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The Politics of SimCity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Kenneth Kolson
Kenneth Kolson*
Affiliation:
National Endowment for the Humanities
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Extract

Years ago, when Robert Caro's magisterial biography of Robert Moses was first published, I remember reading it with mixed emotions. On the one hand, it reinforced every lesson I tried to convey in my course on urban politics. On the other hand, it taught those lessons in a way that was so vivid, and so engaging, that it made my conventional textbooks and lectures seem hopelessly abstract and lifeless. There was only one thing to do: throw out the old texts and make The Power Broker (Caro 1975) the centerpiece of the course. I redesigned everything from scratch.

Recently, one of the students in my course on the history of city planning (offered in the University Honors Program at the University of Maryland at College Park) ambled up after class. “Have you ever played sin city?” I thought I heard him ask. He set me straight—“SimCity” he said, enunciating carefully—and then offered a demonstration, during which I was reminded of Caro's book. Here we go again, I though to myself as I purchased the Windows version of the simulation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 43 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1996

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Footnotes

*

A version of this paper was delivered at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, The New York Hilton, September 1–4.

1.

Thanks are due Eric Spross, who helped me in a number of ways.

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