That actually looks confusing at the first glance, but when you take a brief look you can see that it is actually a simple roundabout. At least in it's purpose.
Wow, I don't even know how you managed to get people to live there in the first place!
The thing is, I first built a good city, got as many people to live there as I could, and then slowly started turning it into a hellish place. Demolished outer regions and created new residential zones out of former shopping districts (on medium density) to make people move inside and line up in the apartments. Then I destroyed the outer roads and left only a single one, but then I also built a bus system and the raised metro rail to keep the traffic smooth, so not much was changed.
Then the evil part began. I built huge slum area on that road, complete with a garbage dump and a small, smoke-filled factory area in the middle. I slowly reduced services and demolished zones, maybe once every few years. Then I slowly began to remove the bus system away, and then the subway (which was becoming overcrowded). I then allowed an auxiliary road to prevent job losses and time problems for the commuters, but then slowly removed it as well.
Then I removed a police station, hospital or a school every 10 years. By year 300 the slum had no services, and the rest of the city had barely a few. And then I slowly added toll booths on the only road going out of the city to the factory area.
The key to making people still live on, is that I kept one small area of the city in great condition. About 20,000 lived great lives in a corner of the city where there was no trash, no pollution, good parks, hospitals, schools and other services everywhere, complete with a dedicated commercial district full of malls, shops and offices. Since there was an area of the town in good condition, many were still attracted and the town was never empty. The rest 80-90,000 of the city was actually bad, but the (mostly desolate, abandoned and damaged) houses there kept being reoccupied frequently. Tweaking of taxes was instrumental here. People left, and I attracted them back into the dirty slum by making the land tax-free.
And the biggest thing was to proceed slowly and patiently. I rushed once, and everyone left. I reloaded the save and this time I did the same thing at a slower pace, which didn't affect most of the people. Then proceeded to the next step.
A good way to build a sadistic city is to build like they did in the middle ages: a square surrounded by a circle, surrounded by another circle and so on
also a very old city with only a few access and a around the wall a modern city with all the workplaces for the people which live in the old town.
I've built a city of this kind in SC4 with some medieval mods
That's a confusing city, but it is still not that confusing when you compare it to the Eternal City during the days of Roman Empire. The city of Rome in 400 AD, the last years of the empire and 10 years before it was sacked, was extremely hectic-looking. While on the ground it was well-organized with wide boulevards, highways running throughout the city, gardens and extremely well developed urban planning and working systems in place, from the sky that city was a mess.
You have a messed-up load of streets at every imaginable place, buildings overlapping each other, buildings that are placed on both sides of the road, incomprehensible housing in a lot of places, the famous Imperial highways were barely visible and had no clear turns or movements, eleven aqueducts placed in a snake-like manner without any planning (still, they managed to work perfectly) the huge Aurelian walls were weirdly placed, no defined boundary of the city which had about a million people, ridiculous number of public places and markets as well as oversized bath houses. And the land outside is completely bought up for the industrial purposes, and after that it was all occupied by rich (but by 400 AD, powerless) senators.
It was so well built, and so hectic, that modern city-planning of Italian Rome had to find workarounds to just every location around the central area (the ancient city). On the other hand Constantinopolis, which was as great as the first capital of the empire, was better planned and had a much simpler system of roads.
Not sure if it was sadistic, though, since it become one of the greatest and most famous cities of all human history. But it
was confusing and incomprehensible.
