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Introduction: Before I get started, I would like to address what this article is not. It is not a guide for any specific grid patterns nor is it a city-building guide in a general sense. It is simply an article introducing the reader to some ideas into Suburban Design. First of all, what is Suburban Design? What is a suburb? While most of you will know the answer and all of you will have different answers, I will give my own opinion as it applies to this article. Suburbs are the low-density residential and commercial districts surrounding a large city’s downtown area. Often they are referred to by the same name as the city. Other times they all have separate names, but are really part of the same city. So we have Downtown in the center, providing all of the dense Co$ and dense R$, and the suburbs providing the low densities. Now, the suburbs I am familiar with are usually made up of large roads that are lined with commercial services and offices. These roads usually have freeway and interstate connections, and are fairly long and connect to other roads of that nature. Now, all of these roads together make up sort of a "grid", although it is not so rigid as, say, a continuous grid like that of what you would see in a downtown area. From now on I will refer to these roads as "veins". Freeways will be "arteries", and the residential neighborhoods are the "flesh". Now, I am not a biology student but I am under the impression that the body has its main arteries, with multiple veins branching our, the veins being protected with flesh. So applying this to SC4 we should have this: Now before you begin to laugh, my artistic abilities are very limited using MS Paint. You should get the idea from the diagram. The freeway, or the artery is the large grey line, the veins are branching off, lined with commercial and the flesh or the residential is the filler. That is pretty much the nature of the beast as far as suburbs go. Step One: The Flesh Now, it would make sense to start with the veins and fill in the flesh afterward, but it makes it much harder. Besides, you shouldn’t even have the arteries yet. Instead we begin working on the flesh. Our goal here, obviously, is to go with realism. I would hope you wouldn’t have read this far if you didn’t want a good, realistic city with nice suburbs. In order to make our residential areas look realistic, first we must take into consideration what we know already. Think of the neighborhood you live in. It most likely has curving roads and nice cul de sacs right? Well in SC4 we have to be very creative when it comes to the roads, since curves are impossible. The main thing to keep in mind is that houses should face the way you want them to. Well, that’s easy, right? Well, when making a nice neighborhood, it can be rough. That is why we must start from the inside and work our way out. Note: from now on, I will be using visual examples. None of the things I’m doing are set in stone, you can copy what I do, but mainly I am just giving basic ideas. Afterall, we don’t want everyone’s neighborhood looking the same, right? Here is an example of the first "layer" of our neighborhood. Now, this looks pretty basic. The idea is to work around it. By adding another layer, we can get something like this: Now we have a second layer, but what are we gonna do with those pesky corners??? Simply create a few cul de sacs: Now we are really getting somewhere! From here it is all a matter of preference. We could create another layer surrounding the entire place, with some feeder roads: That looks okay, but we could so something a bit more creative. Pretty much everything is up to you. You will find that as you are building that certain lots aren’t going to face the ways you want them to and you will have to demolish some of the streets and then re-lay them. That’s why is is recommended to go from the inside out; it makes it a lot easier. Now this next diagram is an example of the commercial areas acting as the "vein". This also provides jobs for the residents. That about wraps it up for part one. In my next guide I will go into more detail on the planning of entire suburbs, and strategic placement of important buildings such as schools and the like. Until then, feel free to check out similar articles here in the Omnibus, or ask a question in City Building Concepts or SC4 General Discussion, here at Simtropolis Forums.

I am having a problem that I think alot of you may have also with the game. I have to decide between making all medium cities and having my graphics at a high resolution(1600x1200+) or using large cities and having a lower resolution. The problem is when you have a higher resolution, large cities get "cut off" on the region view. Now I thought that this bug would be fixed with the release of RH, but thats Maxis/EA for you. And I know they know about the problem by now. But since I consider the Simtropolis Mod Squad to be the official unofficial patch developers(since Maxis''s patches don''t really do anything, except add little arrows to the zones), I am asking, begging, one of you modders to look into the causes of this and see if there is a way to fix it. Sorry if there was a little Maxis bashing in this, I''m just tired of 2 patches and an expansion being released and the stupid rolling Car Zot bug hasn''t even been fixed yet, even though they say it has in the patch information. It''s things like this that cast a shadow over a beautiful game.

I have recently been reading up on New Urbanism, and I think it seems pretty cool. I am wondering if this would work well in Sim City, and I'm thinking it could help with commute times as well as other things. For those of you who know about the New Urbanism concepts, have you tried incorporating them into SC4? New Urbanism basically boils donw to this: Instead of having suburban sprawl, you have small neighborhoods with residential, schools, commercial, etc. So not everyone has to have a huge commute to work. Of course some people would work outside of the neighborhood lets say 30% dont, that makes 30% less traffic because those people could walk to work. Also people could walk to restaurants, friends houses, movie theaters, etc and not have to make so many car trips a day. Well the point of my post is to just get the idea tossed around between some other players who know about New Urbanism and see if it is a possiblity and could help with the cities in the game.

Ha, you are always one step ahead of the game, Eppster.

http://www.amlegal.com/sfzoning_nxt/gateway.dll?f=templates&fn=default.htm&vid=alp:sf_zoning Here is alink to the complete Zoning Maps of San Francisco. It should help you if you have another go at this with the bigger region. It tells you Zone Type as well as density. Good luck.

Excuses are like feet, everyone has 2 of them and they both stink. All joking aside, I'm glad you're back working on the region, I can't wait to see more!!!

Awesome job dude. The roadmap really looks accurate. Now its just a matter of getting the density up in the right areas. I wish they had the rowhouses that they have in SF in this game.

Lookin good, kid.

It must not be a too scale terrain, looks like you couldnt fit in all the roads. It looks great, though! Lower Manhattan would be hard, all the strange roads...

Personally, I think you should make it so that everything comes later, I mean, the requirement for stage 8 is 125K I think, when have you ever seen a city with that many people have a huge skyscraper? So I think that it should be increased across all feilds, but Res should definitely be higher.

Do you got the Bank Of America Tower in there yet? Yeah, it looks really nice, It will be hard to get big enough buildings around Market St. though. I'm just curious-is this a scaled-down model of SF? Because it looks like some of your blocks are really small, but I've never took the time to convert the real life blocks to Sim-sized ones. Good work though, and I'd be glad to help since I have been there and done many studies on it(it is my favorite city and I get almost all of my Sim City inspiration from it).

http://sfgov.org/planning/ This is the official site of SF's planning Dept. They have specific zoning maps of Downtown, Chinatown, SoMa, as well as other areas. Give it a looksie.

Well, they dont exactly look like the Euro Buildings there, but since Haight Ashbury was the Hippie capital of the West Coast, there are a few really brightly painted buildings in that neighborhood. It was one of the most interesting places in SF for me when I went there. There are also a lot of cool shops, and a really awesome record/music store called Amoeba's. Next time you're there you should check it out. The store is almost at the end of the Haight, close to the park(Golden Gate Park maybe?). But since there are some nice brightly colored buildings in the Euro set you could scatter a few into Haight ashbury and mark 'em historical. Also a lot of the townhouses in SF are colorful, the R$$ Rowhouse "Pastel Rowhouses" would fit very well for the residential areas close to the city. In Areas like Daly City and other suburbs, the more modern houses would work nice.

Well, I have 512 MB of RAM so I think that should suffice. Either way, I guess I will just keep playing on medium city tiles.

That sucks about chinatown. You could use some of the colorful new Euro buildings for the Haight Ashbury area.

I have a GeForce 4 Ti4800 128MB. I will go check the drivers now and see but I don't think that will solve the problem. Edit - Have updated the drivers, I still get the problem. Oh well, I guess I will have to settle for a lower resolution. Isn't it funny how Maxis optimized the game for high end computers, but you cant use high graphics options without some annoying bug? It's getting rediculous.

I would have to disagree with Defacto. The suburban sprawl type growth creates more isolation than New Urbanism. Since everything is so spread out, people is sprawl areas use a car to get everywhere, which isolated them from everyone else who is in a car. In the small, New Urbanist neighborhoods, people see eachother as they pass by in the streets, there is more of a sense of community. And New Urbanism doesn't mean that there arent low density houses with lawns, because there are. It's more of a mixed zoning.

Yes, it would be nice if Sims would walk up to 25 tiles(or 1/4 mile in real life). This seems reasonable and in many of the New Urbanist things I've read about they try to build the neighborhoods in a 1/4 mile radius around a park or central area. That way it will be about a 5 minute walk for most people in the neighborhood to get to the center, where they could find restaurants, recreation, and mass transit stations. Right now I think Sims only walk 5 tiles.

Very Nice! How about some up-close shots of the downtown area. I cant wait to see what Chinatown and Haight-ashbury end up looking like. BTW, are you gonna have/already have the Coit Tower? I love SF, this is an A+ journal.

I think that in the actual San Francisco city limits there are like 800,000 people, and like 4 million in the metro area. I could be wrong though.

I was just wondering, why don't you make Market Street an Avenue? It looks great BTW.