City Journal: Steveland - Project Pollution Solution

 

Above is a picture of current and modern Steveland, a bustling city of +400,000 people. Steveland is the "city-center" of the Steveland Metro area, which currently has 600,000 people and is still growing rapidly. Very rarely do I build small cities. I'm always inspired to play SimCity by visiting large cities, and thus try to replicate them on the game. One of the aspects of a large city is always pollution. I never want my cities to be polluted, but I've always chalked the pollution up to being part of the cost of running a large city. Despite nearly always having high pollution levels, my cities always seem to thrive, and thus I never tried too hard to reduce the pollution levels. For the first time in 20 years of playing SimCity 4, I decided to pay attention to pollution. Cities: Skylines was my inspiration, honestly. Pollution is a big part of that game, so much so that it can kill off cities by making people sick. While this doesn't happen in SC 4, I thought that in order to make Steveland the best city possible, I should focus on pollution. 

The above picture is a pollution map, showing where pollution is the heaviest. The darker the color, the more pollution is present. As you can see, essentially the entire map is covered with some amount of pollution. The pollution levels on the chart are above 200. Below are the same pollution maps and graphs, but this time after Project Pollution Solution. As you can see, the map shows almost no pollution, and the graph shows the pollution level around 20.

As you can see, there has been a dramatic decrease in pollution levels, and the land value and environment opinion polls in the city are far in the green and going up. I have never had a green environment rating in a city opinion poll in a city of this size. There were three main ways I accomplished this. The first was with a tax plan that favored manufacturing and high tech industry, while more heavily taxing dirty industry. The second was with an emphasis on higher education in order to have skilled and competent workers for the more high tech industries. Lastly, and likely most importantly, I used air pollution mods, which acted as gigantic air filters to suck pollution out of the air. So basically, I cheated. But either way, Steveland has become the cleanest and most environmentally favorable city I've ever created.