With the release of the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit (SCURK), it was possible to place any building anywhere on the map, and so Millenium 500 was designed to advantage of this ability.

The map shows a very clean and balanced city, a result of careful planning. When building a city with SCURK, you don't have the luxury of knowing what the sims want as you build, so you have to build on trial and error. The challenge with this city was getting the right mix of industrial, commercial, and residential zones.

So, I drew up a sketch of where each zone type would be best placed so it would have access to another zone. The arcologies were placed carefully as well. As a matter of fact, it worked out so well that the arcologies border the entire city, except for a small hole near the seaport. You can see the placement of arcologies on the zone map; they're the black border inside the yellow industrial strips.

This city uses the same 6xX architecture that the previous cities used, but since the buildings could be directly placed, there was no need for the single road tiles to help 3x3 zones to develop, as are needed in non SCURK-based cities.

And so the city was put together and run under the simulator. The first time the city ran, it decayed quickly since there were too many industrial zones. Soon, after making some adjustments to the layout, the mix was just right to support a large population. Even though a few zones always declined right away, the city would be saved, loaded back into SCURK, and these zones were replaced by 3x3 zones. Pretty soon, the city stabilized and ran without any declines.

Millenium 500 is the first city in this category to use the newer high efficient water pattern I had been testing. You can see this in the zone map where there are several small lines of water running next to each other. Essentially, this water pattern allowed me to water the entire city more efficiently using a lot less space. For details on this water pattern, go to the high-efficiency water pattern article.