Making Nice Public Squares

The key to a nice looking city is, in part, having open public spaces. Public squares are more common in European than North American cities, but they tend to be what defines a city as they are common meeting places and centres of pedestrian traffic.

In Cities: Skylines there a few ways to create public spaces. What I like to do is start with some sort of central feature, build roads around it in a way to leave enough open space, then try to fill in the public square with pedestrian paths to give it a feeling of being paved. It's hard to get this paved effect, but filling in the spaces with trees can make these public spaces look even more realistic and attractive. Here are some examples.

Here are a couple of pictures from a square that uses the fountain tourist unique building from After Dark as its main feature, along with a Japanese garden, a subway stop, and a prominent bus stop:

With all the pedestrian paths giving the illusion of pavement, it also makes cims walk through the public square making it look very busy. In addition, on the left you can see a train station, so the public square acts as a public transportation hub as well as a place to hang out.

Another example of a public square, this one combines some unique buildings on one side with a small statue and a train and bus station.

This area was bigger, so I couldn't quite get a pavement effect with pedestrian paths, so I added a fair number of trees which also works to make this an attractive public space.