Sim City created a generation of urban planners

If there’s a space where SimCity perfectly reflects the city planning status quo, it is ironically in its most dysfunctional institution: zoning. Cities use zoning to dictate what uses are allowed where and at what densities. In SimCity, zoning is the beginning and the end of all land-use regulation. Every city starts first with streets, immediately followed by zoning, requiring players to decide pre hoc where all the residential, commercial, and industrial is going to go, and at what densities. As conditions change over time, much of the game involves players scrambling to fix the zoning post hoc.

The trouble with zoning, both within real cities and SimCity, are manifold. As many players pointed out in response to the SimCity reboot in 2013, the mixture of uses that traditionally characterizes dense cities—such as apartments over shops—isn’t allowed. Worse yet, zoning often artificially suppresses densities and blocks growth, driving up housing costs in the process. While SimCity players can unilaterally alter zoning to accommodate a growing population, the politics of zoning dictates that this rarely happens in the real world.

Curiously, the latest entry into the series, simply called SimCity, largely dispenses with this kind of politics more so than past entries, which might help to explain the series’ fading relevance.