@Ratttz Because Sim City, I bet. 9.9

@indi @Ratttz Which is weird as hell, considering it's a European game.

No country out here has that kind of strict zoning going on, neighborhood supermarkets and other small commercial establishments in otherwise residential neighborhoods are... pretty much ubiquitous in most parts of the world outside the US.

@Thaminga @Ratttz I think maybe part of it is that, from a game designer POV, doing the zoning thing, which is to say clearly dividing 'work' and 'home', provides a very clear basis for the sort of trip-generation they have to do to support interesting traffic-design problem.

So just a bit of design/imagination failure.

@indi @Ratttz Indeed. To go back to the original topic at hand though:

Zoning laws are a mixed bag; honestly, I feel like the system found in Europe (either very broad ones that just keep places where people live away from industry but otherwise allowing people to do mostly whatever, or just having no laws at all and instead putting it all in the hands of municipal governments) works just fine for this for the most part.

Of course architectural practice is hardly perfect what with >>>

@Ratttz @indi > anything taller than an ordinary house being treated as a giant reservoir for offices or apartments rather than a space in its own right, but that's developers, architectural practice and to some extent capitalism itself that's to blame there, not the system where it would otherwise allow for this in theory.

@Ratttz When I played around with Cities Skylines I explicitly fought against that; instead of having A Residential Suburb and A Shopping Zone, I was sticking commercial plots in amongst the residential ones in a ratio of about 1:3. The happiness metrics were all pretty good.