What if Calgary was modeled in SimCity? Let's test it out!

In reference to a great to a great article written by Jeremy Klazus, the idea has always been there to build an actual SimCity model based on how Calgary was built. Over the past couple of weeks, this blog has been doing exactly that, and trying to model an approximate model of what Calgary would look like. Along with that though, there were a few hilarious moments along the way because I decided to let SimCity issue random disasters, so anything from aliens to earthquakes were possible during the game.

The city was called "calgarycity" for reasons I don't know, but I tried to really demonstrate the effects of urban sprawl. I also understand that the geography and topography of my SimCity map may not be 100%, and I will improve on that later. This is something I believe has never been done for the city of Calgary in particular. SimCity 2000 has a lot of other model cities including Portland and Chicago for example. 2000 is also great because the game is just 30 megabytes and is easy to use. I remember playing this in grade 6 and it was a top notch game, even for today's users.

Starting November 2nd, 2009 on this blog, I will be posting an update for every 20 years of "calgarycity" growth. I've paused the game at the year 2000 so that people can see where the city has developed and the things that were needed in order to grow the city really quickly. However, I do not intend to stop there with this SimCity project.

I will be deciding whether or not to start from scratch again on a second city where people can contribute ideas and thoughts about how Calgary should have been planned, or continue on with this city and have Internet input. It's a great way to be interactive and understand that things like Plan It is not as simple as a SimCity game. It's also a great way to highlight how important city building is and the administrative side of building up things.

Below are some of the resources I used to plan "calgarycity". You can see that a lot of the information was actually derived from Plan It documents and research. Other references included Google Maps and a neat feature I found called "Calgary Mapped." You can choose certain parameters and Calgary Mapped will automatically find all of those parameters in Google Maps. For example, if you wanted to know where all the police stations were in Calgary NW, you could do that with one click.

References:

Calgary Mapped

Calgary Municipal Development Plan

Calgary Energy Mapping Study


Calgary on Google Maps