Below are my (few) completed "Sampa" tiles. Sampa is the local nickname for Sao Paulo, Brazil, the 3rd largest city in the world. In Sampa cheap labor, cheap cement, a relatively balmy climate, and relaxed building codes have resulted in a veritable forest of high-rises, spanning the horizon. This "concrete jungle" is pretty typical of high-density urban construction throughout the world, and is a real treasure-trove of material for a SCURKaholic like me ;-) .

Some notes and general observations: First of all, I've touched up some of my older tiles..some shrubbery here and there, larger doorways, a few new houses... (it's about time...). Second about the tiles themselves, with very few exceptions, all the buildings are drawn from photos, postcards, or InterNet images of Sao Paulo, although some of the small stuff (favelas, small houses) are made-up, based on a photo. I'm trying to make a tileset that reproduces a dense urban "fabric" so I put multiple buildings on each tile - My goal is to make a tileset of "typical" buildings, rather than a bunch of "landmarks." First I draw individual buildings (you can see a lot of them in my SketchPad, the rest are spread around my working tileset, mostly in the Industrial part), then I combine them on a tile, gathering together buildings of the same economic class (lower-class apartments together with others, condos together with condos, etc...) and otherwise grouping them by whatever "looks good."  Zoning in Brasil is pretty lax and development in Sampa especially pretty haphazard, so it's quite common to find high-rise towers right next to individual residences and office towers jumbled together with apartments. Of course, that only makes SCURKing more fun - not only is zoning jumbled together, but the buildings rarely follow a grid pattern, so I drew many buildings "against the grain." However, I grouped my tiles as mostly "residential", "commercial," etc., so they fit in with SC2K's game engine.

At the bottom of this page I have a file upload table with zipped (out-of-date) .til and .mif archives.  Otherwise, feel free to download these tiles directly as .gifs by right-clicking on the image. Mail me if you have any questions.

New: Click on any of the tile views to get a zoomed-in view of the tile.

Residential
Description	Base Size	View
These are mostly residential buildings, and I'm trying to break the "diagonal" grain of SC2K a little. I've finally added some "shrubbery" so this tile looks better (IMHO). The buildings in the left foreground, from the yellow/orange on over to the "wedge" in the corner are next to each other in real life too... they're at the Av. Consolacao end of Av. Paulista, one of Sampa's principal streets.	3x3
My first "sampa" tile, I still hadn't gotten the hang of scale and perspective. These buildings are a mix of commercial and residential - in the .til file, all the stores on the ground floor have flashing lights and marquees, true to life. OK, so I did go overboard with the animate feature.... As you can see, Brazilian apartments frequently have balconies and terraces, even in lower-class districts. The red building in the center is almost the only one in this set which is *not* from Sao Paulo - it's a modified bit of the "Corporate Headquarters" in future.til.	3x3
This is a mix of middle-class hi-rise apartments and a few smaller office buildings, mostly from the southern (more affluent) neighborhoods of the city. This tile has 12 buildings on it, a record of sorts for me, but I'm afraid I may have over-done it. As this tileset gets more complete, let's see how it looks in the middle of a Sim-City - if neccesary I'll edit this tile.	3x3
I'm not quite sure where to put this tile, for now, let's call it a residential 3x3 Condo since these buildings were modeled from the more expensive residential districts of the city. The small building on the left is an office from Jardim Europa, the yellow/white building and the big grey one in the center are condos on Av. Reboucas (Jardim America), while the big yellow/black one is right off of Av. Paulista and is probably an office building. Nevertheless, I made it into a condo with a mezzanine-level pool and a ground-floor shopping area, not at all unusual in Brasil. Filling in the foreground are some small commercial buildings, the one on the left with a sea-green window is actually a bank from my "hometown," Porto Alegre (so there! ;-))	3x3
This hyper-modern condo and it's twin are being built right now and should be ready by '98. They belong to Sampa's new generation of "smart buildings," where all internal functions are computerized. Despite this, they are still constructed of steel and cement with a curtain wall of bricks. As this building is pretty distinctive, it should not be put in the tileset as a regular 2x2 residential tile, but rather, should be included as a water-tower or mayor's house tile so it will be fairly unique in your city.	2x2
This is a upper-middle class residential tile (M. Condo 1 or 2) drawn from apartment high-rises in the affluent Consolacao, Pacaembu, and Jardims neighborhoods of Sao Paulo. The red triangular logo on top of the tallest building is seen pretty frequently in the city, it means that the building belongs to GAFISA,  a construction and development company.	2x2
This is a residential tile with three hi-rise apartments, a mid-rise apartment and a corner low-rise office. The originals are all from middle-class neighborhoods, so I guess this tile would fit in as "M Apts" 1 or 2. That L-shaped building could probably use a satellite dish on top....	2x2
This one really could be either residential or commercial, the two white buildings are apartment houses, the parallelogram-shaped building is an office tower, the small grey building is a store and I'm pretty sure the small orange building is a movie theater (these commercial buildings are all re-touched from photos). I'm not too happy with the trees alongside the small white building on the left, have to fix them up...	2x2
Here are two more apartment buildings, lower-middle class . While Sao Paulo is not exactly in the "jungle", any patch of land left unattended eventually gets a nice (tangled) growth of sub-tropical forest on it, like the lot on the right. The building on the right has a tin roof, which is not unusual for for older high-rises in the city. Imagine what a rainy night is like for the folks living on the top floor! This is one of the few tiles where I juxtaposed buildings that actually are next to each other in real life, including the tiny houses behind the high-rises.	2x2
These are two small lower-class apartment buildings, you can see the steps I took in drawing them on my SketchPad.	2x2
Small residential buildings, and a small office building. Except for the office building, these buildings are all from the same block in the working-class Bras neighborhood.	2x2
These are middle-class apartment buildings, although their ground floors are commercial. "Cafe Uniao" is a common brand of coffee. In Brazil, it is very typical for apartment buildings to have a common social area for parties, etc., like the roofed-over area of the leftmost building. Likewise, it's not unusual to see laundry-lines on the roof, like the building on the right - in the .til file I "animated" the clothes flapping in the breeze. Originally, I was using this tile as "Sm. Apt. 1," but it is too distinctive (because of the logo), looked pretty silly repeated throughout a city...dunno what to do with it now, probably incorporate it into a larger tile.	2x2
Small residential apartment towers. Sao Paulo is studded with buildings like this, rising out of the middle of otherwise quiet residential streets. That's why I made this a 1x1 tile.	1x1
This is a small block of middle-class houses. One day, I'm going to have to organize all this as to what corresponds to which SC2000 tile...	1x1
Another small block of middle-class houses. Notice how even these homes have walls around them (the rich live in veritable fortresses). Unfortunately, rampant crime is a fact of life in Sampa.	1x1
Yet another block of typical middle-class houses (maybe upper-middle class in this case). Once again, notice the high walls around the homes...most of the time they have bars on the lower floor windows as well....	1x1

Commercial
Description	Base Size	View
<updated!> These buildings are on Avenida Paulista, in front of MASP. This avenue used to be the home of Brazil's "coffee barons." Now it's a row of corporate headquarters, but some of the old mansions are still there, including a little yellow one that houses a McDonalds! BTW, "Arno" is a home-appliance manufacturer, and "Tintas Coral" is a brand of paint. I used to have a different building in the left-hand corner of this tile, but have since found a good image of that side of the street corner and have drawn the building that is actually there (and is better-looking IMHO).	3x3
These buildings are from the "old downtown." As you can probably tell, I like buildings with big advertisements painted on their sides, Sampa has a lot of them. . Also, Brazil, like much of Latin America, uses red clay tiles as roofing material - even on skyscrapers!	3x3
This tile unites a bunch of commercial buildings that have been "floating around" on my Sketchpad for ages. I'm really happy with the "curtain" of office buildings that I managed to draw in the foreground. These buildings are mostly older office buildings from around Rua Sao Bento, except for the blue one on the far right, which is from near Praca Trianon. The taller buildings in the background are from somewhere north of the Opera House, in Sampa's old downtown. (A big advantage of drawing a "curtain" of buildings is that it hides the bases of larger buildings - I have no idea what the real bases of those buildings look like, they don't show in the photo I worked from!). The little round structure in the near corner is (supposed to be) another newstand - newstands are pretty elaborate in Brasil, you walk into them and they have books and gifts along with the usual newspapers and magazines.	3x3
These are some more buildings that I've been working on for a while an finally managed to fit together on a tile - no easy feat! OK, so I had to force the perspective a little bit...well maybe a lot...but I like the end result. The gap between the buildings in the middle of the tile looks especially nice when used in SimCity as it frames the tiles behind it. Once again, the buildings on this tile are from Sampa's downtown areas. The tall one on the left and the brown trapezoid below it are actually located within a block of each other near Av. Sao Luis, although in real life the brown one is the taller of the two. I have no idea what the short, curving building in the middle is, but I really like the big funky cyclops-like window on the facade. This building, along with the ones on either side of it and the one behind it, were all retouched from a photo image and are also all within a couple of blocks of each other just south of Anhangabau. The remaining small building in the foreground is loosely modeled off of a bank in Rio (it's one of the very few structures that I've "invented" in this tileset rather than drawn from a model), I basically needed it too fill the space and am not too happy with it... Lastly, although Sampa does not have a lot of wide-open public plazas (as opposed to parks, it has plenty of those), I threw in a "praca" (as they are called in Portuguese) because another building would not have fit. The fountain is my tribute to SC Classic's famous "dancing dog-poo"! ;-)	3x3
This tile is really a mixed bag - I have buildings from all over the place... The one I like most here is the blue-ish office building on the left, drawn at an angle. Believe it or not, it was cut directly from an image file, the only retouching I did was to fix some of the colors that had mapped over to "animated" colors and swap the direction of the shadow inside the light well - it just fit perfectly! I did some more "cheating" on this tile - the small white office building on the left is modified from Maxis' "2010" tileset, while the three small stores next to it are from Pete's excellent New Haven tileset (from his Taft Hotel tile to be exact), I just "stretched" them a bit. The other buildings are from various Sampa neighborhoods - Bela Vista, Morumbi, downtown, and Paecambu. Lastly, the white building with a satellite dish on the right is a hotel in Fortaleza (northeastern Brasil) that I liked.	3x3
This grouping of buildings is the same as in real life (with the exception of the small greyish office building on the left). As usual, I had to "stretch" the perspective a bit, modify the building heights (the "Sanyo" building is actually the highest of the group), and guess at the bases of the buildings, but over-all I'm pretty pleased with the result. These buildings are from near the Praca da Bandeira on Av. 24 de Julho (or was in Junho? South America is full of avenues named after otherwise mundane dates, "Julho" is July)	3x3
Note - I now have more 2x2 commercial tiles than there are in SC2K - "eventually" I'll have to choose which ones to use as "Commercial Tiles" and which to stick somewhere else...
This is a collection of office buildings near Praca da Se. The glass building in the center and the tower to the right are retouched from a photo.	2x2
Four small office buildings, a mix of old and new...and "cheating." Yeah, yeah, the two on the left are modified out of the "2050" set from Maxis, so sue me.... They're not out of place in Sampa and are a nice contrast to the other two buildings on the tile, IMHO.	2x2
Six office buildings from all over town (and the little one in the front is actually from Ipanema, Rio, but I like it). On the corner is a newsstand. Also, oops!, I included the same brown and white tower as in the above tile... I think it looks better here so I'll have to browse around my "bit's and pieces" to modify the other tile.	2x2
This is a modification of the tile up above where I inadvertently re-used a building. The big brown building in the background of this one is a hotel (and I finally added some greenery on top), and the white one is an older office building (I think it's been torn down already, the photo I saw it in is from the early sixties).	2x2
The mushroom-shaped building in the foreground is a department store, actually from Sorocaba in the interior of Sao Paulo state, but typical enough for Sampa city also. The two white buildings at the corners are pretty modern, they're on Rua da Conceicao.  The brown building at the back is from the same area, but from a 60's photo, who knows if it still exists? - Sao Paulo is always changing...	2x2
These are older office buildings also near Praca da Se (old downtown), and also retouched from a photo.	2x2
These two buildings are in the "new downtown." I like the way they nestle against each other, but wish I could have managed to better draw the curved facade of the front building....	2x2
Ooops! I originally wrote that these are apartment buildings - nope they are office buildings near the Praca da Republica (new downtown). The one on the right has a stairwell/tower on it's exterior, which I tried to model with "diagonal" windows.	2x2
A collection of medium office towers, along with two residential (the blue and the brown building).	2x2
These are some older buildings from downtown. In fact, the on one the left is Latin America's first "skyscraper" - the 21-story (I think) Martinelli Building, built in the early 20's. It's full of ornate gables and turrets, I did the best that I could given SC2K's scale limitations. The bulding next to it, a little taller, is the same neighbor as in real life, except I had to make it a little narrower to fit on the tile. The last building is a bank on Praca da Republica, about 1/2 mile away.	2x2
These buildings are from around the Reboucas/Nacoes Unidas intersection, the commercial center for the "Jardims" district. Sao Paulo is so large that many individual neighborhoods have their own "downtowns." These commercial centers are often as large or larger than what you would find in "normal-sized" city - but this is not so suprising when you consider that a neighborhood of  half a million people is not unusual for Sampa.	2x2
Small commercial buildings, I'm pretty sure that the long skinny ones on the right are print shops.	2x2
These are some small commercial buildings - stores, offices, and a workshop (the sloped-roof building on the left).	1x1
These are two non-descript small commercial buildings and an empty lot.	1x1
More non-descript commercial buildings. These are a typical corner grocery store (or bakery) in the center, two small shops of some sort on the left, a very small apartment building on the right, and a small office building in the background. Note - I've recently re-touched some windows in this tile.	1x1
Another small commercial block - this one is probably best used as Gas 1 or 2. In the back corner of this tile is (what I hope looks like...) a barrel-vaulted roof. These are actually quite common in Brasil, especially over mechanic's garages and workshops - anywhere a large, protected space is needed.	1x1
More commercial - you can use this as one of the Small Office tiles. I'm still trying to be authentic, but I did cheat a bit on this tile (as if it really matters ;-) ). The little store on the right is actually white not orange, the building on the left is actually three stories high in real life...I gave it a stretch..and the building in the corner is actually in Recife in northeastern Brazil, but I liked the challenge of drawing something with difficult window widths. I had to fiddle with the perspective in order to get the windows right.	1x1

Miscellaneous
Description	Base Size	View
Rubble Tiles: In Sao Paulo, as in most other large, impoverished urban areas throughout the world, intense overcrowding means that no patch of land goes unoccupied - not even "rubble." Every riverbank, every empty lot, every roadside strip - unless fenced-off and policed - sprouts a squatter's shantytown. These are known in Brasil as a "favelas". Although they look colorful from afar - the houses are constructed from all sorts of cast-off materials, usually very brightly colored - they are pools of urban misery, crime, and disease. The people who live there survive on one thing only: hope for a better life.  I've included favela tiles in my Sampa tileset because they reflect a reality not only of Sao Paulo, but of all too much of the world. "Rubble" is probably the closest approximation to the effect of the favela on the city in the SC2K engine. (Note, I've recently modified this tile to make it taller, and thereby more in scale with the rest of the tileset.)	1x1
Abandoned Tiles: Of course, any buildings that are abandoned are soon occupied by squatters. I'm representing abandoned 1x1 areas as somewhat darker favelas, check out the fragments of abandoned buildings which I put in the "Construction" section of  my tileset. (Note: I thought that white was the best background for a very dark tile. I've also recently made these a bit taller.) To see these tiles in a city, click  HERE.	1x1
Airports in SC2K are modeled pretty badly, but I felt like adding touches to the airport tiles anyhow. This tile is a plane offloading passengers onto an airport bus on the tarmac (Sao Paulo's domestic airport doesn't have any boarding ramps like in the U.S.). In the .til file the passengers are "semi-animated" ;-), I hope they kinda sorta look like they're moving onto the bus. (Hey, you want realistic SimCitizens, then get SC3K, jeez!). This tile fits in best as a replacement for "Civilian Parking." Coincidentally, Sao Paulo's state airline, VASP, uses white and blue as their livery. (Don't' fly VASP, use VARIG...if not - walk!)	2x2
Another piece of airport scenery - an airplane tow truck out on the ramp. Use it as "Tarmac."	1x1
This is just a touch-up of the original "Civ Tower" tile - I fancied up the lights and I forget what else. If I can find a picture of the real control tower at Congonhas Airport in Sao Paulo, I'll draw it (send me one if you've got it! :-) )	1x1
Here's my "Sub Station" tile. In Sao Paulo, just like Paris, Washington, or Montreal, the subway is the "Metro," and, believe it or not, is relatively clean, safe, and efficient - there just aren't enough miles of "Metro" for the amount of people in Sampa, and new subway building is coming along slooooowly. The most recent portion of the Metro is along Avenida Paulista, where the subway stations are little, metal-and-glass, barrel-vaulted buildings like the one in this tile. Just to complete the scene, I added a typical newstand and some trees. This station is by no means typical, the Sao Paulo Metro has many above ground stations, some of which are architectural landmarks in there own right. It also has a central station with a huge light-well and waterfalls (Se Station), and even a station that descends down a steep hillside, with the entrance in a small park and the actual subway line underneath a highway tunnel (Anhangabau Station).	1x1
Another touchup - this is from a construction tile, I just "fixed" the perspective on the crane arm. This isn't really even a complete tile, just a fragment that you can stick into your own graphic. Just felt like putting it here, rather than on my sketchpad page.	(1x1)

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