I've got new players interested in playing Shadowrun 5 as opposed to their usual fantasy fare. I've thought it might be good to base it in our hometown, and I started to convert some of the areas mentally. Building up major business areas, converting apartment complexes into bigger zones, even building a few 'Barrens' areas where some of the high crime and/or low income type places are. Using some of the data on the corps, including some of the older edition sourcebooks that talk about how the older companies resources are allocated in different divisions, I was able to build a few arcologies for companies that would have a reason to be in the city.

However, I'm curious on what sort of things people might look at making use of if they were to transform a city into a Shadowrun city. I figure there would be a lot more space taken up as the city enlarges itself to accommodate more people and businesses, as well as there would probably be some areas with higher security like guard gates on certain roads and a lot of security cameras and such.

But would you tear down entire neighbourhoods and turn it into factories and warehouses and such? Would you maybe add extra public transportation or assume everyone's going to be using auto-navigation in cars? The Robocop movie series talked about building Delta City over old Detroit, as an example, and in the third movie they even went so far to forcefully evict people from their homes as they needed to get the land to keep from going under in debt. So, mainly curious on people's opinions on if they see if being more of a remade city or more of an upgrade as you add an extra level or two to apartment buildings, tear down a few homes and convert it into a larger complex, things like that.

If you're setting it in your home town, you want to keep things as close as possible. It'll make the game world more familiar to your players. Change up some things, of course, but making it somewhat recognizable to your players always helps.

For example, I'm from Seattle, and I like incorporating little details into my game. Every tourist knows about Pike Place Market and the flying fish stand, but there's also a magic shop underneath the main market. In my games, it's one of the best Talismonger shops in town. It's a fun little nod for Seattle residents, and a nice bit of color for everyone else.

In that nice little chinese restaurant? I hope they still serve chinese - it's a good menu.

To answer the original question:

If you look at most cities, they tend to swell in rough proportion to urbanisation combined with population growth. In the Shadowrun world urbanisation increases, but population actually dwindles a bit, so bear that in mind.

Street grids tend to remain broadly the same (sometimes streets change - pick a few which change for whatever reason). Land use is more flexible - just look at how London has changed over the centuries. Prime land tends to be all about location, although there can be weird exceptions based on custom and stigma - look at the history of District Six, in Cape Town.

I would keep the town recognisable, but make three (or fewer, depending on its size) major corporate/industrial changes, and locate those. Decide who runs things, and where the big shots live (probably not far from where they live now, although that can change too).

That should get you started.

There's also the impact of large disasters somewhere in the future history.
Example: Hamburg, Germany, is largely detailed in the german SR books. Canon has it that the North Sea some day had a seriously big storm tide, so the adjacent land changed quite a bit - including Hamburg. In short, there's an entire neighborhood of the city that now is more a lagoon than anything else. In Seattle, as far as I remember, there's that nuclear reactor somewhere in the barrens that had a small meltdown... Also, there was that volcano that rocked the earth and covered large parts of Puyallup in ashes.
I think this can be quite interesting.

Just as a reference point, I saw a case study of a small city in East Germany after re-unification with West Germany. The population dropped by about 30%, because so many people moved to the wealthier former West Germany areas. Paradoxically, what then happened was that people who stayed behind tended to move out to new suburbs—housing prices had dropped so much that people could afford to move out of older or small places and into new, modern, developments. Combine the two and large parts of the core became wastelands—they literally ended up bulldozing some entire blocks and letting them grow wild, to keep down the amount of squatters and rats.

Now, the population drop in the early years of the ShadowRun timeline is not quite so bad, but between losing probably 10+% of the population to disease, some more leaving, or changing neighborhoods, after goblinization, and some probably heading off to larger cities where they perceive more opportunities, I think you’d see some of the same in many cities.

To get the feel across to your players quickly, I’d choose three really distinctive areas or features of your town, sci-fi modernize one of them, have one of them not much changed but now worn down and shoddy, and one be totally transformed/gone. Say you choose a major mall, a gorgeous waterfront park downtown, and a high profile college in town that is well known for its football team. Perhaps the mall has expanded and grown to the point of essentially being an arcology. The water front park is still there, but isn’t anywhere that most people would want to be after dark, and there are rumours of packs of devil rats attacking people even during the day. And the college was largely burned and looted during riots, then became squats for the newly goblinized, and meanwhile the old college football stadium is used for informal combat bike events.

Economically I’d suggest you do something the same—amp up one area, have another be depressing, and another collapsed and gone. i.e. The food processing industry has been replaced by some of the largest Soy food processing plants on the continent, the plastics plants are still there which is why the river is poisoned and the people in the nearby neighbourhoods have twice the rates of cancers as those who live elsewhere (but their jobs at the plant aren’t paying them enough to afford to move anywhere else), and the growing video game cluster was wiped out in the net crash 2.0 (but left behind a lot of mentally scared computer professionals)?

Finally figure out why runners would want to be in the city. Why are there opportunities here? To start with you probably want at least three major corps have a presence and being in competition, and a couple of major crime groups. But why are the crime groups strong here? Is there smuggling to be done (near a border)? Do they control a lot of the transportation bringing in and out things for the factories (trucking or docks)? Is there some reason that something illegal would be more available here (feedstock from the soy and plastics plants make it a great place to fabricate illegal drugs)?

Finally, figure out what the corps might want the city to turn into in the future, what the average citizen might want it to grow into, and what road to hell it could be inadvertently walking, and put these three in conflict (you don’t have to play that up massively at first, but it will help to shape missions). i.e. The corps want to intensify the soy growing and make the area a company town for that, the average citizen wants a cleaner environment and better sports teams, meanwhile the land is getting so toxic, between excess fertilizers and pollution, that toxic magic is becoming more common and twisted awakened critters are starting to prowl the shadows.

Also, think about the power players. What criminal syndicates are present, what areas do they control (smuggling, etc.), and do they have separate niches, or are they fighting over territory or markets? What corporations are most entrenched or powerful in the city, and what are the other corporations doing to undermine them? What about neighbors? Is the city in the UCAS, the CAS, or one of the NAN nations? Is it a free city, or an anglo reservation, or a treaty city like Seattle? Are there any socioeconomic rivals out there (other cities who want to displace them as a transit hub, etc.). What is the area around the city like? Some parts of the country are toxic wastelands, while others have been overgrown with an awakened nature gone feral.