How Cities: Skylines Makes You Plan Bad Cities

hey everyone welcome back today i want to discuss some issues that have gone way under discussed in the city skeletons community issues with the simulation i think the simulation is really unrealistic to the point where it makes players plan cities that would be really bad cities in real life but also makes them misunderstand what makes great cities great in the real world i also want to discuss how this could actually have some real life impacts beyond the game itself before we get started i just wanted to be clear about a couple things the goal of this video is not at all to say city skylines is a bad game it is undoubtedly the best city building game of all time and i think what the community has become and the workshop has become and really what the game allows is is remarkable and i really have trouble explaining how amazing it is to people who don't know what it is however i thought it was about time to just take a breath and think critically a little bit about why i've had the simulation off using mods for so many years i really want to be able to play a city building game that actually simulates reality and lets us understand how real cities work i don't think city skylines has a simulation that's capable of that it's really unfortunate because i think city skylines is a game otherwise is completely once again remarkable but i think it's time to just think critically about the simulation and look at what the problems with it are and what can be done to solve them everything in city skylines is placeless and timeless but not in a good way everything's green field development basically meaning that you're building on land that hasn't been built on before which isn't how it works in real life in real life cities aren't planned from nothing their plans throughout history throughout centuries but in city skylines this isn't the case there's no incremental growth your city grows from nothing to something without any real context at all i think this leads to placeless places without histories once you run out of space in your city to do unrealistic greenfield development building up is unrealistic too beyond a really small decrease in happiness and a tiny little demolition cost and maybe some reduced tax revenue that can be made up for by larger buildings there's basically no cost to demolition in game there's no displacement for example you can plow a freeway through a neighborhood in city skylines and replace the homes in a neighborhood with a government building and there's been no community displaced no people have been displaced across the city and had their you know economic ties and social ties to their community and their job severed because the simulation doesn't simulate any of that on the other hand in real life in the united states when we blasted freeways through existing low-income and minority neighborhoods and did urban renewal we absolutely destroyed communities displaced human beings and severed their ties with their communities it's just stuff that the simulation doesn't even begin to get to really important aspects of real urban history that are not only lost in city skylines there there is no place for them at all because the simulation doesn't even try to simulate them and there are a couple impacts to this first of all i think it's a missed opportunity to show what realistic historical progression looks like for cities what a city looks like as it changes over time who wins and who loses due to urban planning decisions instead you get this placeless timeless city with no context and players can't see the trade-offs of basically anything they do second everything being greenfield development and the lack of neighborhoods in city skylines makes it hard to see the consequences of urban planning decisions for people and communities specifically cities are made up of people not the numbers on the screen that you see in your info panel notating the traffic flow in your new urban freeway or your population those are just numbers and real cities are made up of real people and another impact is that the lack of a financial or human cost demolition in city skylines encourages complete overhauls of neighborhoods rather than incremental change like you'd see in real life making it seem like things like slum clearance and urban renewal were fine in real life because in game it doesn't really seem like destroying neighborhoods has any real consequences there are a couple of solutions that i might propose to these problems the first one would be a historical mode where players can choose to build a city that goes through history with different architectural styles technologies and citizen preferences that change over a long period of time changing the whole game might be too much for most people but at least giving players the option to build a city throughout history is i i think a good idea it also might make players in the timeless placeless default mode that we're used to recognize that it's less realistic than planning a city throughout history second i think that city skylines should actually have social consequences for destroying neighborhoods players should at the very least see the names of the people whose homes they destroy where those people go and what impact that has on their communities it should be possible for sims to experience homelessness and eviction this would show the real impact of displacement demolition of existing neighborhoods and existing neighborhoods should be able to resist demolition there should be an actual political simulation where members of the community can voice their concerns and you know increase the costs of a project by making it so that you actually have to compensate folks who are already living in the place you're demolishing at the very least just show that they're actually people living in the areas that you destroy and your destruction of those neighborhoods has consequences for them and another thing i'd change is that districts and city skylines should function as neighborhoods people should shop in their neighborhoods play in their neighborhoods befriend others in their neighborhoods use their neighborhood schools maybe even have family that's lived in the neighborhood for generations and they should be able to create strong community advocacy groups in their neighborhood that function like political groups these political groups should have influence in the simulation like i was discussing before they should be able to oppose demolition they should be able to support you know more housing in their neighborhood they should be able to demand better schools and and so on there should be actual neighborhoods of actual people who communicate and have social cohesion and going back to the idea of a political simulation i think this should take place largely on the neighborhood scale neighborhood advocacy groups might advocate for policies for example opposing a freeway being built or maybe opposing a freeway being built without sound barriers and maybe driving up the cost of a rail project by opposing that maybe advocating for better schools or more park space things that matter to a specific community so neighborhood should be able to build cohesion and advocate for what they want whether it's good or bad [Music] in city skylines the player acts as a planning god who's rewarded for growth above all else rapid expansion gives you new toys and achievements which gives you a nice dopamine boost in each milestone just for reaching meaningless quantitative goals like population numbers all infrastructure is unrealistically cheap and it's not just roads here and beyond this the maintenance costs for infrastructure are so low that you never really think about them when you're playing city skylines which allows you to expand your city's infrastructure much quicker than any real-life city would be able to without debt and really importantly the player makes all the decisions but this is not at all how it works in real life city planning in real life is a messy collaborative incremental process that takes place over a long period of time and has tons of different actors from community groups to religious leaders to politicians to special interests involved in city skylines there's none of this the player is a planner king who can do basically anything you could plan any mode of transportation raise taxes what kind of taxes i don't know just just taxes you could set any kind of policy you could build an enormous monument on someone's house there's no politics there's no community advocacy there's no consulting there's no collaboration in city skylines while you're building your city and returning to what we were talking about before the simulation is about big numbers and big growth not about strengthening existing communities so you ignore the inconvenient small things even if they're really important for example there's no accessibility planning in city skylines no sims have disabilities you don't have to build ramps or elevators to make sure everybody can access buildings there's no policy for any of this there's no accessibility info panel to tell you how accessible your city is to people with disabilities they're just forgotten in the simulation another small thing that's forgotten is that there's no focus on visual aesthetics for sims who walk you know city skylines always assumes that sims will take the quickest walking route but this isn't really how it works in real life all the time there's psychological factors that make maybe you or i take a more scenic route even if it's a little longer because maybe it's quieter or more scenic these are just a few things among many that are just lost in the mess of the city skyline simulation where there's one sole arbiter of all decisions there are a couple of impacts this view from above first it perpetuates a utilitarian short-term view of how cities should be built shiny revenue and population numbers and traffic flow and big scale are are prioritized above all else second giving players infinite power is a complete misrepresentation of how real-life city planning works in real life there are so many different actors who have to come together to make decisions about um how cities should be built they have conflicting views and conflicting needs and wants but in city skylines the player makes all the decisions it's a complete distortion of how city planning works in real life because there's no input from anybody it's just one person making all of the decisions and third it makes players forget the small things in city planning which is really important the simulation shouldn't make players forget that people with disabilities exist and that they need to use urban space just like everybody else and that urban planners need to accommodate them players forget that communities exist because there are no neighborhoods to serve no specific needs of any given area it's just the population of your city is it a hundred thousand is it a hundred ten thousand that's really the main thing that matters when you're building is your population going up is your income going up there's no consideration for people and communities i think there are a couple solutions to these problems that we should consider first players should be rewarded for fixing the small things just going beyond the dopamine rush of big milestones in the city making neighborhoods more livable and accessible players should be rewarded much more for strengthening existing communities than they are right now second city skyline should have a group of bureaucrats and citizens who advise the player there should be an actual political simulation the chirper isn't enough there isn't a real participatory or political simulation in city skylines in both simcity 4 and simcity 3000 advisors advised the player on solutions to problems in the city and then simcity 3000 petitioners petitioned the player for changes to city policy the players still ultimately decided but at least there was some effort to show that people had a voice in the process interpret kind of simulates this but you really learn to completely ignore messages from the chirper after a while and it also doesn't simulate any of the bureaucratic or political process that happens in a real city or that was simulated in previous city building games [Music] in city skylines you have no choice but to play in your city for cars basic infrastructure choices force you to plan for cars you start with a freeway connection every single time there is no map in city skylines without an outside freeway connection it's literally not allowed by the game's mechanics cars are the default mode of transportation you're forced to have trucks access commercial and industrial buildings at all times of day there's no rail served industry or stores you have to have things delivered to buildings by trucks you also can't create commercial alleyways or only allow deliveries at certain times of day things that might make an area more attractive to pedestrians every building in the game functionally has to be connected to a road that has cars on it because there are no pedestrian-only streets i mentioned this before but infrastructure is really really cheap in city skylines not only is it really cheap to build the road itself like it costs basically nothing to build a mile of freeway in city skylines when it would cost billions of dollars in real life but as we talked about before the land acquisition costs are basically nothing which is definitely not how it works in real life another important thing is that in city skylines mobility always trumps accessibility according to strong towns and i quote mobility is how far you can go in a given amount of time accessibility is how much you can get to in that time when your city's built for cars basic destinations are further away and you need a car to get to them that's why you have to have a car to live in phoenix or orange county they're designed that way it's a cycle but accessibility is a different story one way to look at it is say i can only walk half a mile in 10 minutes but there are about a hundred stores within that half mile radius things are really accessible they're much more accessible than if you could drive five miles in 10 minutes but only go to 50 different stores automobility completely warps the way we think about travel traveling far is cool but it's not the only goal getting people to destinations they need to go to should be the goal in city skylines with no neighborhoods and no mixed-use zoning sims don't really care where their destination is they'll figure out a way to get to it probably by car even if it's across the city and even if it's a store they could have gone to in their own neighborhood on that note let's talk about how there's no mixed use zoning in city skylines in real life mixed-use zoning creates livable walkable environments where accessibility always trumps mobility european cities are so good because you can walk from your second floor flat to the pharmacy or the pub in just minutes but you can't build these neighborhoods and city skylines the simulation just doesn't allow it the closest thing is maybe zoning commercial buildings next to residential buildings but their aspects of the simulation that discourage that too if you put a residential building next to a bunch of commercial buildings and city skylines people will go to the hospital from noise pollution because it's too noisy so there's neither a point nor a real way to make walkable neighborhoods in city skylines there's also no mid-density zoning in game you're kind of given a false dichotomy between building skyscrapers or single-family neighborhoods but in real life missing middle housing like duplexes fourplexes small apartment buildings this kind of housing can support walkability just like skyscrapers can but once again there's just no reward for making walkable neighborhoods in the first place in city skylines there's no info view there's no health benefits there's no simulation of walkability at all you're not going to find a youtube video titled walkability challenge let's make this street more walkable because there's no reason to there's just nothing to reward you for it and nothing that tells you to make your street walkable your traffic flow metrics will increase if you widen a street even if in real life it would make the place a lot less livable so everything in city skylines is geared towards automobility you're never rewarded for walkability or building for the human scale one of the most important goals for a city skylines player is fixing traffic right in city skylines a traffic jam screams to the player you need more lanes on this highway now this leads to what has been called in academic literature i'm not making this up here this isn't just a stupid term i'm making up this all leads to a freeway fetish among city skylines players bradley brightshaft of the university of nebraska omaha says and i quote automotive traffic provides immediate visual feedback traffic jams indicate inefficient road networks while swiftly moving automata are interpreted as a sign of successful planning this rather simplified approach to traffic engineering where the primary goal is to tame automotive congestion leads many players to exhibit a kind of freeway fetish city building games like city skylines and simcity 2013 make it easy to rely heavily if not exclusively on automotive transportation despite the availability of other transit options in both games traffic congestion can often most swiftly and effectively be ameliorated by upgrading from two to four to six lane roads if a traffic jam is particularly stubborn a six-lane one-way road might be in order induced demand in which more lanes spur more demand and ultimately more traffic is clearly not a consideration and since more traffic does not translate into higher maintenance costs continually increasing the roadway capacity is a logical congestion abatement strategy as are streamlined superblocks and limited access freeway systems straight out of the coopersies radiant city there are no costs to autodependency in the city skylines for the player first of all there's no parking simulation because in real life parking is really expensive to build in the high cost of free parking donald shupe estimated the value of all the parking in the united states at more than twice the value of all of the cars in the united states but in game parking is simulated terribly you don't actually have to provide parking when there isn't parking available cars just disappear into the oblivion you don't have to see how ugly enormous parking lots are when you build them in an interview with the atlantic the lead designer for simcity 2013 stated and i quote when i started measuring out our local grocery store which i don't think of as being that big i was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store that was kind of a problem because we were originally just going to model real cities but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to get really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots so he's basically saying that by artificially decreasing the amount of parking in simcity it made the game unrealistic i understand the idea that it makes the game less fun to have more parking lots because yeah the amount of parking lots in real life in american cities is obscene the problem is if you just make parking non-existent and you just have the simulation disappear then you also obscure the cost of parking and the financial cost of parking is really significant and obscuring that from a city builder game that's supposed to be modeling reality is a much more significant choice than you might imagine donald trump criticizes how in real life parking is enormously subsidized and in fact in the united states free parking reduces the cost of automobile commuting by about 71 percent but in city skylines you don't even have to think about parking it's a really really expensive land use that has an enormous impact on our cities by subsidizing car use but you don't even have to think about it in city skylines and cars can just disappear without you needing to provide space for them or without anybody assuming the costs of parking the car the way city skylines works it completely masks the monetary impact that free parking has in real life another thing there's no sustainability in the city skyline simulation this goes back to our point before that you're supposed to grow your city at all costs in city skylines cars don't pollute and there's no climate change these are issues that are beyond crucial in real life urban planning that aren't even touched in city skylines the fact that there's no sustainability within the simulation where there aren't actual environmental costs or demands from citizens that you have to actually address as the player is a big problem it makes it easier to build enormous freeways without thinking about the consequences in city skylines there's also no traffic safety no road safety there are no traffic accidents in city skylines there are no hospitalizations from car crashes there are no deaths and it basically lets you make cars go as fast as you can make them go bigger and faster roads have no real downside in city skylines so there are a couple impacts to all of these aspects of the city skyline simulation that promote automobility above all else first by encouraging players at every turn to build auto infrastructure and never encouraging them to build walkable neighborhoods the game makes it so that these harmful traffic engineering ideas like basically maximizing car speed above all else even in central cities where people live that that's fine that's good it encourages that thinking and i think that's really harmful because it misses an opportunity to show what a walkable accessible city can look like second i think city skylines makes players forget how dangerous and costly cars can be tens of thousands of people die in auto crashes each year in the united states but you wouldn't know that in city skylines parking in roads are really expensive in real life but you wouldn't know that by playing city skylines perpetuating the perception that automobility is the standard the default option and that it has very few problems when you're planning a city can have impacts beyond the game itself playing the game might be the main opportunity that city skylines players have to learn about cities and many of them might go on to plan public policy or become politically active as silly as it may seem millions of people have bought the game and city skylines is a truly formative experience for a lot of people when learning about how cities work and i just don't think that an influence so important on so many people's understanding of how cities work should so wildly misrepresent in the simulation what makes great cities so great because it's not just traffic flow a couple ways i think that these problems could be ameliorated are first players should be rewarded for walkability and livability in the neighborhoods they make not just the speed of cars and how fast you're able to get from one place to another by car it should be metrics and rewards for walkability and lovability i think that would be a really important step that makes it so that the easy traffic metrics are not the only way to make your city better second i think players should have the option to use mixed-use zoning corner stores with homes attached to them a barber shop under the apartment building that would be a really important aspect of the simulation third i think very importantly city skyline should have a car crash simulation people should be able to be injured and killed by cars and people should be able to demand lower speeds and traffic safety measures and it should be responsive to the width and speed of your your road there should be incentives to make roads safer fourth maintenance costs for infrastructure should be increased maintenance costs already exist for infrastructure actually which is a great aspect to the simulation the only problem is that they're so insignificant that you probably haven't ever thought about them while creating roads in your city different types of infrastructure should also cost more or less to maintain like for example bridges should cost more than ground-level roads to maintain like they do in real life and also when a bridge reaches the end of its useful life for example you should have to deal with the trade-offs of replacing it because in city skylines you just kind of assume the cost slowly over time in low maintenance costs but in real life you have to close the bridge down or partially close it down and upgrade it you know over time there are different trade-offs that you have to make that you don't have to make in-game infrastructure replacement like that should be simulated players should need to provide enough parking to store the cars they put on the road and whether it's buildings that you place needing to assume the cost of parking and that that increasing the cost of construction or maybe it's the city providing parking or a combination of the two just something a little bit more realistic than cars just disappearing into nowhere sixth and finally i really think cars and city skylines should pollute and it should be significant areas with high levels of pollution from automobiles should be able to demand cleaner air and become unhealthy as a result of freeways that go through them and higher levels of government should demand or require pollution regulations and there should be political pressure from citizen activists movements that are against us expanding auto infrastructure during a climate catastrophe and players should also experience climate disasters in their cities as well there should be pressure from wildfires and sea level rise and other factors that we're going to have we are dealing with right now you know from climate change players should have to contend with those as well and feel the pressure of those too to make their city more environmentally friendly there just isn't pollution in city skylines it comes from automobiles and i really think that masks really the biggest cost of all when it comes to autodependency which is the contribution to climate change there's no accounting for that in city skylines [Music] the main idea i want you to come away with here is that by making city skylines a game where you are planning a city at one point in time by making the player the sole arbiter of all decisions in the city and by basically forcing the player to plan a city to maximize traffic flow city skylines forces you to plan bad cities and gives you the wrong idea of what a good city is the simulation promoting auto use for example it might be a mirror of real life like yes we maximize traffic flow for cars in too many cases in real life when we should be prioritizing pedestrians but that doesn't mean that the game should also reinforce that the game should make it clear to players the harms of auto use and it should make it clear to the player that you know it's not just one person making all of the decisions in a city should make it clear to the player that there are communities and histories that are built over time not just in a 30-minute session of playing the game i really don't want you to think it's all bad though because city skylines has an absolutely incredible community of people who share their knowledge on architecture urban planning history really anything else related to cities i know i've learned an immense amount from the city skylines community and it's really the main reason that i became interested in urban planning in the first place and i will always be grateful to this amazing community for that i've met so many people and learned so many things and i really do truly believe that city skylines is a positive influence so while there are a lot of opportunities i believe the developers missed in crafting city skylines they really didn't foresee what the game would become now millions of people worldwide play what has become my favorite game of all time they make up my favorite community on the internet a community that collaborates it creates and makes city skylines what it is and for that i am forever grateful if you've watched this far first of all thank you and and second of all i'd love to hear what you think in the comments am i right what would you change in my assessment of the city skyline simulation do you think there are some things i missed let me know and a special thanks to do not eat silverette and besquigglehouse and especially for helping me with this video and giving me ideas and jay bisquicklhousen for helping me put the video together really appreciate it if you want to support what i'm doing you could leave a like on the video you could become a patron or a youtube member links are below if you want to support the channel you get tons of benefits like early access to new videos you're naming the credits shout outs and even save games when i upload a new episode of cabrillo cabrillo is my current city skyline series where i'm building a city set in northern california trying to talk about urban planning and urban history issues and i'd really love to have you along so if you want to subscribe and follow along as i'm building that um that would be great before we go shout out to some wonderful patrons fluffy the cat antoine robert matthews i'm a david and stay intruders thank you all so much for supporting the channel i really appreciate all of you and everybody for watching so far once again let me know what you thought in the comments and i'll see you next time

Channel: Pres

Views: 142,006

Keywords: cities skylines, city skylines, cities skylines realistic, game critic, game criticism, cities skylines realistic city

Id: Fy672b7xZ6c

Length: 29min 31sec (1771 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/PatateLover]

Yeah this is why I stopped playing. Too much car focus. There isn’t even mix-use zoning. I know there is way to circumvent this but it’s too much of a hassle.

[u/gfaster]

Public perception of the harm of car-centric cities is really important and Cities: Skylines has a massive influence. Right now if you take a look at many of the top posts on /r/CitiesSkylines you’ll see an abundance freeway fetishists, people proud of their urban freeways.

If anything I believe this video undersells the severity of how rose-tinted Cities: Skylines’ view of American suburbia is. For example, R-1 zoning actually can house several households, with the facade of suburbia. Additionally, even in the worst traffic jams, cars will eventually just disappear artificially making the problem seem not as bad.

It is obviously pointless to complain too much about the kind of game Cites: Skylines is now, but we can advocate for its sequel to develop a healthier view of cities for future planners.

[u/rHaris]

Next up: Why Minecraft supports dirt architecture