The Cities Unlimited Archives: Mixed-Purpose Zoning and Lots/Buildings

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Mixed-Purpose Zoning and Lots/Buildings

a Conceptual article by tr0ub1es0me

(author: tr0ub1es0me)

#13947 tr0ub1e

CITIES XL needs to incorporate the realistic ability for some Lots/Buildings to have "mixed-uses" with our Zones.

One of the most common mixed uses is with high street shops - they often have extra floor(s) above with residential apartments or commercial offices. Often these would be one large building but provide lots of different individual shops of varying widths on the ground floor. Above would just be a repetition of offices or apartments identical from the outside. Another common mixed-use of buildings is with skyscrapers and large buildings which have both office and apartment space.

Also - older terraced residential suburban homes, with ground floors converted into shops. This is extremely common in all the major developed areas of the UK. These are usually wall-to-wall and would only need varying textures and props to make the shops all look different.

Another type of development where there may be mixed-uses (although between different types of businesses, rather than between business and residential) is in office complexes/business parks or industrial unit complexes. They are estates featuring many buildings of the same style and design with their own surface parking spaces, configured around an integral network of access roads, and owned by one company. The individual industrial or office units are then leased out to different companies.

Dynamic Mixed-Use Buildings: Retail (ground floor) and Apartments/Offices (upper floors)

One way the game could achieve a realistic option for mixed-use buildings that have the ground floors converted or designed for retail outlets (while the higher floors are used as an individual house, apartments, office space, or a combination of apartments and offices), is to have the game dynamically replace the ground floors of existing buildings with shop-fronts.

Providing that the player has selected the zoning options to allow mixed Commercial Service usage along with Residential and/or Commercial Office usages within a single development zone (or updated an existing Residential/Commercial Office zone at a later point to also allow mixed-use with Commercial Service) then this should set the stage for dynamic mixed-use buildings to develop there, or allow existing buildings to have ground floors converted into Commercial Service shops and other retail outlets.

The following method technique used by the game to create these buildings can be applied to a high-number of building models in the game. There are a number of factors which must be considered by the game's developers:

• They would need to mark certain building models as being compatible with this method of creating dynamic mixed-use buildings with retail space on the ground floors.
• This particular method would only work with buildings that have a fairly straight frontage, from one side of the building to the other. They do not have to be perfectly flat, as will be shown, but they cannot be too unique in shape either. So this must be remembered when the developers mark buildings as being compatible with this method.
• Buildings to use this method must be designed to a common set of rules. The widths of buildings must be equal to multiples of a fixed number; and the top of the ground floors of each and every building being used for this must be the same height from ground level.
• Shop-fronts must also be designed so that the width is equal to multiples of a fixed number; and the height is the same as the height of the ground floors described previously.
• Buildings depths and overall building heights do not have to conform to any rules. They can also be any shape. Only the fronts of the buildings are important. It also does not matter if the rears of different buildings do not align, as this can happen in the real-world. It is only a requirement that the fronts of different buildings do align.
• The part(s) of building frontages that extrude closest towards the front of the Lot must be the same distance from the Lot frontage, for each and every building. (This rule also applies to creating more realistic terraces of wall-to-wall buildings, and also more uniformed-looking streets of any buildings).

To help illustrate how the game would create dynamic mixed-use buildings of this type using existing building models (for Residential buildings, Commercial Office buildings, and even mixed-use Residential & Commercial Office buildings), here follows a series of images.

Imagine these images represent the front view of building models that have been designed with this technique in-mind. Image on the left shows the original building model. Image on the right shows the model with the ground floor frontage removed (and any visible basement floors removed).

(22.5m wide Bungalow / minimum: 1 per Lot)

(15m wide House / minimum: 1 per Lot)

(15m wide House / minimum: 1 per Lot)

(15m wide House / minimum: 1 per Lot)

(15m wide House / minimum: 1 per Lot)

(7.5m wide Townhouse / minimum: 2 per Lot)

(15m wide Townhouse / minimum: 1 per Lot)

(15m wide Townhouse / minimum: 1 per Lot)

As you can see, the only buildings used have a fairly standard shape with a distinct "wall-like" frontage. The sides of each building's ground floor are left in-tact, along with the rears (except in the case of "corner" buildings - where one of the side's ground floors would also be removed). All buildings are to-scale, with the tops of the ground floors being at the same elevation from ground level in each example. The widths of each building are also designed to be multiples of 7.5m in size.

Next, we have different shop fronts:

(5m wide Shop-front)

(5m wide Shop-front)

(7.5m wide Shop-front)

(7.5m wide Shop-front)

These are designed to be relatively flat, but do not have to be completely flat. All have been designed for the width to be in multiples of 2.5m, and not less than 5m wide. There should also be alternatives even larger than those above: e.g. 10m wide, 12.5m wide, 15m wide, and so on. They have been designed to the same height as the ground floor frontages removed from the original building models.

The final step is for these shop-fronts to be placed randomly onto the original buildings. As both the buildings and shop-fronts have been designed to a common set of rules, there are endless combinations which can be created by the game. (Bear in mind that those size dimensions of buildings/Lots and the minimum number of buildings per Lot that were included in the rules above can be altered slightly to fit with the game's design limitations on Lot sizes. However, the mathematical concepts involved remain the same). It would also make sense for the game to choose bigger (as in wider) and nicer shop-fronts for areas where higher-wealth Commercial Services would be developing. The ends of each individual shop-front used, no matter what combination, should align vertically with the end of a building model. However, the ends of every building model do not have to align vertically with the end of a shop-front.

Some of the original buildings would not have perfectly flat frontages, and because of this the shop-fronts should be aligned with the point of the original buildings which is furthest forward and closest to the front of the Lot. As mentioned previously, all relevant buildings would have been designed so that this point is the same distance from the front of the Lot for all of the different buildings. This means that the shop-fronts would automatically be aligned. All that would remain is to place a visible "flat-roof" if necessary to fill any voids above what would be the inside of the shop (where parts of the first floor of the original building may fall back further from the front of the Lot than the point where the shop-front is placed).

The end result would be a beautifully realistic mixed-usage of buildings to include retail space on the ground floor, using these automatic and dynamic conversions. The biggest advantage would be the diversity as we could have the same buildings appearing but with different shop-fronts (sometimes of different sizes), rows of identical houses where only one has been converted into a shop, wall-to-wall or semi-detached or detached buildings with ground floors converted to shops, and many other possibilities. The major advantage for the game's developers is that it completely removes the need for a hell of a lot of modelling work to create a high number of mixed-use buildings of this type in order to reduce repetition. By using existing building models, and the method described here, they are also making their own lives easier for the amount of modelling time saved, for the sake of a little bit of initial work designing this system to work.

Here are just a tiny number of examples, barely scratching the surface of the possibilities that would become available. The second image of each example shows where each Lot would begin and end:

(15m Lot, 15m Lot, 22.5m Lot, 15m Lot)

(22.5m Lot, 15m Lot, 22.5m Lot)

(15m Lot, 15m Lot, 15m Lot, 15m Lot)

Real-world inspiration photo examples of ground floor retail/commercial-service with houses/apartments/offices above:

As a final note: although this method is designed to work with buildings of a particular design type, it can also be altered slightly so that it can be used with other buildings such as standalone towers and unique-shaped buildings. However, the shop-fronts may have to extend out from all sides of the building, to a much further distance with larger visible flat-roofs in place. With such examples, the building would be more of a standalone structure rather than part of a uniformed street as shown in this article.

Post any other comments, suggestions, additions, or adjustments here too.

#13951 JC Scooby

This topic has been discussed a lot and that just shows how important this is to the gamers and mixed zoning is a really big step for the city-builder genre! I'm really glad this has been brought up and would really enjoy this in CU, though it's not the most important thing(in the top 5 though ;)

4 - Important. I'd like to have these features. (75%)

:)

#13953 Steven Heuer

5- Definitely something that is in my top 3.

#13968 ToeJam

4.5 - couldn't make up my mind between 4 and 5. :)

#13973 The Yeti

5 - Yup, mixed use buildings are a nessecity in a modern city builder.

#14097 jon

ToeJam wrote:

4.5 - couldn't make up my mind between 4 and 5.:)

agreed. it's VERY important, but i don't know if it's in my top 3 and i am only considering my top 3 worthy of a 5 ranking.

currently my top 3 are:

1. Realistic and complex transportation on ALL aspects (roads, rail, subway, ports, water travel, bus, pedestrian, etc. This also includes traveling for Work, recreation, and shopping/ entertainment).
2. Visual appearance (i want stunning, city life looks good, but it's far from stunning)... this includes realistic terrains, water, and super realistic looking buildings.
3. Wide and Realistic variety of businesses (this means more than 3 zone types with high/medium/low density categories). This could also include Multi-purpose, but i don't know if i'd fit it in right here which is why i'm torn between 4 and 5.

It IS very important for mixed zoning, so again, like ToeJam, 4.5 from me.

#14102 Jman47

a very important isuue for me, i give it a 5 :)

#14112 The Yeti

jon wrote:

currently my top 3 are:

1. Realistic and complex transportation on ALL aspects (roads, rail, subway, ports, water travel, bus, pedestrian, etc. This also includes traveling for Work, recreation, and shopping/ entertainment).
2. Visual appearance (i want stunning, city life looks good, but it's far from stunning)... this includes realistic terrains, water, and super realistic looking buildings.
3. Wide and Realistic variety of businesses (this means more than 3 zone types with high/medium/low density categories).

I'd have to agree with you on these priorities jon. :) But for number 3 I would also add a huge variety of houses and kitset pieces for airports, seaports etc. Not to mention heaps of park and filler lots for all those little nooks and crannies. Not asking for too much are we?? :P

#14127 Don Mikimax

5. Very important

#14192 jon

The Yeti wrote:

jon wrote:

currently my top 3 are:

1. Realistic and complex transportation on ALL aspects (roads, rail, subway, ports, water travel, bus, pedestrian, etc. This also includes traveling for Work, recreation, and shopping/ entertainment).
2. Visual appearance (i want stunning, city life looks good, but it's far from stunning)... this includes realistic terrains, water, and super realistic looking buildings.
3. Wide and Realistic variety of businesses (this means more than 3 zone types with high/medium/low density categories).

I'd have to agree with you on these priorities jon. :) But for number 3 I would also add a huge variety of houses and kitset pieces for airports, seaports etc. Not to mention heaps of park and filler lots for all those little nooks and crannies. Not asking for too much are we?? :P

oh yeah, i sort of assumed that stuff could be taken care of with custom content, but i don't want the game to skimp on that and just assume that the users will take care of it. I want no wasted space in my cities. so yeah, i would include that in my top 3.

#14232 Pedro Rodrigues

5 - These features are a must. They'll make for the city to seem much more realistic. ;)

#16017 Amdinside

I give this one a solid 4. It would be nice to have more options for zoning including mix use zones.

#16244 ckwong

3 - yes, in real life. But for gameplay...mmm...how would ratio of, say. commercial jobs vs no of residence in a particular building be determined at the point of zoning? Do we have, say, low density (LD) comemrical + LD residential form those 2 storeys buldings, LD Com+MD Res, LD Com+HD Res.....that would be another up to 9 combinations!! Sorry, I can't convince myself on this.

#25390 g314

5 - Very Important. These features are a must-have! (100%)

I did wrote my opinions in several threads, yet I didn't post here. Here's what I said. ;)

I wrote:

Agree. I don't like to build 2-story schools or fire stations in my skyscraper district. It's more realistic if they're incorporated within bigger buildings (such as high-rises). In New York, for example, Time Warner Center has a mall, a supermarket, a convention center and CNN studios; Madison Square Garden has a large subway and train station (PENN Station) with many stores and the Hotel Pennsylvania in front of the MSG has a school and a Dunkin' Donuts.

I really hope this feature will be implemented in the game, I feel this is the ultimate step for zoning. ;)

#25394 Chanson

5!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm in total agreement that this idea almost has to be incorporated in some shape or form into the game. Without mixed-use development cities just wouldn't be what they are. Since cities are just ultra-dense concentrations of a multitude of activities, at a certain density, the uses are stacked vertically for the sake of efficiency. Moreover, this leads to more diverse city life and ends up attracting even more businesses and people to said cities.

There are several different types of common mixed-use buildings.

1. Downtown Commercial and Residential Buildings. Most, if not all, incorporate shopping or other services into the first couple of floors.
2. Hotels. They incorporate not only the hospitality portion, but generally also include conference facilities, restaurants, and shops within their respective complexes.
3. Live/Work Buildings. Usually small doctor's offices or art galleries, where the person owning the shop lives above it. Something like a Rowhouse or Townhouse in design.

Here's an idea... What if the buildings and tenants were separate entities. ie: Just because Company A builds Building 1 in your city, doesn't mean that if they decide to leave that Building 1 is demolished. The building could be occupied by Company B or redeveloped. The same could be true with shops on the ground levels. Each building might have one or several vacant storefronts that shops can rent/lease and could come and go without the building disappearing. I'm sure this could be ironed out some, but it would make for a more realistic city and a more predictable cityscape.