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To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. The newest game, putting players face-to-face with climate change, resilient systems, and open data, makes that more true now than ever before. Growing up in a household that loved SimCity, my family had a common refrain that anyone holding public office should be able to pass the SimCity Test. However, turning data into usable forms is still difficult for cash-strapped cities, and even opening up that data to the public can become mired in politics.
SIMCITY (2013 VIDEO GAME) CODE
Palo Alto, Calif., recently launched an online dashboard for public data, and groups like Code for America pair local governments with programmers and designers to help open up data to the people.
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Cities around the world are latching on to the open data movement to fix this. With a few small exceptions, you’ll probably find out how much you don’t know about your area, and how much it doesn’t know about itself. Pittsburgh, on the other hand, made notable progress by acknowledging that its days as a steel powerhouse were over, finding new life by investing in research and education.Īfter understanding the real-time, on-demand stats in SimCity, you’ll want to know what your city-the one you live in-has to offer. As those dried up, Detroit and Cleveland became notorious for their struggle to move on. It’s a situation all too familiar in the Rust Belt, where cities have long relied on the once lucrative manufacturing industry for jobs and tax revenue. Even though it was a simulation, the degree of ownership I felt over this town led to a real sense of conflict when faced with the risks of correcting course. But as I focused on maximizing them, other elements suffered. The decisions I made early on made sense and brought rewards. First is the difficulty of changing course. My ill-fated city faced two challenges that are all too familiar for real urban areas. Should I dedicate myself to industry, knowing it will bring money as well as environmental damage, and that the area’s lifeblood would someday run out? Or should I try diversifying the economy by shifting to, say, commerce, education, or tourism? The second approach would take time, money, and land away from the city’s greatest source of income, and there was no guaranteed success.
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Real estate was limited, so I needed to make a decision. The city was off to a decent start financially, but following the trend lines wasn’t hard. These values have become paramount for cities around the world, and guiding principles for cities built from scratch. In their place, the New Urbanism movement has taken hold, spreading the gospel of dense, walkable, tech-savvy, environmentally friendly cities.
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Big cities are safer than they’ve been in generations, and cookie-cutter suburbs are falling swiftly out of fashion. For the first time in history, most of the world’s population lives in cities. The decade since SimCity 4’s release has seen a major urban renaissance. Whether or not it was meant for presidential politics, the big takeaway was that a balanced budget was the key to success, and megapolitan sprawl was the reward. Along the way, the player, as mayor-overlord of the simulation, controls zoning, budgeting, transportation networks, power grids, and more. The task is to plot out a city, manage its services, grow its population, and-above all-keep the citizens happy. The four major SimCity titles, released between 19, made urban planning something kids could do for fun.