#Cities skylines pc funding series#

I also build a subway system and several comprehensive bus routes. A railway snakes through the city on Foster + Partners' plans, so I do my best to approximate that - despite the noise pollution it's going to cause local residents. The next step is public transport, and here I'm going all out. I also dot the normal utilities around - education, health, police and fire services. I enact power, water and recycling ordinances to make sure everyone does their bit. I throw up some water towers around the city outskirts, pumping it up from aquifers below ground (which is questionable in sustainability terms - a desalination plant would be better), as well as building three wastewater treatment plants on the seashore. In the real-world plans, 80 percent of the water in the city is reused - mostly to irrigate crops that grow outside the city walls.

I build a couple of solar power plants and trash incinerators to power my city, making it 100 percent renewable. The plans originally called for solar panels covering most of the roofs of the buildings, but the planners found that they quickly got covered with sand blown by the wind, and sweeping all the panels in one place was far easier than accessing everyone's roofs. Power is a simpler decision - Masdar City is powered by a 22-hectare field of solar panels. I zone the squares as districts, banning all heavy goods traffic within.

#Cities skylines pc funding series#

Inside the twin squares that serve as the city's basic shape, only gravel tracks serve the neighborhoods, while a series of roundabouts offer connections to the outside world. Masdar City is built around pedestrians, cyclists and public transport but Cities:Skylines dictates that buildings have to be on a road so I choose as low-capacity roads as possible while still maintaining something of a hierarchy. I rely on Foster + Partner's futuristic renderings to lay out my road network. I pick the 'Diamond Coast' map, because that sounded rather like the sun-kissed shore of the Persian Gulf that the real Masdar City sits on. The Masdar project is expected to cost about $20 billion, so I figure the best approach to approximate the riches of the Gulf states would be to just tick the 'unlimited money' box on map creation. Final completion is now scheduled for between 20. It was due to be finished within about eight years, but the global financial crisis intervened and to date it consists of just a handful of office buildings. Work started in 2006, with British architects Foster + Partners drawing up plans for a city housing about 50,000 people in just six square kilometres. The closest thing we have to an arcology in reality, right now, is Masdar City - a zero-waste city project in the desert of the United Arab Emirates, about twenty kilometres south-east of Abu Dhabi. Some argue that Antarctic bases like Halley and McMurdo are arcologies, but they only sustain a population of tens and hundreds respectively, albeit in very harsh conditions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller proposed early self-sustaining cities, but the term 'arcology' itself was coined in 1969 by Italian architect Paolo Soleri, who dedicated his life to trying to establish a sustainable community called Arcosanti in the Arizona desert. The history of arcologies goes back almost a century. As many planners in the real world have discovered, that is far harder than it appears. I wanted to build a city that relies as little as possible on the outside world, with minimal impact on natural resources. So I thought it might be a fun experiment to try and build one myself - one a little closer to the true meaning of the term. In reality (and I use that word loosely because no-one's ever successfully finished one) an arcology is merely a sustainable, self-contained settlement that can supply most of the needs of a large population that dwells within.Ĭities: Skylines doesn't include the arcologies of SimCity 2000, and at the time of writing there's only one in the Steam workshop. The towering, fishbowl-topped edifices that seasoned gamers will recognise from SimCity 2000 were one of that game's most beloved features, but they bear only a passing resemblance to the real thing.

This is his attempt.Īrcologies are pretty awesome, as town planning concepts go. As part of our month of coverage, we asked Duncan Geere to build an arcology in the game. Cities: Skylines is our RPS Game Of The Month for April.