Gaming Simulation and Urban Planning. A Perspective

The enormous successes obtained by the "hard" sciences (particularly physics) in interpreting and changing the world, have driven lots of "scholars" of the so-called soft sciences to believe that the methods and tools, which had proved so successful at the court of the "queen of science", could also be successful in the drawing-rooms of the social and behavioural sciences. From this stemmed the birth of "urban models", whose terminology revealed a sort of inferiority complex towards the "true" science. It is this set of issues that whoever deals with social "sciences” has to come to terms with. This applies specially to urban sciences as they must take into account both the social and the spatial (physical) dimension. Although it is true that Urban Gaming Simulation had somehow implicitly taken into account these issues by removing part of the closed simulation model from its algorithmic description, it is undeniable that the crisis involving "algorithmic models" of social systems backfired on them as well. The origin of this crisis could be condensed in the following question. Sic stantibus rebus: “can Urban Gaming Simulation be useful not only for training but also for experimenting and predicting? ” Above all, can it be an effective tool in urban and environmental planning, not only with a heuristic and informative purpose, but as part of the planning process and as a technique of interaction between the actors of the planning process? It is obvious that what is needed in order to learn about a complex system has an inherent heuristic, and when it explains how a system works a forecasting function. Understanding, even partially, how complex systems work helps us to formulate "correct questions" and, consequently, to increase our ability to analyse. Claiming that gaming simulations in general are training and predictive tools is sensible and useful, even if they insufficiently map urban systems. Obviously it all depends on the questions: What are "good" urban gaming simulation models, considering the "mechanical" part, the part of roles? And what do we mean by "prediction"? Even if pessimism is reasonable (and it is), it is easy to see why and how Urban Gaming Simulation can be useful to experiment with, and to use as tools for prediction. They offer us clues to identify "sensitive points", the "right" direction, short-term and long-term contradictions, and the few effective policy changes. There is nowadays a renewed interest in "regulative" Urban Planning. The dynamics of urban development are now being accepted again, after the ideological excesses of deregulation. Gaming Simulation's “but” is the condition of being able to connect to new paradigms as Artificial Life and to new models as the models based on Cellular Automata and to new tools as telematic networks and to new goals as a prevision based on the scenario building or to new planning approaches as the ones that consider citizens' participation fundamental. The first section of the paper contains a treatment of these theoretical issues, also making reference to practical examples. This is not all. Among the consequences of the reflection that we have made is the fact that we need to reason in the perspective of a different way of conceiving the planning process. Without active involvement of the social subjects no effective planning is possible. The second part is a presentation of a project which is based on these theoretical considerations. It relies on a multiyear experience and attempts to propose a strategy of communication and participation, based on the application of gaming simulation technologies to a very wide and complex reality such as Greater London. This project is “AWIDe Artificial World for Improving Democracy”, an “integrated 1 Several examples of such experiences can be found in a paper edited by Arnaldo Cecchini in 2001.