Quote Originally Posted by b_jonas View Post
The ancestry and species of a pony seems to limit them significantly about what career they can take. So basically, Equestria is pretty much like real life.
Except that in real life our species isn't split into winged humans, magic humans, and humans that can one-kick all the apples out of a tree (Chuck Norris doesn't count). Career limitations in Equestria are due to physical differences that do not seem to have been easily overcome yet. There is a spell that let's non-pegasi walk on clouds, but it doesn't grant them the mobility to get up to them. A different spell allows flight, but that is very difficult to cast, has a limited duration, and the wings are fragile. So yes, certain specific jobs are probably limited to one pony type (like Weather Patrol and Hedge Wizardry), but these are few and very specific careers.

Career limitations in real life are more... social than physical I think.

Anyway, so on the topic of single-race towns, Cloudsdale is one of those examples of the physical limitation problem. You need at minimum to be able to walk on clouds. A cloud-walking spell gets around not being a pegasus for this, but then you have to learn the spell and keep on top of that spell's duration or it will end badly for you (I played with this idea on a fanfic). Double-hard if you can't cast the spell yourself and rely on an outside source. So unless you're committed to living in a cloud city, it's probably just too much hassle.

On the other hoof, if dense-enough clouds allow any pony type to walk on them, then why didn't this already get done? Well two theories could be that 1) It isn't easy to make dense clouds, and/or 2) Dense clouds don't stay dense to be practical. There was a scene in Too Many Pinkie Pies where Dash explains that a cloud that has gotten too heavy became fog. So a third theory could be that dense clouds are also heavy and will sink. Thus your cloud city is going to be sitting on the ground, which is a useless position to launch weather patterns from.

Magic Kindergarden and Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns are those kind of places that you need to be a Unicorn to attend because of the very nature of the school. If Pegasi and Earth Ponies could cast spells like a unicorn I'm sure they'd let them join. But they don't and it's not like the schools are deliberately shunning these pony types, it's just that the nature of the school is to teach Unicorns how to use their horn magic effectively. Pegasi have Flight Camp, which is probably their version of such a school. I wouldn't be surprised if Earth Ponies have a Agricultural & Mechanical College of San Anponio that trains their earth magic to be sharper. So overall, pockets where you only see one pony type probably is due to these physical limitations more than anything else. Outside the physical differences it appears cities have a healthy integration of all three types and the majority of jobs available could be done by anypony. Apple Bloom proves that potion making is not a Zebra/Unicorn only profession, so that is a job open to anyone with the skills.

As for Appleoosa, I don't know why we only see Earth Ponies there. Could be that no pegasi and unicorns volunteered for the initial colonization project because it's out in the middle of Bum-Buck-Nowhere. Or maybe the original settler ponies are all related to specific Earth Pony families that got together to settle that desert. Sort of like early colonist families in the 1600s?