Epic SimCity Took Four Years to Design, Two to Build

(Architizer Blog) A 22-year old Filipino architecture student named Vincent Ocasla spent four years developing a strategy to beat the “unbeatable” urban planning computer game, SimCity. As you can see in this video, it took countless messy graph paper calculations and a whole lot of demonic video game music to perfect the urban grid that would allow a city of 6 million to function healthily (although it seems like most of its population dies at 50?).

Ocasla show us two test cities in the video, then unveils his final, game-winning “Magnasanti.” In the great city of Magnasanti, there are no roads, only subways. Super-dense high rises populate a grid whose octagonal shape was inspired by “the wheel of life and death.” Ocasla’s influences, according to his video, are as follows: Paolo Soleri’s utopian experiment in the Arizona desert, Arcosanti; the Godfrey Reggio/Philip Glass landscape epic Koyaanisqats; and the Spanish Armada.

Vice interviewed Ocasla, a self-described “former” Buddhist, who has some pretty dire views on planning, policy-making, and human nature in general. He describes his city as deeply ironic, a perfect grid full of citizens who have been “successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact.”

Ocasla concludes that Magnasanti functions because the sims “don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line.” A prescient comment, as the majority of American cities are in the throes of police/citizen conflicts stemming from the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

One of the YouTube commenters ran the numbers, and according to Magnasanti’s population density, the entire world’s population (7 billion) could fit on a grid the size of West Virginia.