Experiments in Brutalism: Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse

Since Cities: Skylines allows you to essentially build your ideal city, I thought I'd experiment with building one of the most famous ideal cities. La Ville Radieuse was the urban planner Le Corbusier's ideal layout for a city. It was based on the human body, with a head, spine, body, and legs, and was supposed to create good circulation, like how blood flows through the human body. Le Corbusier saw his ideal city as a well ordered environment that could create a well ordered society. Le Corbusier was influenced by French utopianism and thus associated himself with various political movements which spanned the political spectrum, from far left syndicalism to right-wing fascism. La Ville Radieuse was meant to create a city layout for a society that was essentially non-political, as it aimed to maximize order and bureaucratic efficiency.

Here is his layout for his ideal city, La Ville Radieuse:

This layout will work nicely with the game, because unlike many ideal city designs, this one actually includes industry and isn't merely a residential layout. Since Le Corbusier was big on density and tall buildings, I'll use mostly high density. The main "spine" up the middle will be a highway, and I'm going to replace the green area separating the industrial zone at the bottom with a river, since that's what will fit on the map I'm using.

Here's an overhead shot of my final creation:

It holds around 17,000 people and is basically a nightmare to look at. Traffic is not too bad due to the fact that there are roads basically everywhere. The only real logjams are in the circle at the top and the "neck" of the city. The roads create some awful intersections in the body, basically replacing any potential for public space with roads. Le Corbusier's critics called this plan "buildings in a parking lot" and that's basically what I've created. Here's the road and traffic situation:

The most interesting aspect of the city are its divisions into zones. With the industry zone on the bottom, I have 4 resource processing zones for each of the 4 types of resources at the very bottom, with generic industry filling out the areas between the bottom and the river. This turned out to be a pretty effective way of keeping tabs on the supply chain situation. When my forestry processing area started to import materials, I knew I needed to expand my forestry raw materials sector, which is off to the side of what's shown here. This industry area is fairly well organized and brings in a lot of money. Here's a close up of the industrial zone:

Up the highway spine, I have the commercial area, with high density along the highway and low density bordering the residential zone. I also have metro stations along the main spine. Here you can kind of see the commercial zoning:

The high density residential areas that make up the bulk of the city are a true concrete jungle. The radiant street pattern makes everything seem completely disordered with buildings facing every possible direction:

World's worst intersection:

Looking at the layout design, Le Corbusier calls for very large sections for hotels and embassies directly above the residential part. I zoned these as tourism with leisure inside of the circle that terminates the highway:

Next is the neck, which I used to create a nice central plaza with a train station, park, and metro station, and the head, which is zoned as office. The arms are light residential with a university in the right hand and a cemetery in the left hand.

Overall I find this to be a pretty unappealing city which I think actually lacks the well-ordered effect that Le Corbusier was after. If I expanded the area somewhat and reworked the road system, it would do a better job of capturing his plan for symmetrical building alignment. On the plus side, the separated industrial area works nicely and there is massive usage of passenger trains!