An Urban Planner Plays Sim City 

Know someone who might like a Sim City/City Planning mash up video? Share it with them! We'll be back to the regularly scheduled 5-10 minute planning video in a couple of weeks.

"We'll talk about budgets later..." Yep, Town Planner confirmed ;)

"if you're not interested in gaming videos, i understand". It's the most viewed video on the channel.

Coal worker strike in beautiful city!! Poor Coal Plant workers need to walk through fields and forests to get to work. "build us a road" exclaims Gary, a 65 year old sim who has lived in beautiful city his whole life. "Its pathetic that a mayor who claims to be a city planner would allow such an over site" another anonymous employee shouted. The angry mob that has gathered in front of the mayors house this morning demand answers. For years now these poor workers have braved the 30km trek in all weather and pleas to the mayor still go unnoticed. source: channel sim news, beautiful city

My favorite power plant for the early game was the hydro plant because it cost the same as coal but it doesn't pollute and never needs to be replaced.

You should play Cities Skylines

So, the answer to the question, "How does an urban planner play Sim City?" is, "Exactly the same as everyone else."

It would be hilarious if you hit November 1929 and the city's economy just automatically tanked.

"A coal power plant in California would be a hard sell" Australia: *sweats nervously*

You should try this again with Cities Skylines! There are tons of other things to plan and design, and it's much more in depth.

"I play Sim City with disasters on because I'm not a wimp" Great quote

"I am a city planner and now I can answer that question about 20 years later"

"Yep, so, the city's looking good!"

How do we really know you work for the government? "let's talk about budget later..." Ahh.. nvm...

"I just got off a long day at work planning cities, I need to relax! I think I'll sit back and relax by planning a city."

Understand RCI (click on the icon for explanation) and you'll understand why your city was not doing great at the start. Yellow was in demand with Green and blue declining.

90 year old cop plays L.A. Noire

I'M A HITMAN PLAYING HITMAN

#SimCityPlanner - watching through made me realise how clueless I was playing through this as a kid!

"Real cities have zoning maps." Houston, TX confirmed as fictional.

What a ride, didn't expect to learn so much about Sim City 2000 AND real city planning. This may have awoken something in me... #SimCityPlanner

Why did they go with green for residential? 1) In the original SimCity, they used Red for Residential. RCI was RBY, instead of the GBY introduced in SimCity 2000. 2) I always associated the residential green with having lawns. I have no idea what the real reason is.

An urban planner plays Sim City? What's next, police plays GTA V? Soldier plays C.O.D?

"I'm going to give everyone black lung. So that's cool. " -- a legend

Oh, SimCity 2000! My favorite! I played for hours on end - I loved that, apart from disasters (which I usually disabled), you could focus on building and optimizing your city. 10/10

"...and if it ends up being a burnt-out hellscape, then the name becomes ironic." great planning!

Now I need to see an actual general play an RTS game

This is one of the most enjoyable videos I have seen in a very long time. Thank you for your generosity in sharing your experience with such fine humour. Love it!

“I play with disasters on cause I’m not a wimp” *plays on easy mode*

Thanks for an amusing video. I just discovered your channel. I also work as a city-planner, but in Sweden and have long wanted to know more how planing actually work in the US and I think and hope your channel will bring some clarity to me.

If you built this city in the real world, you could populate it entirely with your own subscribers, since you had a population of about 50,000. :)

As far as the states’ land right situation this exact thing happened in Arlington, Texas for the construction of the Dallas Cowboy Stadium(aka Jerry World). Been a resident here for 21 years and about 10 years ago when the plans were okayed, the Jones family bought nearly 5 square miles of dense apartment housing and section 8 housing right from under the residents. He gave them a bit of time to move out( I think it was like a year) and then completely leveled the whole area. It was sad because kids I went to school with and people you saw in town were all defeated and depressed because their lives had just been sold away for a fucking football stadium. I think the Jones’ family and Arlington City Council should be put in prison. Thousands of people and millions of dollar of potential revenue in the neighboring businesses, restaurants, utilities, etc. for a big building we use 3 months out of the year on every other weekend. I get it makes a lot of money too but we are literally talking about 4/5 blocks of housing destroyed to the ground for a stadium. Something is wrong with this world.

I love this, I've always had an interest in urban planning and this is so cool to find your channel.

Be careful with Cities Skylines, its more addicting than you think. Not only is there the traditional expansion elements, you have much finer control of zoning, and extremely detailed traffic management, which can be made more realistic with a couple mods. I personally end up spending at very least 30 minutes on a single freeway interchange. Since it has DLC, there's several more sides of the content that you can better access including parks, tourisim, and more. Just don't go too far with mods, its easy to push one's computer to far.

This was really interesting and fun to watch. And I don't even normally watch Let's Plays.

This was freaking awesome. Thanks for recording this!

Such a classic game, many childhood memories. Great video!

Saw the entire video. Liked the "fun facts" on the side of the video that was neat. I used to play Simcity 2000 back when i was a kid on the Playstation1... actually i still play SimCity 4 on PC... lots of fun.

I'm 25 minutes in to a video about some city planner guy making a virtual city in sims. What's weirder is that I'm enjoying every second of it.

Awww, you disabled the background music. That was one of the best parts of Simcity 2000. 😕

"I play with disasters on because I'm not a WIMP!" *sets difficulty to easy* lol But for real, this is fantastic content. I love the bits of information that showed up in the corner.

This is so funny. I at one point did an Urban Planning/Urban Studies co-major, right around when this game first came out (The original in 1989,) and I indeed did play it as a student. I think we used it as a class project.

Personally I think the pixel art graphics are great in Sim City 2000. Considering how little resource they had to work with I am not sure it could get much better.

This is how I got interested in planning/GIS... before I even knew what Planning and GIS was

I did an undergrad in Urban Planning and was so tempted to change the residential zones to green in a GIS class using land use maps. I really relate to this video!

You should do cities skylines.

When I played this game as a kid, I would always bulldoze low income housing whenever it appeared because poor people and their ugly little dwellings are gross and they had no place in the utopias I was trying to build. I always thought it was funny that you could do that without even having to compensate the people whose homes you were casually destroying. The only cost you really had to think about was the one you had to pay to the bulldozer crews.

This channel is literally my heaven

17:30 gentrification, the game

Sim City 3000 was my stuff. I need to figure out a way to play it on a modern PC just for the custom building feature alone! I remember making an absolutely giant skyscraper of Sonic and setting it to appear in low density commercial... good times, man. 3x3 and taller than the Burj Khalifa. That was probably my proudest achievement for a few years.

I now really want to play this, haha. I loved playing Cities: Skylines, but it just got too resource-intensive for my PC (it's also a bit poorly optimised, and I *did* have quite a few mods). Another game I've enjoyed is OpenTTD as it really focuses on moving goods and people around :) especially multiplayer! Nice video ^_^ #SimCityPlanner

#SimCityPlanner Thanks for the fun video! My first SimCity game was the original, made in 1989, which came in a box with your choice of one 3.5" floppy disk or two 5.25" floppy disks! I also played "SimCity 2000" (1993), though I was never any good at either of them. After watching a real medical doctor watch and react to "House" (the TV series), I got this video of yours as a suggestion. I was excited to see your take on this, and I was very pleased with what you presented!

That feeling when you're a huge nerd that enjoys city planning content purely for fun, and you realize the stock footage of the street paving is in your old neighborhood! Thanks for representing Westover Village in Arlington County, Virginia! :-D

17:00 - YOU DESTROYED ALL THOSE HOUSES!!!! Eminent domain made sense for the highways, but geez!

The most informative game play ever!

My all time favorite game! Thanks for the upload!!

SIM city got me hooked to your channel. Never stop.

Four of the available neighbor city names are named after "Red Dwarf" characters: Kryten, Lister, Rimmer, Cat's Corner.

It was awesome looking at someone that is a city planner play SimCity, loved your video #SimCityPlanner

Thanks for this video. I list your url as a resource in my class on real estate development and finance. Most of my students have never heard of SimCity

Good old Sim City 2000. I played it on my Super Nintendo. I had a good time. Thank you for the video and the good memorys it brought back.

so many memories I remember seeing the game box in the store and thinking those blocky hills were so cool.

Pointless boondoggle bridge that nobody drives across but looks nice; mercilessly demolishing people's homes for the "greater good"; badly maintained electricity supply; micromanaging people's lives with ordnances - yep, you're a city planner all right! 😂😜

Its nice to see more people like yourself coming on RU-vid and doing things like this. I would like to see more future videos like this from you. You present it well :) #SimCityPlanner

City builders are what make me interested in city planning, so it's nice to see a gaming video on your channel :D

I would love to see you play city skylines with everything unlocked upfront!

I love this concept!!

Cool to see a Sacramento-based city planner who is passionate about his field! As a Sacramento resident this is good to see!

The pairing the whole world has waited for, city planer and Sim city. Great video!

Honestly, sim city 2000 seems to be an awesome game. Looks quite different because of the graffics, but by making an upgrade you can also try cities skylines. This one has almost the same rules as the sim city 2000.

haha - similar story for me: The SimCity series was why I became a civil engineer in GIS - spatial analysis and looking for optimal solutions and such ;)

More videos like this!!! It’s educational and interesting to watch.

Enjoyed listening to the video while I bike toured through the city of San Jose and contemplated what infrastructure and zoning I was biking through. Thanks! 👍

Would love to see more city sim videos in the future

I have this idea of recreating my hometown in Cities Skylines but my current computer doesn't really have the processing power to do so. But if I ever did I'd love to get your opinion on what my city should do in the coming decades planning-wise. Because currently they're stuck in a rut of cul-de-sac and McMansion building.

What a well executed video. Interesting, yet nostalgic! I always played this game as a kid with no direction whatsoever and would just build things aimlessly.

Well that is interesting!!!! Thanks for summarizing all that facts! Even I understood what this is all about now!

I am a #SimCityPlanner you know I was interested when I watched the entire video!

Immediate like for mentioning Madison, WI as your favorite :)

Thanks for this. Was interesting to see a different angle on the greatest game of all!

Currently playing this game on the Sega Saturn. Thank you for the great tips!

sim copter 1 reporting heavy traffic

You should make a video about the California High Speed Rail

simcity 300, 4 and other city building games...I hope its part of your future videos. I loved this one.

This is my favorite video of all time

This video just pop up on my feed and i must say iam loving it. I played simcity so much back in the day (i actually have the iphone version iam playing right now). But i never knew we could build those big blocks. I always tough we had to have more roads. How are those people in the middle leaving they're houses??

I am going to be this video's most demanding RU-vid commenter but I'd like to see you do similar commentaries on most of the major games in the city building genre as it evolved. Going chronologically in release order these games come to mind: Simcity 3000, Simcity 4, City Life, Simcity Societies, Cities XL, Simcity (2013) and Cities Skylines. It would be interesting to watch because the previously listed games were made by 4 different studios (focusing on differing aspects of urban planning) over a period of almost 20 years. Your comments regarding each game would be insightful. I'm not usually interested in Let's Play's but this tightly edited commentary was fun (and nostalgic) to watch. #SimCityPlanner

Thanks for sharing; great to hear your real world experience and enjoyment of this game. Looking forward to see you take on Cities: Skylines.

26:31 Bellingham, WA is another really good example of this, as I'm sure many others are, particularly when you look at the grid for downtown vs. Squalicum vs. the letter district, etc.

Imagine if an urban planner plays Sim City during work. Haha

I too played simcity 2000, on windows 98 I believe. I actually think I still have disk somewhere. I was about 10-13 so I wasn't really good, but I did make some small towns myself.

Would love to see this as an ongoing series where you try all the different city-building games.

Oh Boy! i'm can't wait for play!

Thank you I heard the argument made that Sim City did not create an out break of city planners so the claim that violent video games create violent people is dubious. Great to see an example of one. I played the s%$@ out of this game. In the landscape phase you could min/max by putting a mountain up against the side and cover it in water. Hydro dams are cheap, modular, and never blow up, also no pollution. Unrealistic? Tottaly, but worth it. I would always pause it straight up and go broke laying everything out. As a result I would spend the next 10 years breaking even but it was a fast atart and you would have enough money to make them happy latter. Turns out you are elected for life and live for 150 years! Thanks for this video I ilked sim city for its simplicity and addictive game play. Between this Civilization and master of Orion I cant count how many hours of my youth went into these!

Watching this amazing video while playing Cities Skylines. I really do love both of these games but as tempting as it could be to play the newer one, with all the community customization and modifications it makes all my efforts to complete the game a hopeless, never ending endeavour which can be a bit frustrating. I would therefore recommend keeping the game relatively stock or in some way limiting the scope of the build if you're going to do Cities Skylines videos down the road. That aside, thanks for the great content as always. EDIT: Oh, almost forgot #SimCityPlanner

I was completely unaware of these games. Thank you so much for making this video! I do regional planning with rural entities, so I wonder if you could maybe make a video on ruralism and urbanism planning.

I was a student of Regional Economic and Social Development masters program at UMass, Lowell when I was a heavy Sim City player. In fact, one of my classes was City Management and my professor was the actual former City Manager of the City of Lowell. I ended up not becoming an urban planner, but a software engineer, but one thing I learned in both my courses and playing Sim City is to never build an interstate that cuts right through the middle of a city, because one side of town may flourish, will the other side of town will have businesses close down, abandoned properties and high crime. In fact, that's exactly what happened when I build an interstate that cuts across a city in Sim City. So I ask myself, if urban planning case studies taught us against this and Sim City teaches us against this, why on Earth would the urban planners of Austin, Texas go and build an I-35 that cuts right across the city and continues to slice up the city with all these highways? Are their urban planners all baby boomers? Is urban planning in Texas behind the times compared to universities in Massachusetts? I mean even Boston threw I-93 underground and now the city is more beautiful for it. Help me understand this intellectual urban planning disconnect between Austin and the rest of the country. By the way around 16:50 I started to see urban blight where you started to use your eminent domain powers. It would be interesting to hear your analysis as to why you started to get urban blight in those neighborhoods you ended up razing to avoid this in the real world.

City planner play cities skylines next please!!

Great video! You should consider a video on Sprigfield, MA. A renovated train station and concourse along with a brand new casino downtown with an influx of manufacturing uptown where the new train cars for Boston's T are being built are highlights.

The switch from Sim City zoning color to my cities' zoning color took me a while too!