Zoning maps can include a lot of categories but what happens if it is converted to a SimCity 2000 format? Check out this recolored Chicago zoning map:

To spice up their interactive “2nd City Zoning” map of Chicago, Derek Eder, Juan-Pablo Velez and Aya O’Connor paid tribute to the SimCity franchise with some familiar color-coding. Blue for commercial, yellow for industrial, green for residential.

Then they got carried away, incorporating a few choice icons from SimCity 2000 as well as some of that legendary game music, which you can listen to while you browse the map.

Zoning is a little more complicated than the tri-color scheme implies, but by the time you get to the portion of the site that explains the difference between Manufacturing and Planned Manufacturing Districts, it’s mission complete for the designers.

Here are more details of the SimCity change from 2nd City Zoning – including a plea to not be sued.

It is too bad there isn’t a longer discussion about the simplicity of SimCity zoning versus real world zoning. Are there benefits to presenting a simpler zoning map to residents? (This assumes that there are a good number of residents that want to look at such maps.) How much complexity compared to real life was SimCity missing in the 2000 version? SimCity players might have learned something by playing the game but might also have been misled by the reductionism.

The music takes me back…