Sim Civics

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, the future of urban planning arrived in the form of a wonkish but strangely addictive new computer game. In SimCity, a player assumed the twin roles of mayor and city planner, creating elaborate cityscapes, managing zoning, transportation, and growth, while fighting off poverty, crime, traffic, and pollution.

SimCity went on to become the best-selling game title in history, but its reach has extended far beyond the realm of ordinary gameplay. As Princeton sociologist Paul Starr wrote in a 1994 article in The American Prospect about simulation games and public policy, ”SimCity … has probably introduced more people to urban planning than any book ever has.” And in fact, as its creator has noted, SimCity’s design was influenced by complex theories of urban development, such as the systems theory work of MIT professor Jay Forrester.

Today, thanks to ever more sophisticated software, urban planning itself has increasingly come to resemble a SimCity-style public-policy game. Since the game’s debut, the maturing technology known as Geographical Information Systems (GIS)–software for synthesizing database, mapping, and modeling data–has supplanted the paper blueprint roll as the urban planner’s dominant tool, enabling planners to map over a geographic region everything from gas lines to transit systems to weather patterns.

But it’s not just professionals who have their hands on the technology. Today, a new generation of GIS applications, known as ”scenario planning” or ”decision support” tools–which allow users to visualize, project, and manipulate a wealth of environmental data–have made citizens into major players in the gaming of urban futures.

Across the United States, in communities from Chicago to Honolulu to Boston, these tools are enabling an unprecedented level of public participation in broad regional planning initiatives. Only when a public is fully engaged in the process, the thinking goes, will it pledge itself and its elected officials to the very real commitments and tradeoffs that are key to effective planning.

The upshot, some argue, is that the crusading populism of our inner Jane Jacobs is edging out those usual suspects, the bleak cabal of Robert Moses-style bureaucrats, developers and industrialists who tend, as the morality tale goes, to callously hold the reins of civic power. But some planners worry that they are losing clout, their hard-won acumen replaced by aesthetically pleasing, dangerously oversimplified gewgaws. As the tools grow in sophistication, can professionals and the public learn to play well together?

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Four years ago, Chicago launched what may be the largest exercise in GIS-fueled citizen empowerment to date. Common Ground, sponsored by the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, is working to chart the future of the greater Chicago metropolitan region, encompassing 6 counties, 272 municipalities, and 8 million people.

The project will turn the Chicago region into a ”working lab for planning and democracy,” says program manager Hubert Morgan. ”Everyone has something to learn.” In one spin-off project, PDA-wielding Chicago youth are collecting street-level community data as part of an effort to enable local citizens to report, update, and correct information about development and zoning in their own neighborhoods, which will help generate more realistic portraits of poorer or transitional communities, where census data tends to be less accurate.

Honolulu, during the decade-long tenure of its recently retired mayor, Jeremy Harris, launched a similar, six-year populist planning initiative that culminated in a plethora of awards, including a 2004 UN-endorsed distinction as the world’s most livable large city. In 1998, Harris broadcast a prime-time television special to the 1 million islanders of Oahu and equipped citizens with disposable cameras to collect snapshots of areas in their communities needing attention.

This sparked a wider process in which citizens developed sustainability plans for each of the 19 neighborhoods over the island’s 680 square miles. Approved plans were granted a $2 million disbursement for implementing their vision, from building new developments to improving infrastructure and landscaping. (At one point, students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design were helping provide Honolulu residents with low-cost architectural talent via the Internet.)

Harris credits much of the project’s success to early investments in GIS technology in the 1980s. Honoluluans’ crash course in applied public policy ”has raised the bar, permanently,” Harris says. ”The increased level of knowledge will be our project’s greatest legacy.”

Now Boston is advancing its own GIS-powered scenario-planning initiative. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council’s MetroFuture project (www.metrofuture.org), launched in 2002, aims to transform regional planning for its 101 municipalities and 3 million people, and will seek an unprecedented level of direct public involvement.

With the initial ”visioning” phase completed in January, the MetroFuture team will now assemble a portrait of the Boston region as projected to appear in 2030 under a ”business as usual” scenario–according to officials, not a pretty picture. Starting in November, MetroFuture will begin soliciting alternative scenarios from the public, the most popular of which will be visually modeled in a series of interactive public sessions. Then, using GIS software called CommunityViz, which was also provided to each of the 101 municipalities, MetroFuture will model the scenarios developed collaboratively with the public.

”We knew the selection of decision-support tools would be very important–we need the visual model,” says Marc Draisen, executive director of MAPC. ”Historically, it’s been difficult to get meaningful feedback from the public. I really believe these new tools are changing that dynamic.”

Ken Snyder, director of the Denver-based think tank PlaceMatters (whose parent organization, the Orton Family Foundation, was recently acquired by CommunityViz) and widely considered the dean of scenario-planning technology, applauds the MetroFuture initiative, for which he played an early consultative role. ”People are skeptical about ‘black-box’ calculations,” he says. ”They need to see how these things are calculated.”

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But not everyone is so sanguine about this new populist planning. The problem, critics say, is that the visual models produced by software like CommunityViz essentially provide not models but oversimplified sketches.

”It’s important to recognize when you’re sketching. And these tools are the moral equivalent of sketching,” says Charlie Richman, associate director and chief information officer for the District of Columbia’s Office of Planning. Richman, trained as a geographer, is adamant that the modeling can only be as good as the data on which it is based. Further, he believes that the public’s lack of a deeper understanding of such data can lead to dangerously ill-advised decisions.

”It’s the data, stupid,” Richman says. ”You need good existing condition data, and without it, you put the community at risk by being wrong. When your only output is a map, it’s too easy to get misled, and your scenario plan only reflects back what you already knew.”

Holly St. Clair, one of the cofounders of Boston’s MetroFuture project, acknowledges that while the models may not be perfect, they represent an important and irreversible step forward. ”Tools are never the end,” she says. ”The end is to get people to talk with each other and make informed choices.”

It is precisely this new public conversation, however, that some contend is putting urban planners–and urban planning itself–on the hot seat. Today’s urban planner must be ”fluent in GIS,” says Ben Bakkenta, principal planner for the Puget Sound Regional Council in Seattle, ”but the technology is not quite there yet.” The tools, he insists, ”need to be kept in their proper place in the decision making process.”

Some see a much more outright power shift coming–and applaud it. ”The public is generally ahead of the government,” says John Norquist, former mayor of Milwaukee and head of the Congress of New Urbanism (which promotes dense, walkable, multiuse development). ”Yet there’s an assumption the public can’t handle or understand this information.”

Not everyone, though, thinks the new SimCities will banish professional planners. Computer drawing tools ”didn’t make the architect obsolete,” says George Janes of the Environmental Simulation Center in New York, ”and decision-support systems won’t replace the urban planner.”

Urban planners will, however, have to learn to share the stage. ”People are making more informed decisions,” says Janes. ”And we’ve learned something. You don’t need a visionary to produce a vision–you need eyesight.”

Jeff MacIntyre is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist. He is writing a book on the evolution of media literacy. E-mail jeff@jeffmacintyre.com.

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, an article in Sunday’s Ideas section about urban planning misstated the relationship between the Orton Family Foundation, Placematters, and CommunityViz. Placematters is a program of the foundation, and CommunityViz is a software technology owned and developed by the foundation.)