A City Is Not A Toy: How SimCity Plays With Urbanism

The London School of Economics has just released “A City is not a toy: How SimCity Plays with Urbanism.” The paper questions if there might be an excessive dependency on technology and abstract modeling in planning.

"in 1984 Bill Wright, a Macintosh programmer, discovered that flying an attack helicopter over a swath of islands wasn’t half as fun as designing the islands themselves. Out of a developing interest in city planning and computer modeling theory he conceived of a game that would let players build cities and watch them operate... The history of the game and its multiple permutations has paralleled and even influenced the now omnipresent, if not always well-conceived, use of computer simulation in contemporary urban planning.

This paper offers an overview of the game’s history and mechanisms in order to explore the impact of its use as an educational and professional tool. In particular, it aims to illustrate how it relates to the practice of studying the built environment and what might be the elements that make it relevant to the culture of cities."

[Editor's note: Scroll down for link to complete essay in PDF format.]

Thanks to Daniel Lobo