I liked Ceasar and Pharaoh in concept, but they weren't nearly as fascinating as SimCity.

Way back in.. maybe the 90s there was some kind of Sim Game about heaven and hell. I think it was like simcity but you had to manage hell and heaven at the same time. I remember staring at it when it was in the stores. We didn't have a computer at the time, so I was stuck with Nintendo or Atari or whatever. Seemed like an interesting concept.

Afterlife: http://www.gog.com/game/afterlife

someone did a paper on 8 types of gameplay. i think i heard about it on extra credits. but i dont have a link. all i remember is the paper used some term for "zoning out" that the extra credits guys replaced with "abnegation". but that list of 8 types of gameplay (which included construction as one of the eight types) would probably help in your analysis.

http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf

the monster/natural disaster element gives some randomness and some 'crises' where the player has to solve problems of restoring the bits destroyed (preferably with a time component) Games with a regular pattern of building and expansion/mutation get too boring after enough replays.

I'd say it's actually the "build a machine and watch it go" aspect. You build the resources: the workers, the power, the water, and you connect everything in simple ways but the shape of the terrain makes it a little more complicated but before you know it you've built up a whole heap of little cogs that whir in harmony and just need the odd adjustment now and then. It's a bit like a farm game too, you 'plant' the zones and watch all the little buildings sprout up. Very deep evolutionary part of the brain that would be to take a keen interest in how well things have been growing and taking joy in their success, harvesting all the goods etc. Kind of creepy when you think about them as "people farming" games but there you go

Another aspect I don't think we've touched on yet is I love city builders which have an aspect of cleaning up the map as part of the expansion process. Rebuild and Rebuild 2 are some examples of this - they are zombie apocalypse games where you are retaking a city piece by piece from the zombies - sort of a city-builder hybrid. And a lot of games have piles of rubble or thickets that need to be cleared away before you can build there, and give the player some kind of resource or chance for a bonus item in the process.

So part of the character of my hometown is that there's a LOT of reclaimed architecture, and it's pretty common to find civic and private institutions in former factories, mills, churches, etc. But everywhere has that to some degree. (Hence: http://usedtobeapizzahut.blogspot.com/.)

That's a key part of local character but not something I can recall ever being in a city builder. When a city-builder building ceases to be it either decays or disappears or kinda decays then springs back as the same thing. You don't end up with restaurants in old warehouses, churches in old restaurants, university dorms in old monasteries, and all the other stuff you actually find in cities that gives them some history.

This wouldn't be a walk in the park so far as art & programming are concerned, but it's not impossible either. You'd want to plan ahead so that "new owners" could slap on a new coat of paint and some signage, maybe subdivide or build annexes if the new usage takes up less or more space, add a parking lot or a drive-thru, etc. And not for every building -- you can't reasonably make six houses into a grocery store, it's better to tear them down. But having a bit of procedural architecture that can adapt buildings to new uses would go a long way towards giving your cities realistic character and a sense of having a narrative.

Related: R. Crumb's classic illustration A Short History of America: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2013/08/SHOA.MED_.jpg