Somewhere in my Mind

[Cali]

this is a very nice looking city, it looks like you put alot of care into it. great job

[thundercrack83]

Hey, Flipside! Like I said, I think the university looks good. The only thing that I would add to it would be a larger stadium (maybe the Maxis minor league stadium) or something like that. It would give the school's teams a home stadium. You build a bigger stadium, depending on how big your school's athletic program is. Living about an hour from State College, PA (home of Penn State), I know what big college stadiums are like. Penn State's football stadium, Beaver Stadium, holds over 100,000 people! On the other hand, my college's stadium is significantly smaller. A stadium may be something you want to play around with, or not. Either way, I can't wait to see what you do! Take care, and I'm honored that you asked for my opinion!

[Flipside]

It occurs to me that the sizing on those pics I reposted is bigger than I thought it would be. I might resize them if it's found to be just too annoying to have to scroll across like that.

Anyhow, when I last left off, the Northern Banks looked something like this:



A bunch of residential condos in a predominantly I-HT area. But R-$$ demand remained so high that I resolved to press onward with rezoning the north-east edge of the city.



I thought I would take the above area and nurture it into a second downtown area – introducing big commerce as well as more high-density residential.





It went okay ... for a while ... it certainly developed quickly.



Note the Metropolitan Mall and SimGoober's Zaza Hotel among others.







From above ...





But it couldn't last. More and more residential skyscrapers kept coming up and I hadn't built a transportation network remotely capable of handling the increased traffic. For a while I kept plopping large commerce buildings closer and closer to the residential towers, but it didn't work. Residential dilapidation occurred on a large scale. The whole area needed to be blown up and done right ...



A look at the ghastly traffic grid ... 



Btw, question ... does the Metropolitan Mall always show up as a large red blotch on the traffic menu? I mean, it supports more than 5,000 jobs usually, that would be high traffic – but it's a BUILDING!   

Anyhow, there's where I'll leave it for now. I'll show you what I did with things in my next update.

[bat]

Great pictures! Wonderful update and work!

[Cali]

now thats a very good grid layout. thank you

[Flipside]

Cali: Thanks for the supportive replies!  I'm trying to bust away from the grid-style in some of my other cities, but the game lends itself to it and for this city it's mostly ok, I think.   

Thundercrack: Wow, 100,000 people? Jesus. I guess that's college sports in the States, though.

The Minor League Stadium has bounced around in that city ... I struggle to find a natural-looking spot for it ... maybe it would be best back near the Uni ...

Bat: Thanks as always for your charming comments. 

[NikNik]

LOL with the traffic at the building. Lotsa pedestrians I guess.
I have the same with a traffic generating parking lot. Great to upset a neighbourhood with!

Also nice to see all those graphs. Noticed how the city changed between:
11/25/189
2/11 / 353 and the years after that until
10/8/417 (traffic congestion)
Especially the era 1/20/359 until 10/16/365 shows a lot of building going on.

Nik-Nik

[Naryanna]

Wow! Interesting and good grid layout. Looking good here.

[petercintn]

My thoughts while viewing the college were the same as Thunder's, what, no football field?  But i did notice those oblong sporting fields.  Plus I should always remember the internationalness of Sim City and Devotion.  I am as dumb as a brick when it comes to how the rest of the world does things like collegent sports.  So I was not going to mention it, just write a paragraph on it, that's all.   I'm really enjoying the reconstruction, I think it's cool to show us.  Plus I need ideas as I must do the same to a too fast growing city.

[Flipside]

Nik-Nik: I'd hoped giving the stats would appeal to the geek in all of us.  Just curious, how many game years do you (and anyone else who cares to answer) put into your cities, usually?

Naryanna: I LOVE your avatar! And thanks for the support.

Peter: I had a thought just now ... isn't it warped how we think of real-life universities and go ... where's the football field?  lol, somewhere along the line, maybe we as a society have lost what it's supposed to be about ... or maybe it was always just an extended childhood for rich kids. 

One note about the current city I'm showing: it has almost zero low-wealth citizens and NO dirty industry at all. I like that ... because it's realistic. Like it or not, metropolitan cities (at least in North America) have become unaffordable for low-income persons, and they've also become places where industrial labour jobs are tough to find - of course, they are also magnets for homeless people, the poorest of all. But Sim City failed to factor that in ...

Now ... I haven't posted in a few days because I got sick.  BUT NOW I AM ... okay, still sick.  But I'll pick up things where I left off soon ...

[Flipside]

Anyway, it was time to rip it all apart ...

[Flipside]

That was refreshing, wasn't it? I know I feel better!

I left the western side intact. It could use a pruning but ... whatever, later.



I started rebuilding the great big empty patch that remained ...



From that to ...





The Peg Dynashore Exclusive whatever Ocean college thingie  is off-shore. You can also see a whole whack of NDEX towers, the Shenzhen TV Studio, the Windspear Arena, the Appollinaire Residential tower, etc. etc. The only problem now is the abrupt drop in density compared with the surrounding area. But I'll fix that in time.







The traffic problem is a lot better now ...



And that's Downtown North as it stands today ...

[thundercrack83]

You know, the more that I follow your work, the more I enjoy the concept. Instead of following the city as it's being built, you've taken an already built city and renovating it. It's a great idea, and a lot of fun to compare the Before/After shots. Anyway, the new Downtown North looks good, I love all the custom skyscrapers you've got placed. Keep up the good work and I hope you feel better!

[Flipside]

You know, the more that I follow your work, the more I enjoy the concept. Instead of following the city as it's being built, you've taken an already built city and renovating it. It's a great idea, and a lot of fun to compare the Before/After shots. Anyway, the new Downtown North looks good, I love all the custom skyscrapers you've got placed. Keep up the good work and I hope you feel better!

Thanks, Thundercrack.  I'm glad you like my spin on a city journal.

I still have my cold though.

So I'd like to go away from DT-N (as I call it) for the time being. Back to the area around Ill Will Hill Park.

As seen, bordering that park and the Warren Zvonareva Park are the two oldest developments in the city; The First District Commerce and the First District Residential, right above it.



Both had existed there in more or less the same form for hundreds of years and contain buildings that are centuries old. But the lavish new parks built nearby meant property values were doomed to escalate. That was troublesome for the old Residential District; it contained some of the last low-income housing in the city. It wouldn't be long before rapacious capitalist developers were hammering on the door of City Hall to redevelop the area into more high-income condos ...

This is a close-up of how it appeared before ...



A mere twenty years after the completion of the Parks, the go-ahead for a major redesign of the First District Residential was granted. Neighborhood activists and anti-poverty, anti-capitalist demonstrators had to content themselves with the city's not-so-generous compensation package (a copy of the mayor's autobiography - personally signed by his secretary  ). 

But not all change is bad. The mayor has a commitment to green livin' and humanity in his city. "For every tower, build a tree ..."



The beautiful stadium by scba is made a focal point in the rechristened First District Two ...



Big commerce moved in as the NDEX Sidfeldt Tower was erected.



I think it looks nice ... the new residential towers gel better with the skyscrapers around it than did the old, and the First District Commerce, still almost unchanged, looks pretty quaint and unique in comparison to the rest of the city. Many players despise the repitition of Maxis buildings, myself included on occasion, but in this case it has given that block of the city a real special feel. All those high-wealth, low-density buildings set it apart from the rest of the city - and hey, I always liked the Freytag Building and Marshall Printing and all those medium-low density Maxis commerce towers. I think it looks like a block built LONG before everything else that has still managed retained its original makeup (which it is). I like the effect.

That done, the mayor sets his sights to the area to the immediate North-West, which could badly use a facelift.

[emilin]

Sorry I haven't commented as much as I should around here. This is good. In fact, it's really good. It's one of the best "classical" approaches to the game around (not much cheating, not only custom content, taking the game constraints into fact, ect.) and the way you present it makes me feel like I'm taking part in the actual development.

[dedgren]

Oh, hey- Flip...

Your Mayor is small change.  If he'd really been a member of the dark side of the force, he would have required the developers to build a new school as an "offsite improvement" that was "contributed" in return for the needed governmental approvals and permissions.  The law firm I started with was fighting those wars in Northern Virginia in the late 1980s.  They're probably still raging.

Nice stuff here.  I agree with everyone else- you've got a nice angle going here.


David

[bat]

Great pictures! Wonderful updates and work!

[thundercrack83]

Another great update, my friend! I love watching how you are tackling the renovations! Keep up the good work!

[Heinz]

read through your "mind" just now and i'm glad i did. the way you present is interesting and wow 417 years? i dont think i've played any city that long. well, i havent been playing sc4 rh long enough either. lol i'm a late bloomer, i guess. got into the game just this year, lol. and im finding inspiring ways in governing because of the way you present your cities. i never really had the guts to tear a city apart like you do. but now, i think i do. LOL i think tornadoes, fires, UFOs, overwhelming robots and what not are going to "change" my region today. LOL thanks, pal. will follow your MD from now on. 

[rooker1]

Great MD, I also really like the reno idea.  If I may suggest turning off the pause and minimizing the tool bar your pictures would look so much better. (IMO)  I think it's a distraction from the great work you are doing.  I'll be back!