Land-use Forecasting - Policy-oriented Gaming

Policy-oriented Gaming

The notion that the impact of policy on urban development might be simulated was the theme for a conference at Cornell in the early 1960s; collegiums were formed, several streams of work emerged. Several persons developed rather simple (from today’s view) simulation games. Land-use development was the outcome of gravitational type forces and the issue faced was that of conflicts between developers and planners when planners intervened in growth. CLUG and METROPOLIS are two rather well known products from this stream of work (they were the SimCity of their day); there must be twenty or thirty other similar planner vs. developer in the political context games. There seems to have been little serious attempt to analyze use of these games for policy formulation and decision-making, except for work at the firm Environmetrics.

Peter House, one of the Cornell Conference veterans, established environmetrics early in the 1960s. It, too, started with relatively simple gaming ideas. Over about a ten-year period, the comprehensiveness of gaming devices was gradually improved and, unlike the other gaming approaches, transportation played a role in their formulation. Environmetrics’ work moved into the Environmental Protection Agency and was continued for a time at the EPA Washington Environmental Studies Center.

A model known as River Basin was generalized to GEM (general environmental assessment model) and then birthed SEAS (strategic environmental assessment model) and SOS (Son of SEAS). There was quite a bit of development as the models were generalized, too much to be discussed here.

The most interesting thing to be noted is change in the way the use of the models evolved. Use shifted from a “playing games” stance to an “evaluate the impact of federal policy” stance. The model (both equations and data) is viewed as a generalized city or cities. It responds to the question: What would be the impact of proposed policies on cities?

An example of generalized question answering is LaBelle and Moses (1983) La Belle and Moses implement the UTP process on typical cities to assess the impact of several policies. There is no mystery why this approach was used. House had moved from the EPA to the DOE, and the study was prepared for his office.