Playing the City

Mario Ricco

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Screenshots from Sim City

The city is not an ‘entity’ but a process, and nothing can convince me more of the truth of this than Sim City. I play the city-building game; I get up to make some coffee; when I come back, they’re rioting in the area south-east of the river, the chemical factory is polluting the park, the street cleaners are threatening to strike. Things that no urban-planning documentation could ever say, but Sim City does. Let’s take a quiet look.

Unrest, decay, congestion, poverty and, in the end, even crime are elements of design and city control

Sim City, like all outstanding ideas, has far-reaching origins and emerged from a blur of creativity: consider that in the late 1950s it was held that ‘thinking machines’ would soon replace man. The discipline that postulated this sleight of hand was known as cybernetics. In cybernetics there are no objects, only ‘systems’. In short, the world is one great system made up of sub-systems each, in its turn, composed of other subsystems, and so on. One of these Chinese boxes is the city. Therefore the city is a complicated, or rather complex, superlatively complex, system which can only be explored via cybernetics and the use of the computer.

By the end of the 50s the conceptual apparatus to create Sim City was already in place. But we had to wait for another ten years, until 1969, and a town-planning theorist of the Anglo-American school named Brian Mcloughlin for the arrival of a written plan for Sim City: Urban and Regional Planning: a Systems Approach, one of the fundamental texts in systemic town planning. The city is no longer an ‘entity’, nor is it a landscape or a setting for social conflicts, not even an organism in expansion: the city is a ‘system’ of interacting elements. It is the reflected image of continual mutation. A process. Sim City was already there in full, but the game as such still had to see the light of day.

Left: the Italian cover of Notes on the Synthesis of Form, by Christopher Alexander; right: A map of Auschwitz concentration camp

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: truth no longer lies in words but in the empty space between one word and another. The crisis of modernity is the crisis of ‘explication’ as the method of transferring knowledge. Complexity cannot be explicated: today’s narrator will never have the entire truth, his is an inevitably incomplete explication, the information he can give is imprecise and unusable and the truth is therefore ungraspable. The world’s last great ‘explication’ was Marxism. Then nothing. By no coincidence the failure of that ‘explication’, located between the mid-seventies and the mid-eighties, occurred in synchrony with the explosion of video games, the true interpretative medium of the contemporary age. The late-eighties’ success of Sim City is a reflection of the crisis in modern thought.

Designing insanity
Michel Foucault, in his masterpiece Madness and Civilization, observes that in the wake of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), Henry IVth of France had to invent the French state. In Paris there was the ‘court of miracles’, a community of drifters: petty thieves, prostitutes, assassins, beggars, the physically and mentally ill. Of the 100,000 inhabitants of late-medieval Paris, 30,000 were paupers, living from hand to mouth and, when they could get it, the charity of others. Suddenly these poor unfortunates became dangerous. The French state, in order to fashion the ‘good citizen’ also needed the ‘bad citizen’.

And so the definition of madness became an instrument of good government. Correctional institutions began to appear in the late 17th century, all ‘deviants’ were interned and in the West a season of discrimination, internment, persecution and mass deportation was initiated that, symbolically, would only end in 1945 with the liberation of the concentration camps. To affirm itself the State must create a ‘deviant’. When I say ‘create’ I do not mean identify, but manufacture as required: deviants are ‘created’ to enable the State to structure itself. And the city, home to production, is also the factory of deviance.

Screenshots from Sim City

The city is undoubtedly the place where the conflict between good and evil is best observed. Moderation, affluence, respectability, cleanliness, law and order are good. Social unrest, crime, environmental decay, disorder and dirt are bad. Citizens perceive the good as the true essence of the city and the evil as a sad eventuality. Evil is bad behaviour and the corruption of social mores but does not exist by design. If you play Sim City, however, you appreciate that unrest, decay, congestion, poverty and, in the end, even crime are elements of design and city control. With your moves you, the player-administrator, have decided on decay or development for part of the city. In our big cities the authorities decide not to reduce traffic congestion, for otherwise the city would expand further and they don’t want that to happen. But then, even crime is designed in. In the big cities they tend to confine social unrest to certain neighbourhoods in order to facilitate the control of petty crime and drug dealing. The authorities think it’s better to have one very run- down neighbourhood rather than several smaller incidences of decay spread around town. In fact deviance is a planned element precisely like the design of a sports complex or a new subway line. Through the planning of social deviance, the direction of city expansion is decided.

Game-playing as knowledge system
But what exactly is Sim City? Sim City is a method for observing the urban process. It isn’t always that easy to see ongoing ‘processes’, in fact I would say that the more a process recurs, the more stable it is, the more it is indiscernible as a process. A stable process is often mistaken for an object. Let’s take an example: it is generally accepted that space is an entity. In reality perceived space is not a ‘thing’, but the result of a process that stems from our interaction with the surrounding environment. The shape of a space, for example a room, cannot be seen directly but is deduced from the position of the furniture. The brain elaborates the visual information and determines the shape of the space. Optical illusions disrupt this cognitive elaboration and reveal the true nature of space: it is a ‘process’, not a ‘thing’. Sim City functions in the same way. Playing Sim City, we disrupt the city and can discern its construction. We realize that the city is not an ‘entity’ but the fruit of the interaction of various choices, which represent forces at times in conflict, at times in unison. We realize that if we modify one part of the city, we introduce a disruption that is reflected throughout the system, demonstrating that rational choices do not always produce exclusively beneficial effects (the factory provides jobs, but pollutes; the construction of the subway relieves the traffic, but pushes rents up, and so on), Sim City undermines the notion of the rationality of urban design and gives us a faithful representation of contemporary complexity.

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Will Wright of Sim City

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Born January 20, 1960 in Atlanta, Georgia, Will Wright is one of the most influential game designers in the world. The original project for the future Sim City dates back to 1985; in 1986, together with the entrepreneur Jeff Brown he established Maxis Studios, after a year the first version of the game for Commodore 64 was published. After a quiet start, Sim City’s success encountered an exponential growth, around 20 billion copies were sold by November 2003. The game entered schools, the SimBrand was born with countless variations on the theme. Wright never studied urban planning, but he managed to creatively elaborate the works of some great sociologists and urban planners like Jane Jacobs, Jay Forrester, Christopher Alexander and Brian McLoughlin. Jay Forrester (1918) is the MIT professor who applied the systems theory to the development of human organizations (teaching at the Sloan School of Management, MIT). His MIT lectures profoundly influenced Will Wright, as did Christopher Alexander’s (1936) school of thought, Austrian by birth, mathematician and architect who applied the systems theory to the study of form. His most important work is Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), one of the works that introduced systemic thought to architecture and urban planning. Brian Mcloughlin is an urban planner. He published Urban and Regional Planning (London, 1969), considered one of the most important texts in demonstrating and applying systemic thought to town planning. Jane Jacobs (1916), intellectual and activist, is the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a classic critique of urban planning and renewal policies.