SimCity: An Urban Planner’s Perspective (Guest Post written by Brandon McKoy)
The day has finally
arrived. The day I, and thousands of others, have been looking forward to for
over a decade. The day when we could once again cobble together our conditions
for a perfect living environment and hope they create a blossoming education
and clean energy utopia instead of a society bereft with crime and poverty.
Today is the day that SimCity, the venerated city simulation series that has
helped spawn a generation of urban planners, releases for the PC – don’t worry
Apple owners, a version for you is just around
the corner in Spring.
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| Layer function allows players to experience "the data of everything" Photo Source: Polygon SimCity Review |
I was lucky enough
to play the three beta tests of the new SimCity and was thoroughly impressed
with how easy it is to access information on my city’s performance. At the
click of a button players are able to bring up data
layers that graphically
show how a city is running, from whether the potable water is polluted to which
areas of the city don’t have proper access to education. This makes it easier
to determine how to tackle your city’s problems as players know exactly what
problems exist and where these occur.
Just like any real
city, when changes are instituted they have effects in other areas, usually
creating a different set of problems for players to deal with down the
line. During the Beta tests I started a
recycling program for my city, but I needed to upgrade my roads so that my
trucks could get around town and collect recyclables quickly enough to keep up
with demand. Once I was able to
breakdown the recyclables and send them to my trade port, I then had to decide
whether to ship them through the freight depot or send them to my commercial
and clean industrial entities. Of course all of this required a sufficient
traffic system that makes it easy for deliveries and pick-ups. Only later did I
realize that by focusing on this worthy endeavor I had completely overlooked my
power plant's continuing need for coal from the world market, causing some of
my buildings to be abandoned due to lack of power. Like I said, focus and
changes in one area can lead to problems in others if you're not careful - you
really have to spin multiple plates at once to keep things rolling smoothly.
The game has been
built from the bottom up this time around, with the Sims who reside in your
city making decisions about where they will work, live, and play in
real-time. This means that everything that happens in your city is
the result of citizens reacting to what you have constructed, making it a
simulation that is incredibly close to being able to replicate real-world
conditions – in fact, some
people are already using the game for modeling.
A new addition to
the game is regional play which allows a player and others in his network to
control their own cities in a region together. This provides the opportunity to
share services between cities and help out one another. For instance, in Beta
play, when my city was having a crime problem and my police force couldn't keep
up, another city in the region volunteered some of their police cars to patrol
my city and help out.
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| Nuclear power plant lighting the city Photo Source: Brandon McKoy |
Regional play
allows more than just sharing of services – each region has a “Great Works
Site” which allows cities to work together to create something spectacular.
This feature provides the ability for cities to collaborate on a project that
will benefit the entire region and requires players to coordinate their
activities in pursuit of a collective goal. For example, having a good
education system leads to research projects that unlock larger developments in
the game, such as an international airport, more efficient wind turbines, or a
space station. All of the cities in the region can then work together to
provide the necessary resources to construct these projects. Collaboration
happens along the lines of a residential city
providing students to a educational city/university town, which provides skilled workers to build the international airport in the industrial city, which ultimately provides passenger access the tourism city, and so on and so forth. None of this
would be possible without intercity collaboration.
I particularly find
the inclusion of regional play to be important because it reminds us that
cities do not operate in a vacuum. While past iterations of the game allowed
players to create self-sustaining cities that never relied on anything outside
of their borders, the newest installment recognizes that cities have to plan
for both their citizens and those who help sustain it from the outside – an
issue that New York City deals with on a daily basis. In this version of
SimCity, maps are smaller meaning that you won’t be able to fit everything
including the kitchen sinks into your city. You have to decide what kind of
city you want to have – tourism, educational, clean industry, etc. – and focus
on providing the conditions that will result in that city coming to fruition.
If you have a clean industry city that needs high-skilled workers but don’t
have the space for a university, you need to rely on other cities in your
region to provide those workers for you. This requires players to think outside
the boundaries of their city and realize that they are operating in a greater
environment; I couldn't be happier about this!
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| Regional play demonstration Source: Multi-City Play Strategy Video |
My love for SimCity
goes beyond the fun I get out of it. What matters most to me is that this is a
game that educates and influences kids about how their world works. It has the
ability to make people understand that their entire existence is based upon an
interwoven system that is incredibly delicate and complex. Whenever I hear
people complain about traffic, the occasional blackout, or why they aren’t
allowed to build a 4,000 square foot house on an eighth of an acre because of
storm water runoff regulations, I want to tear my hair out and make them see
the trees from the forest. Everything in our world is connected and our cities
are where connectivity is displayed at its greatest level. The new SimCity
makes this fact of life more apparent than ever before and I sincerely hope its
depth of detail will inspire a new generation of kids to pursue an interest in
planning and other related fields. I absolutely cannot wait to spend many
sleepless nights trying to create my vision of the perfect city, I just hope
the pressure of my sewer pipes don’t burst and leave my streets smelling
like…well…you know.
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Brandon McKoy is a program associate at a philanthropic foundation and is currently completing his Master of City & Regional Planning degree from the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Before pursuing his degree he worked at a community development corporation in New Jersey, dealing with foreclosure mitigation and increasing citizen participation in local decision making. Brandon’s interests include social public policy, increasing democratic citizen participation, use of social media in politics, and sustainable environmental planning and development practices.
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