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Learning Cities Skylines
July 2023
On March 6, 2023, Cities Skylines 2 was announced. Over the next few months, I dove into the content creators surrounding Cities Skylines 1 and eagerly looked for more information about the game. Cities Skylines is a city planner game, where you can build a city and all aspects of it -- roads, power, sewage, zoning, fire stations, education systems, public transit networks, and more. Once I bought the game myself and watched more content, I begun to realize just how much this game scratched my itch for designing a city of my dreams without the constraints of real-world timelines and real human lives.
Playing this game let me create absolutely gorgeous landscapes, but it also opened my eyes to the true complexity of urban planning. Creating even a simple bus lane, a waterfront, a metro network, a power network, none of those are simple tasks, but we often don't realize the complexity behind them as we live in a city. You have a square, and houses all around the border, what do you put in the middle? Questions to think about. At the same time, I realized that it doesn't take 7 years to make a bus lane (Ahem, Seattle). It's hard, but it's not that hard. As fun as it is to develop these different cities and learn about all the different options in this game, there are constraints. A dream city that I want to test in a purely virtual environment is creating a city whose entry from a highway is lined with massive parking garages, and beyond that is a fully pedestrianized city. Cities Skylines 1 cannot do that, at least, without spending hundreds of dollars on DLC. Cities Skylines 2 is coming soon, and I'm eager to update you on the potential of that as it develops. Talk then.