We could argue that modern town planning is in fact infected with a Sim City spirit (or Sim City captured that existing spirit): artificial separation between &quot;commercial&quot; and &quot;residential areas&quot; with miles and miles of separation between them, and car-centric in the extreme.<p>The Sim City world is one where you have to ask permission for everything. Development is prohibited by law unless the benevolent town planner opens up an area with little colored rectangles. But you can only build one type of building and can&#x27;t mix &amp; match because the top-down view of the planner blurs out the complexity at the ground level.<p>Sim City does have a redeeming feature, favoring urban density. Traditional planning is more aligned with creating loose, low-density, detached abodes, with great separation and height restriction and far away from any semblance of economic activity: shops, factories and commercial space.<p>Having to support an infrastructure (necessarily a car infrastructure) in these forms is tremendously inefficient and can be considered as a great cost on societies that found out about planning before most cities got established (early 20th century).