
The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook - Tiktaalik
http://archive.vg/blog/retro-book-look-the-simcity-planning-commission-handbook-publ-1990
======
6t6t6
I plaid a lot to SimCity when I was a kid but, having been raised in a
European city, I always thought that my cities in the game could never look
like a "real" city.

About 15 years after, I found myself in a plane about to land in LA for the
first time, with my face pressed to the window and thinking to myself: "LA is
like the f __* SimCity!! "

~~~
1_player
Which part of Europe? A lot of cities in Italy (and most of Europe) were Roman
encampments
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castra))
and they have a very square, ordinary layout I have always found boring.

I have always been fascinated by other cities when a road starts to curve or a
square pops out of nowhere. Walking through London is much more interesting
than it was in Milan.

~~~
riffraff
which cities in Italy/Europe you consider to have a very square, ordinary
layout?

Off the top of my head I cannot think of a single city with a square
structure, or where castrum and decuman still exist[0].

[0] i.e. Manchester
[https://www.google.hu/maps/place/Manchester,+UK/@53.479099,-...](https://www.google.hu/maps/place/Manchester,+UK/@53.479099,-2.2449683,15.01z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x487a4d4c5226f5db:0xd9be143804fe6baa?hl=en)
does not look square at all, even though the "-chester" part derives from
"castrum" and there is something resembling a cross in part of it.

~~~
LoSboccacc
Piacenza has the roman squared city center intact in layout[1], lots of other
small towns as well, but the fact is the old town parts are likely too small
to actually matter when you look at the whole city layout - hard to notice
from just looking at the urban map!

then you have places like Turin that were built with a ruler [2]

[https://www.google.it/maps/place/Via+Camillo+Benso+Cavour,+3...](https://www.google.it/maps/place/Via+Camillo+Benso+Cavour,+37,+29121+Piacenza+PC/@45.0535637,9.696712,17z/data=!4m7!1m4!3m3!1s0x4780dd5d846b46f9:0x51f69c98ad5dd080!2sVia+Borghetto,+29121+Piacenza+PC!3b1!3m1!1s0x4780dd5ee54fc553:0x64d649c17a854eba!6m1!1e1)

[https://www.google.it/maps/place/Turin,+Metropolitan+City+of...](https://www.google.it/maps/place/Turin,+Metropolitan+City+of+Turin/@45.0653871,7.6696611,14.75z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x47886d0cc3ed5cdf:0x405e67d473c94e0)

edit: some more samples, with cardo/decumano marked when known

naples
[https://www.google.it/maps/place/Naples,+Metropolitan+City+o...](https://www.google.it/maps/place/Naples,+Metropolitan+City+of+Naples/@40.8413926,14.247351,18.25z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x133b084f6a6c7e99:0x3df52cc13b78191d)

parma (barely visible, linked plaza was the old forum)
[https://www.google.it/maps/place/Piazza+Giuseppe+Garibaldi,+...](https://www.google.it/maps/place/Piazza+Giuseppe+Garibaldi,+1,+43121+Parma+PR/@44.8014151,10.3284871,18.85z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x47806ae658e227e1:0xd4ef6bcbe7faf4ea)

verona
[https://www.google.it/maps/place/Via+Rosa,+7,+37121+Verona+V...](https://www.google.it/maps/place/Via+Rosa,+7,+37121+Verona+VR/@45.4446212,10.9968018,17.75z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x477f5f4958041e89:0x9f4341065220e9ac)

firenze, you can even see the old walls

[https://www.google.it/maps/place/Piazza+della+Repubblica,+10...](https://www.google.it/maps/place/Piazza+della+Repubblica,+10,+50123+Firenze/@43.7713588,11.2541992,17.75z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x132a54019458448f:0x346f9c6ac1205f60)

~~~
riffraff
you are probably right, the old town parts probably get lost in the largest
map.

But as far as I know naples is not even a roman city, so I don't know what is
going on there :)

~~~
LoSboccacc
my bad, I mixed up generic squared block in cities (turin, naples) with old
roman squared blocks arrangements that survived today (the others)

------
iwwr
We could argue that modern town planning is in fact infected with a Sim City
spirit (or Sim City captured that existing spirit): artificial separation
between "commercial" and "residential areas" with miles and miles of
separation between them, and car-centric in the extreme.

The Sim City world is one where you have to ask permission for everything.
Development is prohibited by law unless the benevolent town planner opens up
an area with little colored rectangles. But you can only build one type of
building and can't mix & match because the top-down view of the planner blurs
out the complexity at the ground level.

Sim City does have a redeeming feature, favoring urban density. Traditional
planning is more aligned with creating loose, low-density, detached abodes,
with great separation and height restriction and far away from any semblance
of economic activity: shops, factories and commercial space.

Having to support an infrastructure (necessarily a car infrastructure) in
these forms is tremendously inefficient and can be considered as a great cost
on societies that found out about planning before most cities got established
(early 20th century).

~~~
Mchl
The 'modern town planning' you talk about is so called Euclidan zoning (named
so from the town of Euclid in US where it was supposedly first introduced - as
a way to segregate rich from poor in an indirect way). Not all areas/countries
use such laws. Some time ago this link hit the front page of HN:
[http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-
zoning.html](http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html) \-
it is really an interesting read (other articels on the site as well)

~~~
elktea
If you're interested in the history of this sort of thing Lewis Mumford's 'The
City In History' is a fantastic read. Brilliantly researched and presented in
a very non-dry way.

------
colanderman
Wow, I wish they had something like this for the more modern SimCities. I was
playing SimCity 3 or 4 and built a road going to a beach and to this day
haven't figured out why no-one drove on it.

It's hard to play a game that approximates reality enough that instruction
manuals aren't provided, but differs just slightly enough to foil
expectations.

~~~
Tiktaalik
It would be great if future versions of SimCity and Cities:Skylines would
embed more direct urban planning lessons in their games. This way players
would learn what makes a city work properly.

A problem is that most peoples' only knowledge of urban planning comes from
looking around at their own town, and unfortunately most towns in North
America are incredibly poorly designed. A SimCity player that bases their city
on a typical North American one will often wind up with a dysfunctional and
gridlocked town, just like real life.

~~~
DiabloD3
Cities: Skylines is an absolutely amazing game, but yeah, I wish there was
more lessons. I keep discovering new things that I can do with it that,
honestly, should have been taught to me early on.

------
flomo
Thanks to this book, I actually received college credit for playing SimCity.
(Or actually for writing a paper about the simulator, which was a cinch
because the way to 'beat' the game was to build an elitist suburb.)

------
Terr_
I have fond memories of the Simcity 2000 manual as well... I ended up reading
the whole thing obsessively while waiting for a new computer that had the
minimum specs. (VESA BIOS extensions.)

~~~
nitrogen
_(VESA BIOS extensions.)_

Was your video card not supported by _univbe.exe_?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE)

~~~
ant6n
"UniVBE (short for Universal VESA BIOS Extensions) is a software driver that
allows DOS applications written to the VESA BIOS standard to run on almost any
display device made in the last 15 years or so."

I wonder which 15 years this is referring to (i.e. ending what year)

~~~
nitrogen
_I wonder which 15 years this is referring to (i.e. ending what year)_

That line is in the very first revision of the page, from 2006:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UniVBE&oldid=4989...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UniVBE&oldid=49897111)

------
yread
Interesting article. I was interested in views on the newer simcities and
found these articles interesting:

[http://planyourcity.net/2013/09/20/sim-city-through-the-
eyes...](http://planyourcity.net/2013/09/20/sim-city-through-the-eyes-of-a-
city-planner/)

\- this city planer concludes that there are a lot of options and the
mechanics are interesting but it oversimplifies things and gives the player
god-like powers

[http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681515/using-the-new-sim-
city-6-...](http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681515/using-the-new-sim-city-6-urban-
planners-battle-for-bragging-rights)

-this was a "tournament" between various urban think tanks and journalists and points out how all of them took the short term benefits with casinos, oil and sewage over sustainable livable cities that they advocate.

[http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/31/36](http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/31/36)
\- this a scientific article compares the rules in Simcity Societies to the
work of controversial urban theorist Richard Florida

------
SZJX
I think one point that doesn't really make sense to me is the strict
separation of R/C/I zones and the land plot pricing curve for them. Surely
nowadays nobody wants to live exactly in the city center? And it makes no
sense to put industrial zones in the city center either. Most rich people
obviously live in suburbs and downtown areas are not very safe in any sense.

Also the strict separation of industry being external-orientated and commerce
being internal-oriented seems way too simplistic and childish. Surely many
industrial products also sell to the city itself, and many commerces are
nationwide even international ones? Unless you restrict the definition of
"commerce" to "things like local restaurants".

I'd say the notions of the game are maybe a kind of too old, and seriously any
of these "reality simulation" games for extremely complex systems are bound to
miss the reality by some distance. The same goes for Football Manager etc.
Playing them for fun is OK, but taking them too seriously is bound to
disappoint and frustrate you to no end.

------
XYEaQMZJvS
I love how dense some older games were. I still like the original Victoria by
Paradox Studios, though that might be because I never quite have the video
card to play Victoria II.

Anyone remember SimEarth? Loved that stuff.

------
DonHopkins
Here's some more SimCity documentation and reference material:
[https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...](https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/MicropolisCore/documentation)

And various SimCity source code:
[https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis](https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis)

------
Tomte
Damn, the one really cheap used copy on Amazon Marketplace is gone now… I was
thinking about buying it two hours ago.

But then again, I already have more books on my "to read" stack than I could
possibly read 2015/2016\. And it's not exactly a necessary book.

------
imauld
Related: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-
TqpU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU)

