in my latest city has that. I need to find a way to grow my city without sticking with a semi-boring grid. The multi-centered idea is a good one.

 

[Splorghley]

Here's one way which I've found quite effective in weaning myself off grids:

1. Begin by laying out a few blocks in a simple grid. Zone every block.
2. Once you're ready to expand, lay out a few blocks in a totally new grid, on a completely random axis. In other words, your new grid shouldn't "line up" with the existing grid at all - it should be somewhat randomly diagonal to it. Your second grid should be very, very close to your first grid. Don't unpause yet.
3. Connect as many roads as you can in your first grid to the roads in your second grid. You shouldn't aim for a one-to-one relationship (you don't need to link 1st Street to 1st Street): neatness is your enemy. Make sure as much land as possible between the two grids is "zonable" (i.e. don't leave gaps in the middle of blocks). Zone both your new grid, and everything between the two grids.
4. Unpause. Watch your town grow, perhaps place a third and fourth grid (as per above), and as your traffic increases, figure out which routes are getting busy.
5. If those routes aren't straight - in other words, if drivers have to take a zigzag path - demolish the roads in question (and the road segments that connect to them), and lay the route out again using the curvy road tool, so it runs smoothly from beginning to end. Then reconnect the existing grid roads to these new curvy roads.
6. If your new curvy roads are particularly busy, use four- or six-lane roads. These will become your arterial roads.
7. Once you have arterial roads, and you're ready to expand your town out, use the curvy road tool to drag one of your arterial roads out in a sharp curve onto undeveloped land. At random spots along this curve, create new grids. Interlock these new grids as at step 3. Be careful not to try and develop too much new land at once - this is how you get monotonous suburbs.
8. Don't be afraid to demolish whole roads and lay them out differently - zoom way in, and replace roads so that they make sense locally. Disregard the big picture. The Bulldozer tool is your friend.
9. When you're extending your town out in an area without an arterial road, use whatever pre-existing roads you have, even if none of them are parallel. The curvy road tool can bring them back together.
10. Over time, this should result in a suitably "messy" road network.

I make no claim to this being the only/best way to defeat the grid monster. I'm just posting it as I found it quite helpful, and you may too.

Here's a screenshot of a city which grew on those lines. You'll note that there are many spots on the map where you can see the pre-existing grids: e.g. under the word Brighton, under the word Victoria, under the word Laureton. Importantly, none of these run along the same axes: they are laid out totally at random, and connected in whatever way made sense and minimised space which wasn't "zonable". There are a couple of arterial six-lane roads: these were placed using the curvy road tool, to replace particularly busy sections of the previously straight grids. I ran the highway through previously developed areas, demolishing whole swathes of existing suburbs. Through many iterations of development, redevelopment, and road replacement, we get a fairly messy, organic town. Not as messy as the old towns of Europe, perhaps, but plenty messy by modern standards.

(Ignore the empty blocks, such as above the word "Pandaburg": these are only there because I just re-zoned some areas.)

Here's a map of the whole city. You'll notice that the older areas (Old Town, Olympia, Pinecroft) tend to be messier, while the newer areas (the south shore, the lakeside, everything east of Chester Square) are more griddy. In time, as I iterate using the above method, the newer griddy bits will get just as messy as the older areas.

If you'll look at Brighton and the Palisades (west side of the north shore), you'll notice two grids slightly askew (as per step 2), and the haphazard connections between them (as per step 3).

I hope this is helpful to someone!

PS: Disregard my highways. I can't highway.

 

[TimW]

That layout reminds me of European cities. How did you get your city into a map like the one in your most recent post?

 

[Splorghley]

That layout reminds me of European cities. How did you get your city into a map like the one in your most recent post?

I used the amazing CSL Map View mod.

 

[DrBolle]

Imo the key is to orientate along natural obstacles and by use of the free form road tool.

This town is really new. I have started it yesterday afternoon. (there is a lot of work to do right now. but with hardmode a beginning isnt that easy at all...)
Actual pop: ~12 - 14k

With the view from top it looks somehow griddy but ingame it doesnt.
The griddy look is based on the major roads that are coming along the town.

I think everyone knows the map Delta Range and how exiting it is to build a non-generic town on it.
Thats the reason why it isnt possible at all to grid-lock a city by the map itself. (natural obstacles)
Everything other I do: Make curvy roads and set intersections with major and minor roads.


I havnt any problems with traffic. Its a pretty traffic-free town. Well, mass-transit does its job, too.
For dealing with traffic: Major roads arent allowed to have close-by intersections with minor roads and commercial buildings zoned to it. Also dont busstop them. Busstop streets that arent necessary for traffic but are well-reachable by walking

E.g.
The 6-lane road connecting the parts beyond the expressway-intersection has four (there will be a fifth and last one) traffic-light-guided intersections at all. The only pourpose the road has: Being a connection between the two parts and the expressway.


Thats the way how I am building most of the time without any nasty traffic problems.



@ Splorghley

A tip for better highway/expressway-ing:
Use 6-lane (or, if you play with NE 2 8-lane) roads inside the town with minimal connections to other major strees for traffic-flow and zone them with residential and connect them with pedestrian walkways to the streets behind. Also cross them with pedestrian walkways to the other side.

The highways/expressways itself are good for connecting bigger parts of the city together.

E.g.
The intersection with the standard highway, my town is using, is just for that purpose. It is going to end up in an other industrial/aricultural area and northern of the area on the leftend side of the screen.

It looks so much better and much more organic
#justmyopinion