Improve YOUR Builds! | Mixed Use Districts in Cities: Skylines

[Music] everybody welcome back my name is yumble and today i'd like to discuss mixed-use zoning in cities skylines this is a mixed-use area mixed use just means that it fulfills multiple needs for your sims so they can live and work and shop and and you know have a life all in one area it's really good for saving space it's really good for avoiding the suburban sprawl that so many u.s cities are known for where you've got this very dense tall area in the middle and then this really short single-family home sprawl out into nowhere and then people have to have to drive into the city to work this alleviates that i want to show you how to build this type of area i want to show you my thought process how i approach this sort of thing and you know i'd like to hear your feedback on this i really want to know if you if you like the idea of mixed-use zoning or if you prefer the suburban sprawl or if you just like a big loud downtown area i want to hear about that in the comments and i'd also appreciate it if you would subscribe to the channel so you don't miss upcoming videos thank you for being here i'm yumble let's get into it so here's a bit of context on the area that we're dealing with this is my current mixed use development i don't have a name for it really well we'll name it eventually or actually i mean comment your favorite name i've been calling it uh little vancouver actually i don't know that vancouver i don't know what they say about mixed use but it looks a lot like vancouver to me but for context the stadium is here there's a hotel over here big parking garage another kind of condo mixed use-ish area it fits the same aesthetic actually but i'd really like to expand to this area kind of eastward into this section um i'd like to continue the walkability of the mixed use area i'd like to continue the another bit of green space because people don't have lawns here you'll notice that none of the buildings have their own lawns really there's a few bits of green behind some buildings but really you want to have like shared this sports area here you know a shared shared use kind of recreational area along with offices for people to work and commercial like i mentioned earlier let me show you exactly what's going on here this building is a perfect example it's actually two buildings ready one is on the bottom one commercial area wonderful and then there's a topper above that right here and these are by the uh the asset creator known as smileys i believe is how it's pronounced and smileys makes these great assets that enable you to uh to stack them essentially here's what they look like separately remove that from the top so this is your mixed use 60 degree commercial this is a mixed use 60 degree residential and there's you can put different toppers on top of the commercial and the commercial will have businesses across the bottom much like in a real city and then there'll be this residential set of condos on top which i think is just beautiful i think it works wonderfully i'd like to because of the nature of these 60 degree buildings i tend to use them to kind of outline the the structure of the streets so i like to use them as an excuse to make these diagonal lines 60 degrees specifically using precision engineering which is where you hold control if you have the mod hold control and you'll see this 60 degree angle form it's beautiful and the road that i'm going to be using largely is this parking lot 16 meter parking lot service road so this comes with the parking lots parking lot roads pack and i don't just use it for parking lots you'll see this whole thing is filthy with this one network and that's because i think it's just a good unmarked drive road for for a more pedestrian area part of what i'm doing as well philosophy wise is this is it's supposed to be walkable but it needs to be drivable so that services can get to the buildings as well so i'm looking at a very strong sense of road hierarchy here i'm really trying to make it clear that there's an arterial and another arterial and then a collector will branch off and this is connected to all of those here's another i'd call this a collector maybe contextually it's an arterial but i want this to be very local i don't want this to be an optimal through option no traffic should be using it just to cut across i don't want to see vehicles going all the way up and down the whole thing so vehicles are actually banned other than services and some food truck props vehicles are banned on these little paths here you know they're technically roads from network extensions too but through vehicles are not getting through the park mainly for pedestrians in this case so i've got our expansion kind of started here i decided to reorient the building and make it so it's facing this way but it still gives us that strong 60 degree line you'll see that this side also has these really strong 60 degree angled streets and i think that that's using the assets that you have like going to your uh let's say find it and typing in like all these right here everything here any odd shapes that you have any unique buildings try to fit your streets around the buildings rather than fitting the buildings around the streets when you can because you'll end up making decisions that you wouldn't make otherwise and it might be really cool you know i probably wouldn't think to use a 60 degree angle if i didn't have all these great 60 degree assets but because i do now i've got an excuse to to kind of to kind of work around these things i've also got 120 degree assets as well so let's see if we can fit a 120 on that corner it's actually this one here so i've got this mixed use 120 degree corner also by smileys he makes some of the best condos and they fit the aesthetic of the city i'm building right now so i use so many smiley's assets it's not even funny there we go so i've just placed both and then i'm using move it move it as a requirement for these buildings to move them into position and it's great because these things the businesses hug the street in the way that they would in in real life and i think that that's great and it's an excuse to use these bizarre angles which really aren't that bizarre they're bizarre if you if you don't care to branch out it might feel bizarre but i would i would strongly recommend you know trying something a little different break the grid grids are beautiful grids are efficient and amazing and a little boring at times some might agree so i'm going to try to circle this road around this building it doesn't need to go right up against it necessarily is this three units no let's put it right up against it how about that we'll put it right here and we'll just go right around this building and see what happens you'll also notice that i've i've sanctioned this area for you know i've destroyed all the trees all the trees are gone because i'm going to end up adding my own trees just like i did in this area here i also encircled it with kind of this this exterior road that follows the train tracks i don't know that i want to put any buildings directly on the train tracks they're sunken but but still i don't know that that's the that's the best move all right we'll complete that little block there because it's unique and interesting and let's find another condo asset to work with i've got all these uh either ploppable rico or in finder here we go let's find another kind of building to work with there we go that fits the uh that fits go with that and we'll use that as an excuse actually to maybe go vertical with this road and have it go right to the end here once again keeping with with um what i said shaping around the buildings so like this is a whole whole philosophy i think a lot of people could benefit from this really really really focusing on making your city shapely using shapely buildings i know i already said this but like let me say it again please and for walkability i'm not going to do too many huge blocks if you know what i mean it's not going to be the huge mega blocks that a lot of u.s cities are known for they're going to be much smaller uh much tighter blocks so think like a lot of european cities this isn't a rule but a lot of european cities also use a lot of mixed-use zoning because of the nature of of how uh i mean you could say this about early us cities as well but european cities were built to be walkable if they were created in a time before automobiles and because of that you end up with these tight sometimes winding roads and you end up with with mid-rise buildings with a commercial on the bottom all that kind of thing so europe is is uh kind of has this in many of its cities and many especially the older cities whereas the u.s we kind of need to catch up i think and and don't forget that people live in cities it doesn't just have to be a place of cars says the guy who built this this is absolutely uh there's there's so many cars i built so many spaces for cars so away from downtown i wanted to create a nice little respite from that you know a nice little spot to kind of get away and live maybe if you have a little more you know a little more money i guess it's it's a slightly nicer area one could say so i think that this is going to be the green space for this part i think i'll keep this roped off just as i kept this roped off i think that this will be a park in the center of this whole thing and i'm going to keep figuring out how to fill in this area and maybe we'll figure out some parking too i'm trying to keep parking centralized so that the vehicles can stop so you can pull into this area and then park your car and then walk to your destination very very easily let me figure out what my next move is so now we've got this somewhat bizarre but also very strong shape forming which i'm really thankful for this is good and i'm just going to keep kind of plotting away with these buildings and i picked this one because it fits perfectly in this area and that means i can continue this street to allow delivery vehicles to come through and oh that would be so good if that lined up uh let's make it so that lines up actually i think it's important to have a plan and then to be able to scrap the plan when you see something better i think i think flexibility is is very important yes i like that i like that and then this now we can adjust that's eight units away so if we do an eight by eight curve starting here it should line up nicely and we'll avoid the train track there we go love that okay so now we've got this here i've allocated this area for parking as i said before i really don't want people to drive all the way to the center to park like the park should be where people are walking i i like the idea of keeping parking on the edges because if it's on the edges the vehicles don't have to travel all the way to the center thus increasing walkability uh let's see i think i have a this might be the wrong word i think i have a um high school soccer field too big urban yes there we go and it is called soccer on the asset perfect cool so i'm gonna use this strange kind of little area as a as a way to give the sims a place to play some sports let's see using using move it to nudge it into position now so it's facing this road which is good let's see a good central spot for it i like that it's kind of even on all sides and it fills out this area nicely and we'll just add some trees and maybe some benches like on these i ended up i put them in and we surrounded it with paths and benches and trees and all the kind of stuff you'd like to see if you walked to a to a multi-use kind of sports recreational area complete with uh with trash cans so i'll probably end up throwing some detail around this at some point but i think that's a good use for that kind of odd shape there i've also got this um mixed other mixed use building here where this is a commercial on the bottom and residential on top just as i've been talking about this whole time i'm just gonna keep kind of going around and figuring out what all these spaces are for and working as i go you know seeing what happens all right a little bit of progress we got some trees going in i've added a couple paths to make things a little more walkable in places so that sims don't have to go around you'll find that sims use paths a lot don't forget to connect areas with paths where they're not connected by roads like i'll probably end up adding a path that connects this to this so that the sims don't have to walk all the way around to get out i think that's a very good approach um i keep making pretty liberal use of the um of the condo assets that i have so really i've just gone into the same workshop and looked up condos smileys makes a ton of them and they're all pretty uniform while while still being unique if that makes sense so i'm using a lot of those and a lot of them have mixed use characteristics where even if the building isn't technically a commercial building on bottom you can see that it uh that it kind of could function that way you know you can see that you could easily imagine that there's offices on the ground floor like this this condo here there's probably stores let's see yep looks like bottles of detergent so yeah there's there's implied stores though this is technically just residential for my purposes there's there's implied there's implicit mixed use going on there visually at least so i'm just continuing to build out the network i'm thinking get out of here i'm thinking maybe this squares off let's see where that hits yeah cool so this will further refine our central um our central park area and i think that's pretty nice it'll complement this by being a different shape and a different angle and repetition but but not really you know not too much repetition but you'll keep seeing this angle and these shapes popping up if you stick to your guns on a given angle you'll you'll end up making a lot of cool decisions maybe let's put a fountain here let's put a fountain in this middle area just to let's see this is the fountain i have it may not end up being this fountain forever but this is what i got so we'll kind of turn this into a cool little little square actually i have a more modern looking fountain this one not gonna fit not gonna fit i take it back but this will be cool uh the soccer field next to the the green space in the middle which are all triangulated by this little also triangular bit of space i use surface painter to to paint that in with with pavement so that's why it looks the way it does let me throw some details on this let me show you what a bit of detail can do to a to a section like this and there we go that's a that's a good quick example of how to convert something that's kind of boring and underused and turn it into a feature turn it into something that people actually want to look at and and what might be a a highlight of your city actually uh let me know in the comments if you want to see me uh detail a little bit more in other areas and someday i might make a video on how to do stuff like this it's a lot of trial and error for me but you can see just adding a path add a couple benches add some trash cans a tree with a planter goes a long way the network has lights built in sorry the the road has light lights built in and the path has lights built in um also this hedge network i have a cool hedge network just to highlight the path and make that into kind of a central seating area next to our central park for this section of the city i think that goes a long way did not take too long to do so i do have this alternative 60 degree building that i'm about to use and this one doesn't snap on its own so you can see that there's a grid on the road this building is much like parks do where certain assets will will not snap but that is the base that is the commercial uh 60 degree base this is a 60 degree corner so i'm going to make use of that right now and the topper that i'm going to use i had it there my buttons are all messed up for some reason the topper i'm going to use is something like that that's kind of the mid-rise version that's the shorter version i think let's do the mid-rise version we'll do it a little taller next to the train track the train shouldn't be too loud at ground level one other tip with all of this one other thing to keep in mind i actually use mods to disable the the sound of um the the noise pollution in the city i found that building realistic cities with high density bases like high density commercial with high density residential on top it drives the people nuts and there's constantly ambulances showing up but it doesn't make any sense because they're 20 floors up from the noise and they're still getting sick so i've deactivated that i've found that noise pollution is not overly realistic in the game you can call that cheating if you want it kind of is but for me to build realistically you kinda gotta take a hit you kinda gotta the game has to take a hit as it was designed so what i've just done is i'm using move it and i'm holding alt so by holding alt it snaps to the grid so snap it to the grid snap them both to the same spot on the grid then select both buildings and snap them both into place so it retains that 60 degree angle and the buildings match up perfectly the residential to the commercial i'm going to fill in this little section with some other buildings and then we'll see what the bottom looks like so as i'm making this area i had this really funny thought i said to myself why can't we all just get a lawn and what i mean when i say that is this is our standard single-family home or maybe this one's an even better example we've got our single-family home over here in in a suburban part of town surrounded by other suburban homes we've got this lawn and somebody's responsible probably the homeowner is responsible for taking care of the lawn and trimming the bushes and all these all these things and that's cool and maybe you'll even use it on like a holiday or two you know thanksgiving you'll throw the ball around or whatever but generally it just i think the main for most families in my experience the lawn is a place where a parent goes out and mows once a week maybe once every two weeks or they pay somebody to keep it together and then they at most maybe it sees the action from a couple dogs every now and then right what if we pooled all of our lawns call me crazy take all of our lawns we'll live a little closer together and then we'll take all of our lawns and stick them together into a park and it's much much larger and it'll get much more use and you can you know throw a frisbee further without worrying about it going into your neighbor's yard or what have you i i think it's a it's a good concept you know why can't we take all of our lawns and put them together into one hugely useful space for everybody and you're not responsible you know you pay taxes so somebody else the city is responsible for uh for doing this and of course everything costs money i'm not you know i'm not ignoring that everything costs money but what if your money went a bit further and you didn't have to buy your own lawn mower you know what if you could uh invest in something else because of that that type of thing that just struck me as funny uh this area is coming along great by the way i had added some more condos over here added this nice little 120 degree mixed use corner this is like an older style building but kind of familiar looking in a way old town america kind of stuff where the once again the bottom level is stores and then there's a couple floors of houses up above it really really nice um i think next i'm going to focus on the park itself and maybe we'll make it similar to this one so that it complements it nicely i think i'm going to imagine this park similarly to what i did with the park on the left my theory with this one was that when people see green space they like to walk across it and if enough people walk across one area it turns into dirt right so the grass dies and you get what's called a desire path and then sometimes the city will pave those desire paths so the story that i've invented here in my mind is that people have picked their crossings and rather than go around the corner the longer route they're going to cut right to the chase and they're going to get right to the spot so i'm going to make a couple desired paths and just see how it see how it comes out see how it looks just imagining where people might have been cutting from and cutting to and and um how they might have tried to move when this was initially built because i think if the city is smart they'll often pave the desired path you know they'll take the the dirt path and they'll sure it up with some some pavement maybe put some bushes next to it or or what have you let's see i like that maybe one more one more slice just to add some some more shapeliness to it actually i'm gonna stick with that i think that's good i think that's good i'm probably gonna put some bushes around the edges like i did with this one so that's gonna end up being prop line tool if you haven't if you haven't already got it propline tool is a real good way to go actually here this network needs to be kinda sure it up against the edges so i'm going to make sure to do that i don't want the bushes to come out in a in a weird spot that's all i want to know exactly where this is trying to connect i like that it's a little bit less than this one but still there's the the pathiness of it and that's good i've also experimented a little bit i haven't come up with a result that i'm happy with but you can take sand you can kind of sand well okay you can take sand and make little little sandy patches if you click around enough you'll get this sandy effect so it depends what kind of park you're going for but you can add some some kind of sections of dead grass if you want to depending on how much you like your sand texture i'm going to go around and i'm just going to do this type of thing i'm gonna take the regular bush that i've been using we're just gonna rock and roll along the edges i like that a lot i'm just gonna do that on all sides i think the park has come together nicely we got some bushes on the side some trees some little seating areas there i'm starting to figure out what's going to go along the train tracks and i started with these older buildings and maybe this piece of land was bought up by this developer or whoever and and they put up a condo thing there i like that and then this is another 60 degree corner so i'm actually going to search for my 60 degree assets and we'll go with this one another smiles will i be able to fit a path down the middle technically maybe technically or should i go with the other 60 degree one let's see where i've used each of these this one would work at least as well maybe even better actually though i did use the same one here yeah let's go back to this one this style i've got a couple different 60 degree assets and i want to mix and match between the two i don't want to do too much of either and we'll do the mid-rise cap that's good mixed-use 60-degree residential that's the medium-sized version and it sort of leaves space for a path that's okay it'll either be a building or trees on the corner i'm gonna have to see how this shapes up now let's see get back in to find it let's look under uh let's look at condos again i have this extensive bank of condos to choose from and let's pick maybe a larger let's see [Music] i'm going back to the road networks now and i want to figure out a way to um i want to figure out something to frame with the roads if you know what i mean i want to figure out oh did i use this over here yet i didn't this is a good one this one would make sense overlooking an area over here so maybe maybe that goes in there and we line it up with this park using move it so i'm going to nudge it over one spot and let's see how the road kind of fits around that let's see how the road meanders around this guy send this low and now the question is going to be what fits here what what do i put here do i continue this road down to frame that further i think i got it just turning that building sideways it means that this building no longer fronts the street like this arterial but that's okay i'm okay with that it affords us a good use of that space plus we can have a road that just goes along the side here and i don't have a good plan for this this might get cut somewhere or we might have extra green space that would be interesting huh idea i've got an idea so i'm going to take this and we're going to use this little area here this little uh this little spot i'd like to build a small path and then using move it i can just nudge this into position i think because it falls this happens to fall between two uh spaces in the grid so i'm gonna have to manually put it where i want i've got this condo up and running i think that's a good move to kind of um we'll end up bringing the path back down and terminating it at the back of this condo using this spot i think and i've got these smaller condos i forget exactly what they're called maybe just modern something something modern condos everything is named so similarly these these what are they called brick brick condo these this little series here we're going to use the middle yeah it'll leave a little path down the middle we're gonna sacrifice green space but there's green space nearby so you know i'm okay sacrificing some green space we'll do two middles there and two middles there and i think the end let's see is the end the same on both sides it is so it doesn't actually matter there we go oh a chipotle who knew the other one probably has a chipotle too i just never noticed there it is yep chipotle we've got that cool so now we've got a couple rows of condos there with with some condos bookending it and it all fits the the vibe not every building is uh is mixed use by the way i don't know if i've made that clear it's not like every building has to be mixed use a building itself that has a residential and a residential on top and mixed use on the bottom is mixed use but also an area can be mixed use or a zoning plan can be mixed use and that's really what we're going for it doesn't have to be like a specific set of buildings per se it's more the concept of of using the space for multiple purposes to keep this final area moving i know that this is a 120 degree and i only have so many 120 degree assets so there is gonna be a good bit of repetition but if i pick the right topper we can avoid some of that ah it's okay you'll be able to see the back of the building which is fine i'm just looking at this one across the way and i don't want it to look identical it's not going to be oriented the same way because there i i feel that there are sometimes where i want to create repetition in a given area and there's other times where i really i wish i had an infinite number of buildings you know but there are some times where you want things to be repeated to get the point across and other times where you may not want to be where you may not want to repeat it so much but this gives us a measurement let's see i like this little spot here i think that's pretty cool and i like the idea of a road that goes behind this one this is all experimental it's all uh kind of as i go it's it's evolving all the time so i can make decisions surrounding this little spot here either a small building or a little plaza i'm fine with either one and then i wonder if this isn't like additional parking you know i i don't want vehicles to to pull into this area and then have to drive all the way across it to park you know i don't want this to be the only parking on this side of the street so i think it might be smart actually to complement it with some parking here's how i approach it using parking lot roads if you've seen my my video about parking in skylines then you know this one already but it's gonna look a little something like this three units as long as you keep the spacing in threes with this particular set of networks this is a parking lot roads once again i'm using their service road all over the place but i'm actually going to use it for parking in a moment here oh should i do another parking garage too probably i probably should let's do that too let's let's implement a garage some garages have uh have holes in the sides for roads and i'd really like to take advantage of one of those i used the brick one on the other side let's use the the mall parking garage on this side just so it's not identical but this will afford us the ability to bring that road right through the right through the thing here or what might be better here let's see if i can nudge this to the right let's let's put the road through it but not through the front let's just do the sides because i know that there is an entrance on this side and there's another entrance exit on this side and then we'll end up putting a path there so that people can walk from the parking garage directly to the park i love that and then if this could become an auxiliary lot i'd be happy with that too really this this area just needs a couple more trees and it's basically done with the space i have here the thing i might need to do is actually just just throw one road down this and we'll just do a single row is that 90 degrees i hope so seems to be uh we can just do a single row of of this parking lot maybe for the residents over here that's perfect so the way that this one works is you do parking lots just uh parking spaces just on one side so this will be lined with a row of spaces as opposed to the wider roads the 16 meter road where you end up with uh double sides double-sided spaces so it ends up looking like [Music] these guys here i'll have to figure out the right size you end up using move it to get these right but it's that style just to remind me to do that and then this one uses the single row the times one let me uh let me firm those up a bit move them into place add some trees see what else can be done give me just a moment i think that does it i think that fits the bill it's a continuation of this area on the left we've extended our mixed use area to here and it says it implies with how it's built leave your car at the door you know turn in here feel free to park right away same up here park right away get out you can live here you can work here you can shop here you can do everything you need to do right in this area the one thing that would really tie the room together properly the one thing that would fix this whole area up nice would actually be a bus line that's going to be another story for another time but a bus line that connects this uh transit this this metro station to this area up here that's a good idea but this this fits the bill though it's a mixed use area it's condos it's shopping it's working it's doing what you got to do everybody i appreciate you being here i appreciate you watching the video feel free to give me some feedback in the comments uh you know nothing too rude or anything but just let me know what you think how you're feeling about this one um i appreciate everyone who's subscribing everyone who's found me on twitch twitch.tv slash humble tv everyone who's joined the discord thank you for joining the discord a lot of good discussion and and questions being answered in there um that's all i got for today everyone i appreciate you being here i've been yumble i'll see you in the next stream or the next video

Channel: YUMBLtv

Views: 75,278

Keywords: Mixed Use, city skylines, european, sprawl, suburb, walkability, transit, yumbltv, american, move it, road hierarchy, mods, pc, vanilla, console

Id: DWjJAnKOv6Q

Length: 33min 44sec (2024 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021