In my concept map I used the “Health and Vitality of a City” to be my main point while separating into “Transportation”, “Urban Design”, and “Environment”. From these points I found that there were a lot of things that fit in multiple categories that contributed to a healthy city. When I started creating this map I first put the main topics connected to the concept on a healthy city then started brainstorming what kind of things went into each aspect of a city of my main topics.
Starting with transportation I thought about all the different forms of transportations in cities and what they need for this to working and running everyday. This is where I thought of road design, traffic, infrastructure, public transportation, walking/biking and a few others. These were the main points of transport in cities today. Then moving to urban design I thought about green space, community, zoning, attractiveness, along with security and a couple others; these are all the things that combine to make a good urban plan. Then finally I moved onto environment by putting emissions, clean energy, metro parks, waste removal and recycling with a couple others. These from my experience also what makes up a good environment of a city, especially living in Columbus and visiting other cities around the country.
I believe that the simulation of City: Skylines did actually a pretty good job at simulating an actual city as well as how difficult it was to start and build one. At the beginning it was more challenging to me to get the city going as I kept running into bankruptcy issues or too many unhappy people that I couldn’t fix and had to restart. After many attempts and trials I’ve been able to sustain a city for a while and it shows to me how difficult it actually can be to be a planner and not only design but also run the city as well. All in all I would say that the simulation does do a good job and if there was one thing that I thought is a little different in the game than in real life is you get way more money to build a city or create different parts of the city rather than the little you start out with.