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
The ultimate goal of the game is to eventually host the world's fair which can only be done by having a sufficiently large city with good transit access, a healthy streetcar network, and a large enough space to put it
Would revolutions/uprisings be a random event or tied to player mismanagement?
You have to make sure that the working class are treated fairly while still keeping the industry in your city to prevent strikes and riots
