If you like a lot of space because you don't need a lot of Residences and/or Workshops the neighborhood visits are a must. Here's how I keep my coin/supply production high enough to get rid of all but 2 Magic Workshops and 5 Magic Residences.
1) Each visitor is worth 5% increase in your coin/supply production from residences/workshops. So you will have to have SOME to make this work. The trick is to have so many 5% boosts to your culture that you can keep lowering your Residences/workshops.
2) To make that visitor visit you have to find them and encourage them with a visit of your own...over and over, because some players only visit those who have visited you. If you, therefore, visit 200 players a day you will get between 40 and 100 return visits. It takes some time for your visits go get that high, but they will get there. I visited 370 each day for a couple of weeks before I saw my daily visits get to about 125. Now I do the 370 about 2-3 times a week for maintainance.
3) For every 2 EE spells you get about 5% a day if you have the visitors. So now you need EE spells. How many? That depends on how high you want your production of coins/supplies to be. In any case you take the number of visits you are now getting and divide by two. That's how many 5% upgrades you can potentially have since each visit is effective for only about 1/2 a day. In my case it's 62 or so. However, I can't produce 125 EE spells each day (which I would need to keep all those 5% culture boosts active 24/7). But I can produce about 20 a day and, once in a while a few more. So my average cultural boost is 50% and I run my culture at a steady 220%. And that, with a other things, is enough for me to run my Chapter 18 city on 2 Magic Workstations and 5 Magic Residences.
4) And have a good amount of space for my guest races.
So it's really in how you wish to play the game. Like I've said elsewhere, it's a complex game where one thing you do here, pops up and changes something you do there, which, in turn, changes another thing in another part of the game. Figuring it all out is kind of fun and why, I think, we keep playing. Other than having the opportunity to write really long messages in the form, of course. LOL!
AJ