City of dreams

VANCOUVER in British Columbia is one of the most desirable places on Earth. This year it came second in the annual quality of life survey conducted by consultancy Mercer. Last year it came joint first. It's a great place to live, but it would be even better without the cars. The people of Vancouver own more vehicles per head than just about anyone else in the world, and they refuse to abandon them, despite growing levels of smog and congestion.

In 1999, the city's authorities came up with a plan to tackle the problem. They proposed an annual tax of $75 per vehicle to fund the buses and light rail, and maybe even discourage a few people from buying new cars. But it soon became clear that imposing the levy would be political suicide, and by last year the tax was history. Public transport was forced to slash services, fares rose dramatically and so did property taxes. No one is happy with the outcome. But it might have been avoided, says Christina DeMarco, a senior planner for the Greater Vancouver Regional District, if people understood better the consequences of their decisions. What they needed, she says, was a way of looking into the future. And that's exactly what geographer John Robinson is now offering them.

Robinson reached the same conclusion as DeMarco a decade ago when he was part of the "alternative scenarios" movement at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. In those days sustainable development was still a relatively novel concept and the research team was discovering how difficult it is to balance the needs of people with those of the environment. But they soon found that this was child's play compared with the task of trying to sell their ideas to the public.

"What would be great," Robinson remembers suggesting at the time," is if everyone out there could reproduce the learning that went on in this research team." And that's when he and his colleagues had the idea of using a video game. After all, people are much more likely to learn when they play a game than when they're lectured at. And arcade games such as Asteroids and Space Invaders were already inspiring new approaches to publishing, flight simulation and design. So why not use something similar to help people understand the implications of their environmental decisions?

Robinson's inspiration was a game called SimCity. Released in 1989, and one of the first video games to take advantage of CD-ROMs, it advised players : "As long as your city can provide places for people to live, work, shop and play, it will attract residents. And as long as traffic, pollution, overcrowding, crime or taxes don't drive them away, your city will live." Excellent advice, Robinson realised, for the planners of any city-virtual or concrete. His version of the game would have similar aims, only this time players could generate possible futures for real cities.

By the mid-1990s, Robinson had moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to head up the Sustainable Development Research Institute. There he began developing the first working model of his game, QUEST, which is based around the Georgia Basin region surrounding Vancouver. It was launched last Christmas and since then thousands of people have played it on the Web (www.basinfutures.net), through interactive sessions in schools and in a specially wired 2OO-seat theatre at Vancouver's Science World.

The game invites users to specify variables for transportation, energy consumption, waste disposal, residential, commercial or industrial zoning, and the like. Then it returns visions of what those choices mean for life in 2040. Play QUEST a few times and it soon becomes obvious that the only desirable futures demand major changes and sacrifices in the way we live now. Not too keen on that factory down the street ? Fine, but look what pushing industry to the outskirts does to your commute time. Spend more on healthcare? Great, only that leaves less for trash disposal. "You build toward the future to get to something you like and if you don't like what you get, you keep iterating back through the System until you get a scenario you can live with," says Robinson. It's called backcasting.

The game has certainly achieved its goal of getting people interested in decision making, but will it make any difference to urban planning? Reaction from the professionals has been positive. DeMarco believes QUEST is far better than current methods of testing public opinion such as polls and focus groups. By scouring the results from registered players, Robinson and his team can come up with general trends for different demographic groups and even spot innovative ideas to solve particular problems. But there's still a lot of work to do before QUEST becomes an integral part of the planning process. At a recent evaluation session with Vancouver city planners, its limitations quickly became apparent. "We're presented with too many cakes here without getting a feel for the recipe," says DeMarco. Other planners also complained about a lack of sophistication and control over finer details.

It's early days, but already the QUEST template has begun to travel. At the University of Manchester's Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology, Joe Ravetz and his team have adapted the original game to include British concerns such as the impact of genetically modified organisms. City planners are starting to incorporate results from the game in their decision making. QUEST is also being used in Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur and the island of Bali.

In Bali, the game has reportedly attracted rave reviews. It seems to work particularly well there because many of the island's environmental problems can be traced back to a single issue -degradation brought on by an exploding tourism industry. Zulhasni, the local government's technical coordinator for BaliQUEST, praises the software's ability to visualise the implications of policy decisions and its user-friendly interface. "Not ail marine resources and ecosystems have been considered," she admits, but she is enthusiastic about the potential of BaliQUEST as a planning tool.

Experts predict that it will be between five to eight years before QUEST and its offshoots reach their potential. If they take off, we could ail become town planners. The prospect of creating Utopia in our own backyards is compelling. The down side, of course, is that we will have nobody to blame but ourselves when the buses don't run on time.

James Hrynyshyn is a freelance writer based in Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories