- Well, luckily video game skills
and professional skills are two different skill sets
because this poor city is falling apart.
(chuckles) Okay.
(upbeat music)
- Hey, everyone.
I'm Sylvie Borschel, the producer of some of the pro plays
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- Hi, I'm Deborah, Senior City Planner
with the city of Los Angeles.
A city planner is at the intersection
of a lot of consideration when it comes
to land development and how communities grow.
Today I'm going to be building
my very own city in Cities Skylines.
My ideal city starting from scratch is going to be diverse
in economy and hopefully the peoples that live there,
and natural resources for the community.
All right, let's get into it.
So we have our city here in LA,
and most major cities, we have history.
We've started with a few grids of streets
and a bit of layout of zoning,
water, and power infrastructure.
But other than that
we're basically starting clean slate on this game.
On the bright side, being able to start with empty land
lets us apply lessons learned from the past.
So not put housing near the freeway for example.
I would keep a plane of land undeveloped
to allow for flooding and allows the river to maintain
its natural state of beauty
that provides ecological benefits as well as recreational.
Okay, so we can see,
oh, homes are popping up, that's exciting.
Looking at the construction, it's lightning speed.
Very different than real life.
That would be so nice.
Okay, so this neighborhood,
I envisioned to have a mix of commercial
and residential uses.
I see this lake bed over here,
a nice area for hotels and recreation.
We could place some light manufacturing
that are close to the freeway for easy ingress and egress.
What am I doing, I'm zoning.
Virtually every city in the country has zoning
and zoning is an important tool
to keep land uses compatible with each other.
I imagine that this will be a commercial road.
It's unfortunate with this game is
there's no mixed use zoning tool.
Mixed use being within one building commercial
on the ground floor and residential on top.
So I'm going to place some residential here.
This game does not differentiate
between light industry and heavy industry.
Because industry is no longer the industrial revolution type
of industry and instead, a lot of light manufacturing
or post-production like the set
that I'm on today with Buzzfeed.
I'm going to zone light industry back here
away from the natural resources we have
and away from a lot of the housing close by.
In my imagination we do have a mixture of office
within the space as well.
I think it's important to create a campus-like environment.
Some synergy amongst knowledge base
and people just crossing paths.
So far I've zoned such that this is a bit of a hub
for the lake that's down here.
And this is more of an economic hub,
serving the local industry.
I'm starting to build out residential.
And I imagine moving, assuming east.
I think it's interesting
that this game does not have a compass.
In newer American cities you see street grids
that are checker pattern east, west, north, south.
Whereas other countries you see street patterns
that are slanted which accounts for sunlight
in a different fashion.
And tends to maximize distribution of the sun
and access to the sun throughout the year.
So as I build this out, I would want to only continue
this block going out in order, again,
to keep space from the river to allow the river
to overflow if needed and create park space here.
Okay, so let's see what's going on at the ground level.
I think that means they don't have water.
We are often in a drought in Los Angeles.
So let's build out some pipes to connect the water.
Let's see what else is going on.
We see flashing.
Oh, there's a lot going on here.
Okay, sewage is backing up, that's not good.
That's not good.
And what other problems do we have?
It's abandoned.
Maybe the sewage is backing up.
Okay, so for the sake of this game,
I think I'm going to tear down some abandoned buildings.
This is not a general practice that cities take,
only very extreme situations
in which something like this would happen.
Okay, I deleted a road too.
Luckily video game skills
and professional skills are two different skill sets
because this poor city is falling apart.
City's got some problems, the placement of the sewer pipes,
and the placement of the water pipes,
which I believe are the same in this game.
This needed to build out more gradually
so that we didn't spend too much money
on roads and on infrastructure.
And then run out of money to sustain our growth.
Now we're gonna lay out infrastructure,
some sewer pipes and some electricity will allow
that sewage backup to drain out, hopefully,
and get fresh water into these homes.
And I wanna build some roads
to continue to invest in the city.
And like I said, keep space from the river.
Now we can actually provide
more advanced services for people.
Families can move here.
Medical clinics for basic health needs
so they don't have to go driving out to other cities.
Garbage, taxes, great.
Now we're moving.
Now we're talking.
Now we're like a city.
So let's you to build.
I can build a medical clinic.
Here we go, here's the building.
Building must be placed roadside, okay.
Let's see if I click, if what happens.
All right, happy faces.
So we got happy faces, I like that.
That is great!
And I'll add some commercial here
to compliment that medical facility.
So this main street, I'm imagining trees,
bike paths, access to shops by foot
so it's not so car oriented.
Let's zoom in and see if this game provides for that.
So we see different setbacks here.
A setback is how far a building may be required
to be distanced back from the street.
This is very common in the city of Los Angeles
and across the United States.
What is realistic with this game is
that there are a lot of natural resources
that flow through cities.
It's nice to have the opportunity
to address them from the get go.
I'd say the most realistic thing about this game is
that there are freeways to contend with.
These run all through Los Angeles
and this brand new city was just plunk down on an off ramp.
What's not realistic is how simplistic things are.
So the zoning is very simplistic.
Like I said, there's no mixed use option.
This game is fun, but I don't think it's realistic.
So we don't have that nuance here
of is this an affordable housing project?
Is it not?
And how many units are in that building?
Parks are so important for respite from urban living.
I'm going to build out the rest of this grid.
Obviously in real life these streets would be aligned
more cleanly unless there's a reason.
There could be a reason,
maybe a significant tree or a historic structure
that we wanted to build a road around.
So things aren't always so clean
and orderly in in real life.
But people are happy.
So perhaps it's sharing space.
Oh wow, there's an airplane flying.
I see this whole neighborhood over here.
I built the roads, but I didn't build the water pipes
and the electricity.
Undo that effort and I saw some happy faces.
So, oh, we have a worthy village.
We have a worthy village.
So we are still going to go zoom in
and bulldoze abandoned properties.
It's not good.
(laughing)
I just took a whole like block!
Okay, I can go back and rebuild these roads or not.
All right, this was experimental.
This was just experimental.
A few bumps in the road. (chuckles)
No pun intended.
But we're doing well.
We started to get the framework
of the layout of the city going.
We've got a lot of happy faces, access to lakes.
We've got local industry,
and we have a bit of a tourism component.
It's walkable on top of our residential and commercial uses.
Overall I think I did well.
I persevered it got rough at some points,
but I love that the population kept increasing.
As a city planner I do have somewhat of an advantage
in playing this game.
However, there's more to it, clearly,
as I've learned than just being a city planner.
The community is happy, there's money in the bank,
and it's continuing to grow in a nice fashion.
It was fun to use my imagination and create
this fun little town that I think will continue to grow
and be a fun place to live.
(upbeat music)