City Journal

Simtropolis Forums

I've started a new side project that combines SimCity4, urban design history and creative writing. Simtropolis hosts something called city journals which let SimCity players feature their cities in a sort of graphic history by posting images taken with the in-game screen capture utility and talking about the design of the city. I finally decided to try to put together a journal for one of my creations. I seem to do my best work when other people are going to see it so, I figured this ought to get me serious about urban design. My story begins with a distant territory on the outskirts of a powerful empire in 1300AD. The govenor given the royal charter to found a colony is a former royal architect who wants to retire and live as a farmer away from the politics and intrigue of the capital. Usually, I design these perfect utopian cities, but this journal will explore the challenges of working across centuries and with a story line. I'm going to try and hone my photoshop skills as well by creating some nice graphics for the screen shots. SimCity is really only meant to portray cities from the 1880s on, so there is another challenge to my project right there. The game won't let you build cities without electricity, for example. Pretty tough to layout a medieval town with a power plant in it... :(

Anyway, if you're interested in urban design, the two books that I'm using as references for this project are Edmund N. Bacon's Design of Cities and Spiro Kostof's The City Shaped.