[How to Build #3] American Suburban Planning

If you want to know how to build the most realistic cities, towns, and neighborhoods, this guide is for you :D

In these examples we'll cover suburban areas of classic North American cities.

To achieve maximum realism we, of course, need to measure everything, as usual, pick a place you want to use as a reference from Google Earth, and measure it there, in our case, it is going to be Decorah, Iowa, United States.

Roads

American suburban street patterns have a very distinctive feature: the pedestrian roads parallel to the road.

This is the feature by which you will understand immediately "yeah, we're in the United States". Usually, the standards for these roads are 1.5 meters, most of the time, 1.6 m.

However, for Minecraft we can't replicate this number, we either have to use 1 block or 2 blocks, depending on what the area looks like and how you like it.

For more modern suburban areas which were built during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, the roads are a bit wider, fewer trees, and more open grass areas

This is the example of one of these areas in Minecraft:

The distance between the road and most houses' entrances, is usually 14m, I tested it many times, with different sizes and measurements, and this was the most realistic outcome. 

Note that one of the most important ideas here is realism alright, but not only realism from above, but also from the 1st person perspective. This is key, as we need to achieve the best user experience, when you're inside the map playing it and can't fly, it needs to feel as realistic as possible almost as if you were there. Because in real life you can't fly, right? :D

Keep that in mind when building anything, check it by standing in the middle of the road and maybe look around a bit, to see if anything is missing.

Roads are shaped by how people use them, and how cars are moving. In order to design your own street and not just copy it from Google Earth, you need to have some basic knowledge of how cars move around, and some basic rules. Here is the example of the backyard area movement:

If you see here, that the distance between buildings is much shorter, as there are no car ways, and all garages are at the back, there is a second way where there are no roads at the back:

So in this case, the backyards of the houses are fully connected to one another, with no road separation.

Parking Lots

On a bigger scale, parking lots go together with, well, obviously, places where there is a possibility of multiple people gatherings, so these are: shopping malls, cafes, restaurants, car dealerships, gas stations. This is one of the examples from the city of Rockford, which shows how cars move around, and this directly affects the shape and size of a parking lot:

Note there is only one entrance for cars, in some, especially if they are bigger, there are 2:

Now let's get to a smaller scale and see what is going on there in detail.

We need to understand some basic car sizes, and proportions, so that we can leave free spaces for car movements. These free spaces are marked in green:

I suggest you go with these measurements shown in the picture above. The entrance is 8m, and a singular car parking space width is 5m.

There are different ways you can shape the parking lot and car entrances:

And more straight angles:

I prefer the first version over the straight angles because I think in that case it looks more realistic and natural. But this does not affect the overall user perception of the city, so you can feel free to use it however you want.

Classification of Roads

This is very important to know to design the whole city because first you build and design roads, and then you put houses after that, and then other decoration in the end.

In this example, Freeway (red), Arterial (brown), Local (blue):

Note that sometimes the size might even remain the same between all those roads, what's different is texture, usually, the United States and Canada use the yellow separation line for highways. 

Gray for arterial or rural roads between cities, I decided to use andesite for this, because the color is lighter than the usual stone of the road, which adds the effect of this road being used multiple times, and it became old and worn out, basically.

For rural roads, I use many textures: gravel on the sides, stone as the main material, and andesite on the sides for each car, to make it look worn out, and the yellow separation line of course.

For all roads outside the city, and which are not highways, I only use gravel, to make it clear that this is a rural area.

This is basically all for this guide to the American suburban planning, here are some examples to use as an inspiration, and other tricky situations in designing: