Every city builder ignores something that most American planning ignores: mixed-use districts.

The neighborhood bar. The grocery shop down by the corner. The bakery in a remodeled house. The multi-story apartment block with a couple restaurants on the ground floor. The plumbing business in an old warehouse completely surrounded by houses. The 150-year-old pastry shop that's been in its current location for fifty years and seen the neighborhood change around it. The run-down building whose owner has been letting it rot for four years and turns out to own about fifty properties in similar condition throughout the city. All of this is stuff I see around me in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans. I see it even more so if I go down to the French Quarter, which is still shaped like an old European city with cars awkwardly driving through it. Half the buildings down there have people living in apartments atop ground-floor shops, with hidden courtyards instead of houses awkwardly dropped into the middle of vast road-facing yards. The cook at one of the Quarter cafes I'm a regular at lives in a place right across the street, above a magic shop and an art gallery and a bar. Things are dense and intertwingled and weird and exciting.

None of that. Just, here's the residential zone, here's the commercial zone, here's the industrial zone. It was fine as an abstraction when Will Wright was trying to make something that'd work on a C64 but it all feels so absurd when I look at the actual world now that computers are powerful enough to run Sim City in a Mac emulator running in your browser with only a couple percent of your CPU time.

The archetypical city builder has "people live in the suburbs and drive into the city to work and shop" baked so, so deep into its core.

(Apparently Cities Skylines 2 actually implements this now that I go searching? Huh. City builder's really not a genre I play much and the continued persistence of this abstraction is one of the reasons I bounce off of it, it's impossible to make a place I feel like I'd want to live as a non-driver.)

Note also that Sim City, at least, ignores the reality that American cities are mostly vast swathes of parking with a building sprinkled here and there in the parking-scape.

https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...

> The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.

-- James C. Scott ~~in his review of simcity~~ Seeing Like a State

You could play Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, which has no zones at all. And apparently you start with apartment blocks, not single–family housing. And if you want sidewalks, you have to place them. All of them, individually. I haven’t played it (or CS2) yet, but I’ve been considering it.

Cyberpunk 2077 is freakishly realistic. Of course, they did hire actual urban planners to design it. https://gamerant.com/cyberpunk-2077-city-planners-make-night...

Japan’s fairly simple urban zoning scheme seems to work quite well. There’s essentially a sliding scale from light residential to heavy industrial, but “lighter” uses are always allowed in “heavier” zones.

Cities Skylines 2 only implements mixed-use as building variants within traditional zoning, not the organic neighborhood evolution you're describing where buildings naturally adapt between residential/commercial uses over time.

Cities skylines 2 implementation is still pretty lackluster in related aspects.

Lots of buildings have forced carparks.

People are content to walk absurd distances.

I almost preordered when I saw mixed use zoning.

mediaeval city builders (e.g. "kingdoms and castles") typically don't have zoning at all, though arguably they are more like "small town builders" in that you place individual buildings rather than areas.

this was basically a cheat code in the original cities skylines. if you zoned 4x1 alternating residential/commercial/office, you can pack in way more residents, they were happier, and there was less traffic.