Sim City 5 (renamed simply as SimCity) is set to come out next week, and like every other armchair urban planner I’m excited to see what Maxis has come up with after a decade away from this storied franchise. Other games have filled in admirably while it was away (CitiesXL and Cities in Motion to name a couple) so I’m excited to see what they have to offer, despite the annoying always online requirement.
To refresh my memory and to really help me appreciate the changes, I decided to download Sim City 4’s Deluxe Edition via Steam last weekend and create a new city according to a couple of parameters, Specifically I wanted a city that:
Offers mixed use developmentEmphasizes pedestrian and mass transit traffic over cars.
Walkability is the new buzzword in urban planning circles these days, and I have to admit I’ve swallowed the Kool-Aid on this. Living in a city (Metro Manila) with terrible walkability and awful mass transit, I’m using Sim City to build the city of my dreams as a form of catharsis.
Mixed Use Development
Mixed use development is a philosophy in urban planning has been on the rise in the past few decades. Prior to the twentieth century most cities featured mixed use areas because of walkability and lack of space. Rapid industrialization changed that because it introduced numerous factories that produced affordable goods but also contributed a lot of pollution to their surroundings.
Workers at these factories couldn’t afford decent housing, so they lived in ramshackle buildings that were a health hazard in more ways than one. They made cities terrible places to live. The Garden City Movement, which introduced the idea of zoning residential areas away from industrial areas, materialized during this time. This was the accepted course of Urban Planning in the early 20th century, and Sim City inherited the zoning laws that were codified in the United States in the 1920s.
Since then the tide has turned against strict zoning, and mixed use development and increased walkability is once again in vogue, with proponents citing the benefits of increased health and reduced pollution (more walking, less car use), amongst other things.
Simcity 4 doesn’t allow for mixed use development in this sense, but it does allow you to mix zoning a little bit, at least while your citizens are still poor. This starts to fall apart once your citizen start getting wealthy though, and become much snootier about living next to a factory. The alternative is to build the traditional zoning grids but to have different zones adjacent to each other, simulating mixed use development.
Here’s an example of how that works out, with Sims in a residential area walking over to the office buildings just opposite them to work. I’d initially thought that these Sims were also shopping, but it turns out that Sim City 4 didn’t model shopping or leisure movement, or any other sort of movement for that matter. For example when I clicked on my hospital, it was treating about 2500 sims, but when I checked the route tracking tool only a hundred people were finding their way to the hospital everyday. Presumably these were doctors and nurses traveling to the hospital to treat the 2000 ghostly Sims residing there.
Even taking that into consideration, I consider my hacked mixed use development a success, especially since it encouraged far more pedestrian than vehicle traffic, as we’ll see in the next section.
The War on Cars
The rise of the automobile came hand in hand with zoning rules. As cars rapidly expanded the distances we could travel, so too did the distance between work and home. Cities became the place where people worked, and then emptied out as people traveled home to the suburbs. As car ownership became cheaper and cheaper larger roads and eventually highways began to be built to better serve the commuters driving to and from cities. That model is now starting to collapse as the sheer number of people with cars trumps many cities’ capacity to carry (road) and store (parking) these vehicles.
Sim City 4 didn’t have mass transit as its top priority, something that Maxis tried to rectify with its “Rush Hour” expansion. That expansion introduced one of my favorite Sim City tools : Route Query. It still fascinates me to know exactly how my sims are getting to and form work, which I used to good effect when planning my fake mixed-use development, as seen above.
Unfortunately despite this addition the public transport options in Rush Hour are both woefully inadequate and sometimes just a pain to use. There’s no bus routing tools of any kind, and the player simply plops down a bus stop and hopes that the transit authority sorts it out.
Subways are excruciating to build, and a couple of mistakes laying down subway tracks can bleed your budget dry. Games like Cities XL may be more limited in other ways, but their transport options were top notch, allowing you to build a bus station of a certain capacity then routing the buses around the city according to demand.
In any case I made do and just tried to make sure that there was a bus stop plopped on every other city block. This is important because Sims are notoriously lazy, and will some cases will drive to work right across the street. The richer Sims are the harder it is to get them to use public transport, so accessibility is key.
Thanks to a combination of my mixed-use policy and generous bus stop placement I was able to achieve my goal of limiting car usage to a pretty astounding degree. Pedestrian traffic ruled overall with 4500 sims choosing to hoof it, 3000 sims taking their cars, and almost 2000 choosing the bus.
I also had a very small train system running at this point, which attracted maybe 200 passengers or so. The limited car traffic meant that the majority of my roadways were actually streets, meaning marginally less maintenance costs. Fewer cars also meant less air pollution, which helped offset the the pollution generated from my mixed use policy of scattering industrial areas throughout the city.
Sim City 5
After dealing with the limitations of the Sim City 4 engine, I’m excited to see what Sim City 5 has to offer. Maxis has already announced that there will be no mixed-use zoning, which is a shame. you’d think that in 10 years they could have thought of a way to integrate that into the game.
With regards to mass transit, Maxis promises a wealth of options including bike lanes, but I have yet to read anything into how much control you can have over routing buses. Given that massive improvements have been made to transit simulation in the decade since SimCity 4, I would be devastated to find out that SimCity 5 still has limited transit options. I’m hopeful though, and looking forward to March 5!
We brought together some of the most interesting urban thinkers to play the new version of the city planning game to see who would make the best fake metropolis. But building a sustainable city from the ground up is harder than it looks.
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.
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."
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...
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.
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).
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."
It's safe to say that I'm pretty dang excited. Sim City will be released tonight, and as long as the servers hold up I'm downloading my pre-order and staying up tonight to play the crap out of it!
I should probably consider doing some homework at some point, but who wants to do homework when they could play Sim City? Certainly not me! Besides, I only have homework due in one class tomorrow, so it's no biggie. I will be helping out at a club event for a few hours in between classes, so I'll be able to do some of it then as well.
The game mechanics look different, fun, and interesting. I'll be in nerd heaven tonight. I'll probably end up making my "region" look like the cities that are in my novels. (Oh, yeah. I write novels. Don't tell anyone.)
The question, who wants to play the game with me? Anyone? No? Well, fine then. I don't need people to play Sim City!
::cries in a corner for a few minutes::
I can't find any official confirmation on this, but what I'm reading indicates that the game will be released on Origin tonight at 9:00 PM PST, which means that at 12:00 PM EST I'll be able to download it. That would be wonderful, it really would. I hope to see you all in Sim City land with me!
