Colombo Skylines

This year (2024) we (Watchdog) attempted the most insane build ever made in Cities: Skylines: an accurate topographical representation of Colombo, built with detailed land use and zoning based on official city development plans and data centered around 2020; over a million virtual citizens, simulating population dynamics that reflect large-scale, real-world demographics and human movement; public transport based on actual route data; essentially, the city in a nutshell.

This isColombo: Skylines.

And we got very close to reality!

<img src="/images/cities-transport.png loading="lazy" alt="Photo">

Screenshots

7728 m long from the tip of Dehiwala to a measuring point near the Presidential Secretariat (real city for the same: 7780m)
4585.6 m at its widest (reality: 4611.2m)
Over 99% match in road layout, parks, and water bodies
1,044,500 virtual citizens (estimated 2020 population in reality:  1,048,000 total people 
Functional public transport: bus and train routes that match real-world routes

And as with reality, half these citizens live in the city, half of them commute in; we’ve got everything from tuk-tuks to people who park on the sides of the roads to better lifecycles - citizens age, go to schools, work and die in ways closer to real-world analogues than Skyline’s default assumptions.

Why did we do it? I’ve explained more in the repo and via Watchdog, but we did it as a tool for communication, especially to the public. The idea is that we can then use this to visualize contentious and confusing transport and urban policy plans (which have been a massive driving factor behind both foreign debt and political misinformation in Sri Lanka).

Public reception has been fantastic, from it going viral in Skylines subreddits to Hackernews. I’m happy I got to channel a lifelong obsession with citybuilding games into something truly next-level.