Gaming Simulation for Urban Planning

Simulations are designed to cope with the new complexities of metropolitan planning. If the essential policies deal with the quality of services, and the range of considerations is imperfectly known, a gaming model will be the more informative kind of model. If budgeting and routinized procedures are combined with poorly defined situations, a computerized hybrid form of simulation should eventually be effective. A game employing the roles of planner-administrator, politician, and businessman for three to fifteen players has been developed and played more than thirty times. It employs a reduction in time scale of more than one in ten million and other necessary simplifications. That model is now being hybridized so as to become a “teaching machine” for developing a metropolis of a quarter million population.