An easy way is to use the 2×2 park structure. There’s two kinds. One is a park, the other is a pond. Now, let’s call this a “park tile”. Let’s call an unzoned and empty 2×2 square a “lot”.

Make a checkerboard pattern of parks and lots:

PLPLP
LPLPL
PLPLP
LPLPL
PLPLP

Surround the checkerboard with road, and fill the empty lots with dense residential.
Notice that there is a Park in the middle of the chekerboard. And I use residential. You want a park in the center, because those tiles are not reachable by the road. Residential need to be 4 blocks or less from a road. (Commercial is 3 blocks, industry is 5.)

Similar checkerboard can be made for commercial, and also, you can make variations.

I sometimes like to add a row between the tips of diagonal parks. That way, the high valued residential buildings will build things like large gazebos (larger than what you can build), or nice parks, or tiled walkways.

For commrecial, you can do something like.

1. Place down a 3×3 park (I think it’s called park de’ville or something.)
2. Surround [1] with a 2 block-thick band of dense commercial zone.
3. Surround [2] with a 1×1 block-thick band of parks.
4. Surround the whold thing with roads.

A variation of 1-4, is to add a trail of 1×1 park tiles that connect each entrance to the 3×3 park to the road.

Here’s another band that’s kinda cool:

p – 1×1 tile
R – 1×1 road
C – 1×1 dense commercial

band:

RRRRRRRR….
PPCCPPCC…
CCCCCCC…
CCPPCCPP…

For the above, you are staggering 2×2 commercial zones with 2×1 parks.
Now take the ‘band’ above, and surround a 3×3 park with it.

If you have long narrow strip of empty land surrounded by roads, you do something like snake a 1×1 park:

CCPPPPCCPPP
CCPCCPCCPCC
PPPCCPPPPCC

The idea is to surround commercial and residential zones with as much park as you can. I think this is enough to get the imagination going.

watch while land values jump can crime falls. I have 2 polics stations in my latest city, and that’s just to deal with annoying sim complaints. I don’t even need the stations.

Enjoy. Let me know how it goes. I’m curious what you come up with.

Nice tip!

you can get rid of landfill, you need to remove anything around the landfill in a 7 block radius. including roads and rails. after years they decompose and you can dezone it.

Even though most likely this is too late, you can still try what I said if you ever get stuck again.

No there isn’t any way to connect with other cities. For land value, try implementing park, zoo, police, fire and the other things when building an entire city, because there aren’t any work zones around the test block to boost the land value since those zones provide jobs so sims won’t move out of the town, therefore making the land values higher so better buildings would appear. This advice may not be right though, but I am just guessing because of sim city experience and I read from other articles like this. Also you should frequently after 10 or so years remove and replace incinerators and recyclng centres as they get old and probably pollute too much to the city overtime and may cause problems. The garbage waste zones yes do just sit there with no way to delete it, so be careful with adding those zones( place them far away from residential and commercial zones, majorly residential) and you shouldn’t add to much either. If you do end up having too much harmful waste disposals or too much, the parks should cover as they make residential zones better to live in and you may have to add more too. already, the parks will cover Hope at least somehow helped!

I do not understand the question.

I do not think you can connect to other cities, unless there is a hack / mod out there I do not know about. As for land values, adding those things are good, but you also need to be sure there is low pollution and easy commute access. OH, and jobs of course.

I do not think you can get rid of landfill. As for tech jobs, you need universities.