Anouther way to reduce the city footprint is to have the buildings allow you to assighn your population to working on different tasks.  Say that the study allows you to set up to 100 population (or a given % of total city pop) to research at the rate of X per person.  This makes the building of anouther study a loss of the building time/materials if the current one isnt fully used.  The building level upgrade could then cost but increase the research rate and or the amount of people that can be set to work at that building (say like 300 pop and X+0.5 rate).  Housing could also be abstracted a bit more for the amt of population that they support (so as to reduce the foot print further say like the starting hut able to represent up to 100 population for that city) and have cost for the upgrade of a plot but increase the population it supports and perhaps also add a bit of prestige or something else to indicate the higher standard of living the better housing indicates. It also feels more organic having different levels of housing quality in a city.

The main advantage to reducing the footprint that I see is making the world seem larger (as less of it is eaten by city plots).

I think the idea of computer constructed housing has some merit (using it more as a visual effect than actual representation) as it allows you to build all your special buildings close together without destroying things.  If you could build over a housing zone and it would either auto place or allow you to place the displaced tile(s) that would be neat. You could say have 3 hut types and one house type buildings in your city that the computer would plot on the borders of the city and then if one was built over it wouldnt displace any of the citizens but build another in an empty plot. Mostly i just dont like having my population disappear into the ether if I build over their homes- but if there are fewer overall housing plots to manage to support the improvements, the displacement may not be much of an issue since you could plot out another housing plot.

Im not sure how feasable it is but if the walls would stay where they are when built that could show some of the city's history of where its boarders where when each stage was built.  Im not sure if it would look good or not if they stayed the type they were or gave the option to be replaced with the newer construction type- might only apply to the more permanent structure types such as stone walls (using a tag to indicate to the engine to leave it so that each level could be indicated individually by its actual tile content), could alternatively have a 'replaced' tile type to go into effect after a newer wall type has been built. Unfortunately its also countering the idea of keeping city footprints down.

One thing Id forgotten to add to my last post is supporting the ability to build watch towers or some other destroyable structure to increase line of sight and or maintain surveilence of an area (such as trade routes or choke points).  As someone else said sometimes cities or improvements are placed just to increase the area you can watch (they could also be set up so that a stationed unit can put up an alert for when they see a monster or other faction in their range (perhaps with a cooldown for that unit so you dont get spammed with messages) or even just a general alert that something is in your area.

As a total noob to Elemental, just a few impression regarding city management after one (long) night of playing.

In principle I agree most with:

A basic question that occured: Why is city management so complicated? And why do most people here seem to try to make it even more complicated (admittedly with lots of good ideas) instead of making it smoother? Anybody remembering going from Civ2 to Civ3? This step was ingenious. Enhancing gameplay, handling, strategy and tactics by LIMITING the number of choices, buildings, techs...and simultaneously introducing strategic resources and luxuries as a new game concept. I would prefer a step in that direction...

1. I would rather limit this all too fuzzy city management. You should be able to build the improvement once (computer-placed on the map) and upgrade it with every city level (upgrade visible on the map, but still computer-placed) plus building some new improvements per level.

2. Why do I have space-problems even if I stick to the 5-tile rule for new cities?

3. Is there any faction-specific building? Or building-limits? If there are, they should be dragged to the front and matter for the style of playing a faction. Same goes for tech-development. Although I understand the idea of leaving all choices to the player and thus creating a "uniqueness" for every game played, it is not necessarily experience-enhancing. (Btw, I noticed this in other Stardock-Games, GalCiv 1+2, for example, have way too much techs imo)

Connected to that: Despite the Empire/Kingdoms is there any notable distinction between the appearance of the cities? They all looked kind of the same...

Cheers