The closest we’ve come to it in American history, though, might be the freeway-building era of the 1950s and 1960s, when lines drawn on a map really did result in the wholesale demolition of entire communities-and plunged much larger adjacent swaths of our inner cities into a tailspin of decline that many have yet to recover from. In the real world, that has (mercifully) almost never been the case. Games like this are responsible for giving many laypeople an inflated and inaccurate sense of the power of planning-in a video game, you can play God, wiping away or irreversibly transforming entire neighborhoods with the click of a mouse.
But these days, all the real planning geeks we know are playing Cities:Skylines, which offers more features and a much higher degree of realism.
The average American’s understanding of urban planning has been disproportionately-and inaccurately-shaped by planning simulation video games.
