My exprience on re-organizing a 105 residences/470k population

Ok, so I've been playing this game for almost 6 weeks now and I really didn't plan too much at start. My city has grown and reached almost 500.000 population (I'm lvl 35). However I realized that my city was big and messy (like a real city lol) and I wanted something more organized. Mainly due to the fact that I've seen the population boost given my multiple parks arranged close by.

I thought on destroying all residences and start over with all services, but due to my level, this would be hard since my upgrades ask me for all kinds of resources from any of my 9 stores or factories.

So I thought on doing a new layout using the existing residences. I'll list the steps that I've taken and the results.

My stats prior the re-organization:

Level: 34
Population: 474351
Approval Rate: 100%
Daily Tax Amount: 18454
Residences: 105

Park Population: +39195
Education Population: +78802
Transportation Population: +49377
Leisure/Gaming/Landmark Population: +88231

Now:
Level: 35
Population: 507631
Approval Rate: 96% (missing some parks)
Daily Tax Amount: 19236
Residences: 106

Park Population: +65214
Education Population: +89143
Transportation Population: +44348
Leisure/Gaming Population: +107699

Actions taken:

1 - Make space

I had already expanded 17 times, but I didn't have too much space left. I had some, but not much. My process to make space was the following:

1.1 - Group the residences

I've started to move all residences from the closest to the farthest to a corner. I made space for a road 2 squares large (the space of a residence) going from near the tunnel to the opposite side. Just a quick location reference.

Tunnel: northwest
Mountains: east
Port: southwest
Coast: south

So I built this street west to east and started moving all residences to that place.
After a row was full, I destroyed the row and built another one for a new row. Rince and repeat until all buildings were together.

You can see part of my city during this process in the image below.

http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t16/czeuch/img1_zps96412875.png

While you're doing this, needless to say that your population and approval rate will start to decline fast.
That was the first step.

1.2 - Destroy streets and useless services

After, and even during step 1.1, you need to make more room by destroying streets. Some of your buildings you stay unusable, just make sure not to destroy the streets from your basic services, stores and factories. As for the rest: destroy them all.

If you, like me, have small fire, police and health buildings, destroy them as well. They occupy too much space which you will need. I had 172.000 Simoleons after I've finished the destruction process.

1.3 - Arrange specializations

Try to group specializations by category so it will be easier to place them back afterwards. Also place them in the corners in order to make room in the first part of your new city.

2 - Plan

First part of the planning is the position of you deluxes (fire, police and health).
I've posted how I placed them, but maybe you can find another layout.
Regarding police and health, you can cover your city from south to north and almost all of it from west to east with 2 deluxes.

http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t16/czeuch/img2_zps167a0285.png

To check the best position, just build a street where you think the best position is and check. Then adjust until you find your preferred spot.

After this start checking the position for specializations. Again, use dummy streets to check where you can get the most from your buildings.

Remember to plan for things that you want to add in the future.

3 - Execute

After you have a better idea of where to place your buildings (services and specializations), you start building your first streets, then drag your services and residences back to fill the spaces that you reserved for that part of the city.
This takes patience and calm. It can be quite overwhelming to redo pretty much your whole city.
Go step by step, move your services, residences and specializations back. DO NOT RUSH. You spent a lot of time so far with the previous steps and now do it right.

Feel free to change or adjust anything from your initial plan. I left lots of empty spaces for future parks in order to get amazing population boosts. 90% of my city is covered by Education. A little less for the other specializations.

That's pretty much about it. Feel free to comment or ask questions 🙂