[sustran] Playing Games With Our Cities

[Sujit Patwardhan]

14 January 2011



This is a must read....
from Gautam Patel's blog "Prisoner of Agenda"
I would particularly like to draw your attention to the comments on Traffic
(highlighted in Yellow) and how congestion can never be reduced by building
more and more roads.
--
Sujit



http://www.prisonerofagenda.com/urban_planning/playing_games_with_our_cities.php
Playing Games With Our Cities
<http://www.prisonerofagenda.com/urban_planning/playing_games_with_our_cities-pfv.php>Urban
Planning | 14 January 2011

Our planners should spend more time with urban planning simulation models.
At least we’d have better cities, and they’d still have their jobs.

Part of the process of growing up is the recalibration of the dazzling
career ambitions of childhood to far less glamorous endeavours. Few ever
realize their dreams. Fewer still know exactly what they want to do when
they grow up. Some dreams, like becoming a dentist, are unlikely. One thing
no child ever dreams of being is an urban planner.

Till 1989, when Will Wright launched
SimCity<http://simcitysocieties.ea.com/aboutscbox.php>,
the idea of a computer game simulating town planning seemed absurd. The game
was a runaway success from its first version. A freelance programmer from
California, Wright conceived SimCity five years earlier while working on a
common shoot-‘em-up game. Part of his work involved generating landscapes;
from that evolved his idea of building entire cities. He ploughed through
borrowed books on planning and began translating the core principles to his
game software. In later versions, the game evolved to increasing complexity
and sophistication.

The game’s publisher, Maxis, calls it “the ultimate city simulator” and it
actually does simulate, with stunning animation, the process of urban growth
and development. It uses the theory of urban planning — public goods,
services and choices, land values, accessibility, gated communities, open
cities, spatial interactions and equilibrium — and then complicates matters
by adding all manner of planning variables: economics and taxation, budget
controls, calamity and crime. It requires the user to balance city planning,
civil engineering and economic and social issues. You start by creating an
appropriate terrain (a coastal city, perhaps, or one with hills, a river,
mountains, forests, lakes, or all or none or some of these). You then zone
the land for different uses, residential, industrial and commercial. You
provide power. You lay water and transmission lines. You build roads and
railways. You can actually see these being used and changing over time.
Areas become crowded and degrade. Power supply falls short. You upgrade the
plant — what technology do you choose? Water? Coal? Nuclear? Over time, each
has both cost and benefit. You must balance these against your budget. Then
water supply is scarce. People move out. You spend more, build a reservoir,
and the city rejuvenates with better buildings, better roads, more public
transport.

The premise is that the richest cities are the ones that are not just best
planned but the ones that are best managed with stable economies, adequate
infrastructure and most importantly an ear to the voice of its citizens.
Cities without police stations, fire stations, hospitals, public transport
and parks quickly fail. Areas with high densities and low grade
infrastructure rapidly deteriorate. As the city grows, you need a port, a
major rail terminus, a town hall, an airport. Throughout, the game is
exceedingly realistic with dazzling graphics: moving vehicles and persons
(“Sims”), day/night differentiation, buildings being built and torn down,
roads getting potholed, calamities and disasters and crime, and an annual
budget showing growth and finance.

At The University of Wales, Cardiff, SimCity has been
used<http://ctiweb.cf.ac.uk/learning/habitat/HABITAT4/simcity.html>as
part of its planning courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Other universities’ planning courses acknowledge its value. Of course it has
its limitations. For one thing, it is based entirely on an American
conceptualization of a city, typically of the early Mid- and West America,
where isolated cities were built on ‘clean slates’, drew migrants as they
grew and prospered through an exchange with other cities. Early versions
were limited — rail lines turned at right angles, and tunnels were
improbable, for instance — but later versions grew more complex with road
roundabouts, elevated rails and monorails, undersea tunnels, over bridges
and bus lanes.

At some point, SimCity ceased to be just a game. By 2006, policy makers and
town planners began playing it for real using grid computing to test the
effects of their decisions on actual models of British cities. At the
University
of Leeds, Dr Mark Birkin developed one such
model<http://www.scientific-computing.com/news/news_story.php?news_id=38>using
a 2001 census of the entire UK population.

Clearly, SimCity is more than just a way of passing time. It has a real
educational appeal and is inherently a strategy-based game and therefore its
deployment as a planning-support tool though that was never its primary
intention. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Urban Planning
Department’s introductory
material<http://www4.uwm.edu/sarup/program/planning/faq/about_preparing.cfm>says
that the game teaches the basic principles of town planning. In
SimCity, land-use (the buildable plots) and citizens both respond to
interventions ranging from the abstract (a tax hike) to the mundane (an
extra pedestrian crossing or underpass). It emphasizes one basic postulate:
a city that does not care for its citizens will always fail. In its latest
version, SimCity Societies, the emphasis has shifted from architecture and
engineering to social engineering and value-based models. This expressly
acknowledges the importances of urban planning as an instrument of social
engineering and social change, and while the die-hard Sim-gamers hated the
new version it is certainly more attuned to contemporary thinking about
urban planning which is about far more than granting building permits and
focuses on ways to boost productivity, increase prosperity and emphasizes
education.

In October 2010 IBM launched its own snazzy version called
CityOne<http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/cityone/index.html>.
This is meant precisely for officials, agencies and developers to solve real
problems derived from headlines (climate change, power grid use, banking and
retail supply chain crises). It has over a 100 such scenarios. Unlike
SimCity’s development model of building a city from nothing, in CityOne you
work with a fully developed city. This makes sense because planner almost
never get to build a city from the ground up and even those that are do not
remain in stasis permanently. They must be managed.

A typical CityOne scenario:

*Water Crisis Management*: A city is struggling as water usage increases
twice as fast as the population, supplies are becoming strained and possibly
polluted, and the municipality is losing almost half of its water through
leaky pipes. On top of all that, energy costs continue to rise. To complete
the mission, players must come up with a way to deliver the highest water
quality at the lowest cost in real-time.

CityOne’s logical basis is the prediction that by 2050 the world’s urban
populations will double, with a million people moving into cities every
week, coupled with the enormous demands that cities make: consuming 75% of
global energy, emitting 80% of all greenhouse gases, losing over 20% of
water supply to leaks.

An even more ambitious software is Betaville<http://bxmc.poly.edu/betaville>,
a multiplayer simulation for real cities. Here, a range of experts can
tinker with a virtual simulation of an actual city space. In a dramatic
illustration, experts are modelling a makeover for Manhattan’s southern tip
with an expanded park, sustainable mixed-use development and green
(parkland) roofing over housing areas below.

In a 2008 paper published in *Planning Theory and
Practice*<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a793364403&fulltext=713240928>
1<http://www.prisonerofagenda.com/urban_planning/playing_games_with_our_cities.php#fn:1>,
Oswald Devisch2<http://www.prisonerofagenda.com/urban_planning/playing_games_with_our_cities.php#fn:2>presents
a compelling argument for planners to start playing games like
SimCity. He points out that in the last 60 years our concepts of the city
have changed and we now acknowledge that cities are open, self-organizing,
organic and complex.


<http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Mass-Thing-Leads-Another/dp/0374530416/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294946320&sr=1-1>

In very compressed time frames, SimCity makes some things apparent: you
cannot, for example, solve your city’s traffic woes by building more roads.
More roads mean more congestion, not less — a phenomenon called induced
travel (and one which was pointed out by the MCGM’s own consultant as the
inevitable result of the Worli-Bandra Sealink at points like Peddar Road and
Haji Ali). In *Critical Mass*, Philip Ball quotes Richard
Moe<http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Mass-Thing-Leads-Another/dp/0374530416/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294946320&sr=1-1>,
head of the US National Trust for Historic Preservation as saying that
building more roads to ease traffic “is kind of like trying to cure obesity
by loosening the belt.” The only viable solution is public transport, and
more cycling, more walking, which in turn means a rezoning with shorter
commute distances. Incidentally, Ball’s chapter “On the Road” has a
fascinating exposition of the application of physics to traffic planning.

One aspect of SimCity is totally unreal and that is the complete control in
the hands of the user, a US-style executive Mayor. Basically, the user/Mayor
plays God — there’s even a top-down “God” view. SimCity allows for
incompetence and shows its consequences. It demands that the planner listen
to citizens.

SimCity allows for incompetence but not for the one factor that most affects
our cities: corruption. The reality of planning in India is that the citizen
doesn’t matter at all. No one asks what they want, no one listens to them.
Hearings on development plans are farcical. There are no studies of public
responses to interventions and changes. All we have is corruption and some
mandarins in the Urban Development Department deciding how and where we must
live, work and travel for the next 20 years.

Perhaps if they’d spent some time playing these games we might have had
better cities. And they might still have had their
jobs<http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Layout/Includes/TOINEW/ArtWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=TOIM%2F2011%2F01%2F12&ViewMode=HTML&GZ=T&PageLabel=1&EntityId=Ar00100&AppName=1>
.



*A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Mumbai
Mirror<http://www.mumbaimirror.com/>and Bangalore
Mirror <http://www.bangaloremirror.com/> on Friday, 14 January 2010.*





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*“..each million we invest into urban motorways is an investment
to destroy the city“*

Mayor Hans Joachim Vogel
Munich 1970

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Sujit Patwardhan
patwardhan.sujit at gmail.com
sujit at parisar.org <sujitjp at gmail.com>
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