Urban Planning Simulation is my area of #1 pet peeve.
We can simulate an entire nuclear explosion inside a computer that has made land testing completely obsolete, yet we really do not have a system of urban simulation anywhere near the nuclear computing capacity that Los Alamos, Livermore or CERN can perform.
As a civilization we’ve the entire supply-chain of intellectual rigor and pedagogy to market, research and technology for bombing the planet out many times over but cannot simulate the planet to live in it even once.
After all, the end result will be a Borg Cube… “You will be AsSimulated.”
Every time I discussed this issue with my faculty advisor and the precious few non-racists in the Architecture & Urban Design profession, they always said I should take the idea to Yale or Georgia Tech and see if I can make a PhD out of it… or even possibly create a graduate school based on the research to attract endowments and NSF fundings.
Simulating 8 billion variables called humans on one planet is not as complicated as simulating a nuclear explosion or finding a boson particle. But, I do find the architecture & urban design profession quite luddite and simpleton.
If the simulations in my head is a supercomputer, then what is out there in practice is an etch-a-sketch. So, I am not very concerned about what is out there, as much as what I can do to create a new field of study synthesizing upon the foundations of many fields.
Urban Simulation is extraordinarily organic, non-linear, diverse and complex. I’d be very interested in creating a think-tank to handle that challenge.
“Resistance is futile; You will be AsSimulated.”
