Playing Games With Our Cities

Urban Planning  | 14 January 2011  | print

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.

Image courtesy: Keshav Narla

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, 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 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 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 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. 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 planners 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, 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 Practice¹, Oswald Devisch² 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.

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, 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 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.