Building an entire city as background in Unity

I am building a game that involves falling from the top of a skyscraper. The player starts at the top looking out at the city and falls off eventually hitting the ground.

I need to simulate the urban environment around the skyscraper but only as a background to be seen from a distance. I've found a bunch of modular assets to build your own city on the asset store but these all seem to be geared towards spending a long time placing individual buildings whereas I just want a ready made prefab with thousands of buildings I can use to be seen from above and while falling. Does this kind of thing exist in the asset store or am I going to have to place thousands of buildings myself?

Am I going down the wrong path by trying to build this with actual models? Would it be better done using an image perhaps for anything further than one street away?

 

I suppose what I'm looking for is one giant city prefab, rather than just prefab houses!

 

Try looking into CScape. It procedurally generates whole city blocks.

 

yes, CScape + impostors and your performance won't tank

 

Try this setup:




You can see that in game in the first few seconds of this video

 

I would place a couple of buildings around where the play area is, where the player will fall and make the rest into the skybox, like @JustColorado suggested.