Listening to the song is was easy enough. Making a actual city is brutal! I have spent the last 2 days trying to find ways on making a city. I tried using two popular scripts.
The Suiciditor City Engine was good at making buildings, but failed at creating streets.
The Blender Cities was better, but after making a custom made mesh and processed it for 2 days straight, the RAM couldn’t processed it fast enough for me to work it out because after it was complete, the buildings alone contained nearly 1.9 million vertices on my outdated computer. I once tried to make the city by scratch using a plane and stretched out over curves and paths after I duplicated the main street mesh. It was easier on my PC, but it was a daunting task modeling each street and then connect them together. To be honest with you, I have no idea which direction to take to speed the process along for my behind schedule project. So If anyone has any ideas to make this environment easy to create, I would like to hear it please.
Bumping the thread to get an answer…
Prodedural City Engine: http://www.procedural.com/
AFAIK it even works with shape grammar.
If you really need to make a whole city and don´t have huge turnovers, the Indie version really is a bargain when you calculate it against the worktime it saves you.
Unfortunately, I can’t afford that. What I need is a tutorial on how to make a city that I can actually place people in to interact with. It’s for a project of mine.
Get yourself a nice library of buildings and street elements and do it by hand. Shouldn’t take that long once you have the components.
Also it gives you the result you want 
What you need to think about is … several cities. You’ll need to have one reference model for long-shots of the entire city, and one or more other models which represent the “sets” that you need for individual shots.
A model for a “long shot” can be built using foreground building geometry followed by a flat, painted backdrop depicting anything (and everything) that is far enough not to move when the camera pans.
A model for a “close-up” or a “medium shot” of course needs to be consistent with all other models which represent the same area, but should contain only whatever details are required by that shot, and only to the LOD (Level Of Detail) actually required.
Little things mean a lot. For instance, in a big cityscape that’ll be shot from the front, the actual model can be a long shape rather like a slice of pizza… not a square. And none of those buildings will need “back sides,” or possibly even “left or right sides,” according to what will actually be seen. Don’t present the computer with gobs of data that it will simply have to cull.
Making a actual city is brutal!
Listen, whenever you see a 3d city in any big hollywood movie; a team of maybe 50 persons are working full time, for a couple of months! Building a city is not a oneman job.
Im working on a project right now, involving a street in a major city, with skyscrapers. I’ve modelled the streets i need, and i am beginning detailing the skyscrapers. So now i have a good idea what will be directly viewable in the render, and hence requiring high-medium poly. And what will be background (distant objects, and objects reflected in the main skyscrapers, only requiring low poly.
Hope this advice helps.
I’m currently working on the streets right now. I’m using a combination of the Gribble Method from 3D Max and a method used on Blender Art Magazine issue 18 when they are making a city. Now here’s the thing. Once the streets are done and I start making the buildings I won’t put too much detail into the buildings because my PC can only process so much with out lagging. It’s obsolete I’m afraid. I’ll create the inside of the buildings in another file. Besides, in most shows you really don’t see the main character(s) actually step inside the building any way.
“What you need to think about is … several cities”
I have a image of a city that I’m based my city on, but, I’m going to need to work on somewhat of a the not too distant future look.
This is how much of this city I’ve completed since yesterday. I plan of getting half of the blocks done by 12 AM. However, I still need to search for some buildings to use as a reference, so that I will deal with later.