Realistic American Cities: Windows Live Local Eidtion

[Alek King of SC4]

Ok after being bored and messing with window live local around chicago i have taken some pics and related them to SC4 for those of you into this kinda thing.

Chicago is famous for its grid system, Chicago was built on a grid system with a "major" road every half mile - equal to four blocks. This is a shot from the near sw suburb of oak lawn showing the intersection of the 95th street and Cicero Avenue.  also with 87th to the north 103rd to the south, crawford to the east and Central to the west, making this area about 1mile x 1mile or about a small SC4 tile.



I found it intersting how the zones were layed out with the commercial follwing the major roads and clustering around the commutter rail line. 

Some more examples.

a diagonal cutting through a grid, with commercial along it.



another zoomed out shot of a grid showing the commercial zones along the main roads
with a grid of streets and homes inbetween



a closeup of zoning techniques



this shot shows how rail and highway DO NOT follow the grid, but instead are spaced through out the metro area in a way that they each fan out away fromt the cbd and diverge as they progress into less and less dense neighborhoods.  Also along highways you find more office and industrial space as they provide quicker access to business travelers and freight.



Changed links to pics  - jeronij-

[wouanagaine]

I like it
I'm not fan of griddy cities in SC4, but sometimes it can be helpful to know how to build such a city.
The last pic and the one with the rail are quite intersting !

[Alek King of SC4]

some more real life pics related to in game zoning in SC4

This first pic is on the southwest side of Chicago, notice despite the strict east west/ north south grid for the roads, all major arteries (rail/el/highway) radiate out from downtown, getting further and further away from each other as the density drops.  think as if you were drawing a sun and had the rays radiating out but the distance between each ray gets further and further and they progress out.  obviously many cities have natural barriers to prevent expansion on all sides but the idea is the same.



Hence in this picture the rail line (cta orange) is running from sw to ne towards downtown, bisecting the grid at a diagonal.  another interesting feature in this pic is the proximity to the Stevenson expressway, (also runs at a diagonal sw to ne) and the industrial canal, these can be seen in the second pic better. 



this next pic is of a mor residential neighborhood on the NW side, again this time the rail line is going from NW to SE toward the CBD and again the shopping clustered around major raods and mass transit.



the same area with the streets on.





Changed links to pics  - jeronij-

[KooriSim123]

Wow that was all realy interesting stuff Alek.    I can certainly see the comparisons with SC4  

[Droftrah]

Very interesting, thanks.
It's pretty amazing to look at real cities and see just how rigidly they stick to grids.