The Beginning
Howdy, everyone, and welcome to my city journal for the City of Norwalk! I was inspired to begin this project a few days before I found this website, and the serendipity of the two events was too great to ignore. This project will be re-creating a fictionalized version of the city of Norwalk, CT (and surrounding cities) in Cities: Skylines II. Here's the Wikipedia page if you want to know more about the IRL city. I have a whole list of mods I am using (which I may upload later if I can figure out a way to do so easily) but not yet a lot of additional assets as the game already has excellent Northeast U.S. buildings and style. I set this save up with a few guidelines for myself:
This is not a 1:1 recreation. The map (which you'll see in a moment) is not an imported topographical map of Norwalk, but instead this map that I found online. This is to resist the temptation to simply recreate what already exists IRL and instead take the concepts of certain neighborhoods and street design to create something similar.
The city should be idealized, but realistic. I want everything to look as if it could be in the real city of Norwalk, but with a greater emphasis on pedestrian and mass transit than the city currently has.
The city should function in-sim. I don't want this city to be just a display piece, I want the game's simulation to work well with the design. After all, what is a city if not a living hub of people going about their lives and jobs? While CSL's simulation is not perfect, I've added some mods to enhance it and hopefully allow me to make the city both better looking and better functioning.
I must go through progression. CSL is a game, and I want to play it as one. It has a progression system where as you build more in your city and it grows you unlock new services, road types, buildings, and zoning that rewards you for playing and gives you something to work for. I want this progression system on to limit my early building and encourage me to really get familiar with the growing pains of a city. I also will not have infinite money or tiles, so I have to think creatively to keep myself in the green with limited space.
With all that out of the way, let's jump into it!
PART I: THE MAP
As I mentioned above, I don't want to just recreate Norwalk, but instead recreate it in a comparable landscape. I turned to Seabury Sound, a beautiful seaside map by Byrds with a large bay, interesting coastline with barrier islands, varied topography, and a large river fed by several small tributaries. As you can see, it's comparable enough while still being unique in ways that encourage me to get creative and allow me to utilize all the fun and interesting game mechanics.
(Please ignore the color of everything, I was still messing with my Lumina settings!)
And here is a street map of the actual Norwalk for comparison:
The map has everything I'm looking for, but equally important is a good starting area. While the mod 529 tiles could allow me to choose whatever starting spot I wanted, I enjoy seeing which starting tiles a map-creator will choose for you to have, and working with its benefits and around its limitations. In this case, the starting tiles were perfect: just upriver from the bay in a spot with a connection to small nearby highway and river access. I couldn't ask for anything better.
PART II: FIRST STEPS
Getting started in CSL is always difficult for two reasons: you are going to be losing money the moment you unpause, and you have very limited options for building at the start. The roads available to you are rather simple and you can only zone low-density residential, low-density commercial, and industrial. That limitation is interesting, however, as you still have to think ahead for when you have better roads, zoning, and mass transit available to you. Your starting area should reflect your progression through unlocks as a city grows. Accordingly, you want to plan which roads will be your locals, which will be your collectors, and which will be your arteries. After extensive construction and reconstruction, I ended up with this:
They say to not let perfect be the enemy of good, and I'm forcing myself to consider that. I think the number and placement of the arterial roads will facilitate my future expansion, and I can edit my local roads more as the city develops. I'm most proud of the boulevard near the shore, which features tons of diagonal parking, several pedestrian crossings, extra-wide sidewalks, and (not featured) a roundabout at the Southern end. I think it will be Main Street.
Part of your road-planning should also include making highway connections and thinking about their longevity. Before you get to mass transit, the only way for Cims to move in is through taxis and personal vehicles along the highway, and much of your starting industries and businesses will ship materials into and out of the city. I built this basic highway connection to start with, but it won't last me forever. After a while, this type of direct connection will start to back up as your traffic volume increases, so I'll be looking to replace these after the city has grown some.
This second one was actually the original, but I figured it was a bit silly to make drivers traverse such a long distance through undeveloped areas just to get to where I was building, but I liked it too much to get rid of it. So it's a backup.
In accordance with your limited zoning, you have one priority once you get your streets down: get people to move in. Your biggest source of revenue will always be your tax base, and reversing the economic free-fall you will find yourself in at the start of the game requires you to bring in people fast. Unfortunately, you're stuck with single-family housing for now, so you need to zone a lot of housing. In order to entice people to move in, your city has to provide them with jobs. Eventually you'll also need to provide good services, but we don't have those yet. So, also zone some low-density commercial and find somewhere not too far away to put down your industry (I'll discuss pollution in the Industry section). I took this to heart and planned out some suburbs.
It's at this point that I want to make a shout-out to Platter, a mod which allows you to place zoning grids in "parcels." Getting these starting suburbs to look this good would have been significantly more difficult without it. Also, MoveIt and Anarchy are lifesavers and they are also getting my thanks. You can also see I've improved the roads a bit.
This progress took me through Milestone 1 to Milestone 2 and unlocked for me the ability to place some city services. I was still hemorrhaging money, but the cash injection and development points meant I could unlock some more buildings options. So I put down the basic city services of elementary education, healthcare and death care.
Please don't mind the AI-generated "Overall Grade" image. I've found a mod that creates a really in-depth education system, but discovered it prolifically used AI-generated images for icons. Unfortunately, the CSL mod marketplace seems to be flooded with mods that use the tech. I really like the mod otherwise, so I'm debating whether it stays or goes. Beyond that, I thought this small hill would be perfect for a small elementary school, and I named it appropriately.
I used a small North American clinic to start and gave this town a small Anglican church for a graveyard. While small and large cemetery assets exist that look more American, I decided to use this UK asset due to its smaller size and for a bit of historical continuity. I'm thinking this starting area will be comparable to the central, "original" section of the City of Norwalk. So, this section would include some of the more historical buildings such as the first church around which the town would have been founded. Colonial Norwalk was likely congregationalist in line with most of the rest of Connecticut, but we'll pretend they were an Anglican/Episcopalian colony.
PART III: INDUSTRY
Industry is a very important game mechanic in CSL 2. Industrial traffic can quickly overwhelm a city if not properly accounted for and pollution can make your citizens very unhappy, but refining your supply chains means big profits and more jobs for your Cims. Most people take the easy way out of just picking somewhere out of the way and shoving all their industry there (a sin I am not innocent of myself). It does technically work, but in addition to creating logistical problems for your city it looks ugly. I think industrial areas are just as much a part of a city as residential or commercial and deserve at least as much attention. To break out of that bad habit, I've taken to the philosophy of including small pockets of industry around the city while also building larger industrial parks. Eventually I hope to have large ports and giant production areas for specialized industries, but for now I'll settle with the limited space and resources I have.
I decided to put my starting industrial park on the hill near the starting lake. I couldn't decide for the longest time whether that area would be industry or lakeside community, but for now I've decided to make it industry. Since they are an excellent source of early-game income through exporting power, I wanted to put down a coal power plant. Power plants need tons of water in order to spin the turbines, so I wanted to place it near water. Since I didn't want to place it near my beautiful downtown area due to its intense pollution, and because I couldn't yet reach the nearby small river that flowed into the larger one, the lake was the next best thing. It also strategically was downwind of my population center, which meant that the air pollution would flow Southeast instead to my unpopulated land. I'm sure that won't be a problem later!
There was also space for some farms, a stone quarry, and a dump around it. Most of these larger extraction industries I'll move eventually, they're mostly just quick and dirty ways for me to get some income while the city is growing.
Outside this park is more raw materials industries that I, again, will likely move at some point. I'm mostly just trying to take advantage of the little resources I have available to me. I got started with some more farmland (vegetables) and a small fishing industry. To get the fishing industry working I will admit that I used anarchy to make collection areas out in the bar, but I thought it would not only make sense that this small community would fish in larger areas, but that having several fishing trawlers hunting around a small river would look too comedic.
Look at those bridges in the background! I'm not a fan of Paradox's DLC model, but I must admit the Bridges and Ports expansion is stunning (and fun!).
PART IV: CONCLUSION
Whoa! That was a lot of work. I already spent several hours today on building the city, and I spent another almost two hours typing this! I am very excited to share with you all the progress I make on this city going forward, but as my semester is beginning shortly and I'm moving again, these updates will likely be irregular. I have a lot of fun ideas for what to do with this city and look forward to honing my city-building skills on it. I'll leave you with a late-afternoon screenshot of Norwalk as it looks so far. Until next time!
