This week our topic is zone specializations. Green Cities has many new options that help you to build more diverse cities. Specializations are rules for areas, defining what the areas specialize in. Before Green Cities you could for example specialize an industrial area for farming or oil production, or if you own After Dark expansion, have commercial area that caters to tourists. With Green Cities the selection becomes larger and we are introducing our first residential area specialization. The specializations are related to eco-friendly values, as the name of the expansion reveals.The basics of creating a specialized areas are as follows: build roads and zone an area, then use the district tool to mark it as its own district. Then go to specializations menu and choose the tab for the type of zone you just laid down. The tab has all the specialization options for the zone type. You can specialize any district for any of the specializations, but unless you have the defined zone type within the district, there will be no effect. Some specializations rely on natural resources. If you specialize a district for oil industry, the industrial zones within the district that lie on natural oil repositories will built oil extractors. These extractors pump out the oil and ship it to places that require oil. If your city has an Oil Power Plant, it can now use the oil produced within the city instead of ordering oil from outside the city. The benefit for the city is that taxes are paid on every step of the production process. If the natural resource comes from outside the city, your city does not get taxes from the extracting process. If in the specialized district there are zoned industrial areas that are not on oil repositories, those areas will build oil related industry, such as refining factories and plastic production. They will use oil resources and order the oil preferably from within the city, but will automatically switch to outside providers if they need more than the city produces. The ideal ratio is about two refinery buildings per one extraction facility.But enough about how older specializations work, let’s get on the new ones! They are called Self-sufficient buildings, Organic and local produce and IT-cluster. Self-sufficient buildings is a residential specialization that allows residential housing in the area to use 30% less electricity and produce 30% less garbage, but on the downside also pay 30% less taxes, as they use less city services. The buildings that are built on Self-sufficient buildings area are new models, visually communicating that they produce their electricity themselves and efficiently recycle.Organic and local produce works for commercial areas. Where normally commercial buildings order goods to sell, when they specialize to organic and local produce, they can actually produce some goods themselves. Specialized commercial also produces less waste (-20%), but does use little bit more electricity (+20%) to function. This not only is very efficient, as no resources need to be spent on producing goods by having polluting industry, it also lessens noise pollution by lessening the amount of trucks traveling to and from the commercial buildings. The buildings in organic and local produce specialized area are brand new and fit very nicely into eco-friendly cities. (And boy did I have fun when coming up with names for the businesses!)IT-cluster is useful for a more developed city, as it is an office specialization. IT-cluster has about 50% less employees than regular office zone, and uses about 30% more electricity for its wacky gadgets, but they do produce roughly 30% more taxes. These high-tech IT businesses hone inventions and hog patents, but make the city a lot of money while doing so.Visually all of the new specializations look sleek and modern, very fitting for a high tech smart city with green values. The unique game play effects of each specialization offer lots of new possibilities on how to build your city. As the new specializations are also available in existing saves, you can also tweak existing cities to be more self sufficient and eco friendly.