I think a city builder where you run a late victorian industrial city ala Chicago or Buffalo or Pittsburgh could be interesting.
Instead of starting with a highway, you start with a railroad and a small pre planned grid that you have to expand and build industry on to attract people to move to your sleepy town, you have to manage the effects of pollution and keep the robber Barons happy while courting for donations like libraries and you have to try to keep the city orderly and give the people access to clean water and parks
The game would be a fight between the human need to control and design how the city looks and the natural ever changing organism of a city and the ways we work to constrain and control that nature to keep ourselves alive
