The Map is not the Terrain; the Sim is not the City

How can we effect positive change in an ever-changing world? Worldchanging is full of tools, models and ideas for building a bright green world. Their enlightened insights can be found in their new book and on their website. Their book chapter on cities has been immensely helpful in my thinking about Urban Science, and their blog posts on urban planning simulations are invaluable resources.

In particular, I am a big fan of the author’s, Jamais Cascio, post entitled, “The Map is not the Terrain; the Sim is not the City“.

“Simulation games like SimCity are valuable because they give a peek at the complex relationships between cause and effect in big systems such as cities. They’re a chance to play at the edges of complexity, to see “what happens if I do this?” in both an iterated and replicable fashion. They can be wonderfully seductive digital sirens leading to unexpectedly staying up to 3:30 AM. But to be good educational tools, the models have to be transparent and changeable. We should be able to play with the system itself, not just the system’s effects.”

My interactions with professional planners have helped me begin to unearth how model assumptions alter the way planners think about cities–quite a compelling reason to use the epistemic frame of urban planners as a model for developing a planning game.