From SimCity to Smart City. Modelling and Government in the Epistemology of Architectural Power

Abstract

The article discusses simulation as a particular logic of neoliberal governance, by exploring the connections between modelling and government in city simulation games and smart city projects. Rather than being a simple visual representation of cityscapes, city building video games like SimCity should be understood as a pedagogical and programmatic formulation of the “smart” paradigm of city planning, in which a data-driven managerial epistemology, imposed on all kinds of city services and experiences, is increasingly used to validate and enforce a biopolitical government of life. Both representations and constructions of the city in city building games and discourses around smart cities take place in a zone of indistinction between the design of urban spaces and the government of the community and follow a logic of simulation by which actual city practices and dynamics are supposed to function according to the models that make them liable to control. Simulation in city builders and smart city planning, then, names the operation in which the very relation between architectural forms, their meaning, and their uses becomes operative and is turned into an instrument of government.