After being gone for 15 years, I came back to find Bellisseria, and was frankly confused. It's supposed to be the crown jewel of SL. I say this not to be unfriendly, or to disrespect anyone's earnest work -- but to be direct, and to give you a genuine, unfiltered user perspective:

It's not THE worst urban planning I've ever seen in Second Life, but it's up there. There are SOME things to like about it -- in a way it reminds me of the "zoned" neighborhood of De Haro, all the way back in 2003 -- but there are a lot of missed opportunities you could be taking advantage of!

Here's the problem: There is absolutely nothing in Bellisseria that would foster a sense of community, nothing to do but stare out the window of a prefab home at the comically garish adult furniture in your neighbor's back yard. (An experience I had while flying my camera around the first hour after finding it.)

Fortunately, it's within your power to turn the area from a sleepy beige boredom reactor into an actual crown jewel.

Most of the places in SL that I see active 24x7 are public attractions, or at the very least open to the public, such as that archipelago a klick east of Nautilus. It can be 3AM, and there will be 10-20 people there, hanging out in huge fancy boats or on the sandy beaches. They don't own a single square meter of property in those sims. They go there not because of ownership, but because THAT'S WHERE THE FUN IS.

Boats and aircraft are a BIG part of how people have fun in SL. They encourage travel, exploration, random encounters. Frankly, they give people many more reasons to care that they have accounts in SL.

The other day, I followed a huge crowd of SL Coast Guard inductees who sailed from Abbotts across the adjacent water sims, up around Bay City. There were so many of them that the sims we passed through were often too full to enter. It was magnificent!

How often does that happen in Bellisseria? Has that EVER happened there?

Would you LIKE to see that happen? See people posting about it on social media, driving interest and conversions?

Hire an actual urban planner, or someone with adjacent skills; or just tap existing Linden talent that designed places like Bay City, Nautilus, and the Blake Sea (if they're still around) and tell them, "do this same exact kind of thing, again." Those places are incredibly cool, interesting, inspiring, even romantic. They are among the finest urban planning ever seen in SL. They invite travel and exploration.

Begin quietly consolidating unoccupied tracts of housing in Bellisseria. Raze them. Put in their place highways, overpasses, bridges, canals, airports, seaports, airports that are also seaports (pretty much you just add a water ramp), and watch Get The Freight Out! help you drive traffic to the subcontinent.

You'll also want to add parks and forests. Look to Rodeo and Stinson, where the Forest of Kahruvel is, and you'll see a place that draws you in like nothing in Bellisseria: Dozens of serene, thoughtfully-designed moments. Everywhere there is a vista on some place that makes you want to explore it, and that place has its own vista on other such places. Kahruvel isn't an LDPW build, but if you want to know how to build out some killer hiking trails that remind you of the real thing, you should study it.

Light these places up so that they get even MORE interesting at night. If you hang out at Kahruvel when the sun goes down, you'll see what I mean.

Now, imagine attracting hundreds of boaters, aircraft pilots, and drivers to Bellisseria who have never found a reason to visit before. They park, get out, explore. You have autoreturn set for 2-4 hours, so they can get out, stretch their legs, not feel so hurried. They can leave their vehicles while they look around, preserving the sense of continuity of a long journey. At the same time, the residents of what used to be a sleepy bedroom community look out their windows and see people having fun. Then you get more random social encounters. More reasons for people to connect SL with fun and social interaction, rather than isolated boredom.

What's not to like? C'mon. You can turn this around.