How SimCity inspired an entire generation of urban planners

Scene from "SimCity 4 Deluxe".

SimCity fell into the hands of Jason Baker when he studied political science at the University of California at Davis. Jason carefully studied this computer game.

“I was not one of those players who liked the way Godzilla ran around the streets and destroyed buildings. I liked to arrange the organized life of the city. ”

Such a conscientious approach provided him with an advantage in the course of local self-government. Instead of writing a term paper on three models of possible urban development, Baker proposed to recreate these three scenarios in SimCity, and then let the game work independently and record the successes of its virtual cities.

As a result, he received for the course "excellent." Baker says that playing SimCity helped him remember the importance of local government, so he eventually turned to it professionally.

Today, Baker is Vice President of Transportation and Housing at the nonprofit Silicon Valley Leadership Group. From 2008 to 2016, he worked as a member of the council in Campbell (California), during which time he was twice the mayor.

Thirty years ago, Maxis released SimCity on Mac and Amiga. It was followed by SimCity 2000 (1993), SimCity 3000 (1999), SimCity 4 (2003), the Nintendo DS version (2007), SimCity: BuildIt (2013) and the mobile application (2014).

During this time, a series of games introduced millions of players to the joys and troubles of zoning, street networks and infrastructure financing, and also influenced a whole generation of people whose city planning has become a profession. For many urban planners, architects, municipal workers and activists, SimCity was the first opportunity to run the city. Thanks to her, they first realized that neighborhoods, cities and suburbs are planned, that someone decides where streets, schools, bus stops and shops should be located.

Infected with the passion of urban planning

“I was drawing city maps for fun, and I couldn’t imagine that this could be a real job,” said Nicole Payne, program manager for the National Association of New York City Urban Transport Workers. When she was ten years old, the librarian saw her drawings and said that there was a video game in which she should play.

“I would not be what I’m now without SimCity,” she admits.


Scene from "SimCity 2000" released in 1993. (Maxis)

Quong Trinh played SimCity in the high school summer courses. Years later, having received a bachelor's degree, he wanted to travel, but since he was less than 25 years old, he had to delete from the list those cities in which he would have to rent a car to move.

“And that made me think about urbanism and SimCity, where you place trains and help people move around the city,” says Trinh, now a senior road planner at Caltrans in a Los Angeles suburb.

In a dozen or more interviews conducted during the creation of this article, people who went from SimCity fans to professional designers talked about what they liked in the game: the ability to visualize how one change can affect the whole city, the opportunity to see the connection between transport, fitness for housing and the economy, that no one wants to live near the landfill.

Like Baker, many gamers who became designers usually said they didn’t like to turn on the disaster mode built into the game , which subjected cities to earthquakes, hurricanes and Godzilla attacks. They enjoyed building flawless cities that worked so efficiently that they could function without player intervention.

Simplified Simulations

SimCity creator Will Wright believed when creating the game that it would be of interest only to architects and urban planners. But the first part sold over 1 million copies, changing the nature of video games.

She popularized the genre of simulation games and turned the Maxis startup, founded by Wright and Jeff Brown in Orinda, California, into a titanium industry. Maxis capitalized on the success of the game by publishing SimAnt, SimFarm, SimEarth, SimTower, SimLife, SimIsle, and SimHealth, as well as several less successful non-simulators, in their first decade of their lives.

At the time of the acquisition of EA in 1997, the company was valued at $ 125 million. In 2000, Redwood City released The Sims, one of the best-selling video games of all time.

Like most video games based on real-world professions, SimCity simplifies the most routine elements of urban planning. The game never allows mixed use of space. (In other words, it is impossible for a residential building to appear on the lower floors of which are shopping areas that now occupy US cities .) There are no bike paths. None of the versions of SimCity accurately reflected the huge number of square meters of the city allocated for car parking.

The lead designer of the 2013 version of the game, Stone Librand, explained this in an article by The Atlantic : parking is ugly and boring.


The creator of "SimCity" and "The Sims" Will Wright at Maxis Studios (Walnut Creek, California), 2004.

“It was more like city planning rather than a game,” says public transport activist Aaron Brown from Portland, Oregon, who is involved in transportation. He says that the love of transport systems originally came from him thanks to SimCity.

Aaron spent many hours in the game trying to build a city in which there would be no place for road transport at all, only buses and trains. But as in real life, mass transportation in SimCity is expensive in construction and maintenance, and some residents still want to drive a car, no matter how convenient the transportation systems are. He never managed to get the work of such a structure. (Today, this “troublemaker”, as he calls himself, is struggling with a highway expansion project.)

This problem is a serious criticism of SimCity: Wright’s vision was subject to the old urban planning approach that was influenced by Robert Moses and the Chicago School of Sociology. Both these urban planners and SimCity have strictly binary solutions. To reduce crime, you need to build more police stations. If people complain about traffic jams, more roads need to be built. If you need a place to build a highway or a stadium, demolish the neighborhoods in which the working class lives.

“Many of the assumptions used in this game are worth questioning,” says Brown.

Including it is worth considering that the game ignores: it does not take into account the environment (with the exception of air quality). Almost nothing affects the racial composition of the population.

Greener and more global games

The next generation of SimCity players may have a different view of the problem.

According to EA, the mobile application SimCity: BuildIt, developed by Twentytrack from Helsinki, is used by 6.1 million players, and it has been downloaded more than 200 million times. Game manager Inka Spara says the development team intentionally used a more European outlook on gameplay.

Many of the developers in the early stages of creating the application played in previous versions of SimCity. Inca admits that Wright’s views are rooted in a very American twentieth-century urban style.

The developers were struck by how “American” the buildings and maps looked. Therefore, they added other types of architecture and topography from cities in Asia and Europe. In the latest release, players can build cards with fjords.

“We had a lot of controversy about car parking,” Spara explains. As in previous games, artists preferred that no parking lots be seen near houses. But it was important for her to maintain a certain level of realism.

In the future, they want to add cycle tracks to the game. "Here in Finland, people like to ride bicycles."

All in all, Spara says they have been actively trying to bring environmental concerns and climate change into the game. You can play on the Green City map, where residents have urban gardens, and pollution levels are reduced. You can also use solar energy now.

“We see that these elements resonate with the players,” she says.

Jarret Walker is a public transport network design consultant who runs the Human Transit blog. You can call him a critic of SimCity: for several years he wrote a lot about this game, in particular, posts such as "Does SimCity make us dumber?" and "SimCity will continue to mislead us about transportation . "

According to Walker, for people who study design, SimCity series games are a good introduction to the subject. These people will understand what the game is right and what is wrong. But the vast majority of players whose acquaintance begins and ends with this game might think that the SimCity style is the only way to build a city. Hiding the impact of road transport on the real world and allowing you to use space in only one way, SimCity is turning from entertainment into an ideology.

The main problems that occupy the minds of urban planners today are not displayed in the game.

Jose Sanchez, a professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California, tried to correct some of SimCity's omissions in his Block'hood game , namely ecology and verticality.

“SimCity provides the fundamentals of systems knowledge,” says Sanchez. He hopes that his game and those similar to it will expand this knowledge to the most subtle moments of urban development.

He is currently working on a sequel called Common'hood, which takes into account quarterly issues such as homelessness and drug addiction.