MITroit’s volunteer firefighters were bravely extinguishing the string of household fires that had broken out in neighboring Champignon. Champignon, a blue-collar enclave whose economy was built upon the oil and ore beneath its citizens’ feet, was rife with jobs and industry, but lagged in city services.
The selflessness of MITroit’s volunteer firefighters was even more pronounced considering Champignon had recently built a sewage runoff directed at MITroit. While MITroit’s unpaid firefighters were preventing Champignon’s citizens from immolating themselves, Champignon was slowly polluting the benefactor of its overwhelmed fire department. MITroit was using its water to put out Champignon’s fires, and Champignon was sending liquid waste in return.
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This would be a juicier scoop were it real. Although the above events did occur, they took place within the incredibly complex world of the new Sim City, as part of a tournament thrown by Co.Exist that pitted some of the country’s preeminent urban thinkers against each other in a city building tournament. For this competition, in February, Co.Exist and Greg Lindsay--the co-author of the future cities book Aerotropolis and Co.Exist contributor--assembled six teams of urban think tanks to pit their planning chops against each other in the new version of the city planning game.
The thought was that coupling the players’ collective genius with SimCity’s planning dashboard would result in a vision of a potential urban future, a blueprint for the future of cities. That would not turn out to be the case.
“I’d absolutely play the game again,” MITroit Co-Mayor Anna Muessig later said. “But I’d like to play with a different incentive structure, rather than clobbering my colleagues.”
AN URBAN PLANNER’S DREAM
The tournament was like the setup to some high-brow joke you might hear in between speeches at a TED Conference:
Six urbanists, three architects, three journalists, and a video game designer walk into a room…
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SimCity game designer Stone Librande was encircled by some of the foremost thinkers in urban planning. Twenty minutes earlier, Librande was helping children proceed through the game’s tutorial. Now, he was explaining the game’s mechanics to people whose academic and professional lives were dedicated to urbanism. Librande’s urban planning knowledge was quaint by comparison. He built SimCity over the past three and a half years with Netflix documentaries on urbanism as his only academic resource.
“You won’t really be competing against one another, just not cooperating with one another,” Librande said. Everyone laughed. This was urbanism humor.
Urbanists playing SimCity is hardly new. The first edition of SimCity was released in 1989, and the franchise has been credited with inspiring an entire generation of urban theorists. SimCity is “arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created,” said a 2006 New Yorker profile of Will Wright, designer of the original SimCity.
But the latest version contains two new wrinkles that have city wonks downright giddy. First, it uses what’s called agent-based modeling. Everything you see on the screen actually occurs in the city. There’s no superficial traffic animations, for instance, like in past versions. If you see a truck transporting oil from the refinery you built, there is actual oil being trucked through your city. Each item on the screen is its own discrete piece of data in your city.
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For the purposes of the tournament, the second new feature of the game was more important: Inter-city interaction. Excess goods or services can be bought and sold between cities in the same region. If the seams of a neighboring metropolis are bursting with trash, send your waste management fleet to clear some space (for a price). If your power grid sputters, buy some energy from the mayor next door who just flipped the switch on a new nuclear power plant.
These features, the game’s slick interface, and its troves of data are the exact tools urbanists need to create the elusive “smart city”--a technocratic utopia where policy is informed by real-time data collection. After Librande’s rudimentary explanation, the crowd broke up into their separate teams for the most elite SimCity game ever conducted (probably).
PLANNING A CITY
Nearly every team planned to create a city independent of finite energy resources and the help of other cities. How each city planned to achieve sustainability and economic prowess differed:
- MIT (MITroit): MITroit would be part industrial city, part tourist destination. “We wanted to do Detroit the right way,” MIT’s Anthony Vanky said.
- KPF (XimCity): XimCity was to be a dense commercial and residential hub. The team researched the game beforehand (i.e. watched YouTube clips of people playing the beta version) and came in with pages of handwritten and typed notes on how to execute its vision. Everyone on KPF wore a suit. “We took the point of view that we should play the part of the professionals,” says KPF director David Malott.
- OpenPlans (Openopolis): OpenPlans director Frank Hebbert planned to crowdsource ideas from off-site employees via Twitter and Google docs to construct a walkable, eco-friendly city with minimal car traffic.
- Studio Gang (Looptopia): A city where function (being a “closed loop,” self-sustaining system) mirrored form (a cultural hub surrounded by concentric circles of roads).
- Fast Company (Fastcotown): Sheer pragmatism. “I’m not trying to assert some kind of urbanist philosophy,” Co.Exist editor Morgan Clendaniel said. “I’m the control group.”
- Studio-X (Champignon): Studio X was the only team that was aggressively disinterested in sustainability. Rather, Studio-X’s was unapologetically opportunistic. “We’re going to build brothels and stadiums, they go well together,” Studio-X Director Nicola Twilley joked. “Actually, we’re going to build a knowledge economy and charge your kids a fortune to study there, because that’s the biggest racket around.”
Every city was solely focused on economic autonomy. There was no talk of creating mutually beneficial partnerships. In fact, teams merely saw one another as potential buyers of their wealth of goods and services. The easiest political philosophy is, apparently, Western European mercantilism.
“I would’ve expected everyone to come together and cooperate,” Librande said. “Instead, they competed. I’m glad they did because it was a lot more fun.”
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