Playing SimCity for Real

This article from the New York Times is notable for many things, including its headline: Playing SimCity for Real. Here is the author's take on the roles of planners in the Centennial project: "Planners like Jackson use an array of sophisticated software programs, based on demographic and market research, that enable them to calculate the population and density required to animate new neighborhoods. Such programs also help them figure out how many schools and police stations they may need. To see their work as a real-life version of the computer game SimCity isn’t far off."

'animate new neighhorhoods'? I'm not so sure about that.

In the article Robert Lang of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech states that the future of urban development is "remaking the postwar landscape" by transforming our automobile-oriented suburbs and that "Los Angeles is really the nation's largest infill project." LA and other western cities might just provide clues to the future of urban planning as they will run out of space long before the less geographically constrained eastern portions of the United States.

Angel es de Laos

I just returned from Los Angeles, where I had a very good time. But let me tell you, the University of Virginia webmail service shares an anti-LA bias with much of the east coast. On one of my e-mails the spell check corrected my Los with 'Laos' and my Angeles with 'Angel es'. With the help of the spell checker, I was able to construct the sentence that is the subject heading of this post.

I brought with me two of the classic LA urban studies/planning films: Blade Runner and Chinatown. I didn't have the time to see Chinatown (that's, that's Chinatown) but it was fun to watch Blade Runner in the place where it was supposed to be located. However, the surroundings of Los Angeles are almost completely opposite that of Blade Runner, which to this day looks a lot like modern Tokyo.

What to make of LA? Well, UCLA has one of the coolest things to share my name since the Maryland Area Railroad Commuter. May I present the Mindful Awareness Research Center.


The best part has to be the website address: marc.ucla.edu. But I am highly supportive of mindfulness, awareness, and research so this place has to be quality. In the About MARC section of the website is the following quote by Henry David Thoreau: 'Direct your eyesight inward, and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind undiscovered. Travel them, and be expert in home-cosmography.' Home-cosmography? What on earth is that?

The only other thing I have to say about LA is that on Monday it was 80 degrees and sunny there and back in DC it was in the 30s; yes, that's a 50 degree difference. !Angel es de Laos pero el suena de Los Angeles!