Blogocentric Formulations

World Urbanism Day

I have never in my life heard of World Urbanism Day (or World Town Planning Day, as some call it) until today. According to Wikipedia, it was apparently founded in 1949 by a professor at the University of Buenos Aires to "advance public and professional interest in urban planning." It's currently celebrated in more than 30 countries on four different continents.

You know what else advanced public interest in urban planning?

I used to love Sim City as a kid. I would legitimately spend hours designing cityscapes and watching them develop as the game clock advanced. I would alternate between trying to make a city on a completely flat grid and seeing how well I could optimize the placement of residential, commercial, and industrial areas to see how quickly I could get the population to swell to the point where I could build those big arcologies... and trying to build cities on incredibly complicated landscapes with tons of hills and valleys lakes and other obstacles, to see if I could make a functional town in hostile terrain.

One of the things I loved about this game was the sense of humor they had for the cheat codes too. If you didn't want to wait around to raise revenue the old fashioned way, you could type in "IMACHEAT" and you'd get $500,000 but would also have a significant chance of some kind of natural disaster happening. And if you wanted to cause your own natural disasters just for funsies, "NOAH" would get you a flood, "GOMORRAH" would get you a nuclear power plant meltdown, etc. You could also "shoot down" helicopters traveling through your city by clicking the cursor over them.

I suppose I've always loved urban planning. Like any puzzle, I like the challenge of having a specific space that you then have to figure out where everything goes and the optimal way to configure it. I actually haven't played Sim City in years, but after a little searching it seems like there's both a current mobile game and a current game for both MacOS and Windows. Maybe I should get it and play a commemorative game every November 8th during World Urbanism Day!