Trixtopia

We had a kind of slow start to building our city... I think everyone in our group is pretty much done with school and trying, so we made a beach town slash spring break city. As soon as we decided to make a beach town, we basically figured it would be restaurants, shops, and hotels. As we deliberated more on it, we figured we should add a couple things like residential living, and civil services so that the city would at least have a couple inhabitants year round. We ended up having a couple restaurants, bars, hotels, a shopping center, a dolphin sanctuary, two residential buildings and one very large police/fire station and hospital. The entire experience made me realize a couple of things about city planning. First of all, even small towns are divided up within themselves. Much like Goggin Ice Center tries to differentiate experiences and baseball stadiums do too, so do cities. Our town was basically cut in half, one half for the tourists and the other half for the residents. We put clubs, restaurants, and tourist shops by the hotels that vacationers would stay at and we the grocery store and police fire hospital by the residents. It made me realize how people both don't like change in their lives and at the same time need it. That's why people take vacations, they want a break form their normal daily routines. And when they are on vacation, they do not want anything to remind them of their normal life at home and the stresses that come with it. At the same time, when people reside in a place, they don't want to be bothered by tourists, people who exploit the place that they call home. Furthermore, the project made me realize how coveted nature is and how easily exploitable it can become once people start seeing dollar signs. Additionally, when individuals realize that they have the opportunity to create a "unique" "natural" setting, they can do so and make money off of it. that's exactly what we did, we decided to create an inlet in our coastline and then almost immediately after we did that, we put two enormous hotels on either side of it. It wasn't even like we were going to make money off of our decision, we just did it because we figured that's what would happen if this city were real. All in all the project brought to light a lot of things I had never really given serious thought and it made me realize a little bit of what goes into city planning. Granted our town wasn't really a town at all... more of an imagined space that we all wished was real. Had we made our city bigger, I feel like we would have gotten a better idea of all the details that go into the logistics and economics of city planning, but it was still fun.