The Next L.A. / Reinventing Our Future : Digital City : “Sim City shows you the interrelatedness of urban systems--and the absurdity of what we are doing in day-to-day life.”

Justin, Kevin, Ronyae and Wendall had worked on the city for weeks.

They built solar-powered transportation modules.

They all but got rid of crime.

They erected multiple football stadiums. They bulldozed multiple football stadiums.

Some nights, the eighth-graders would sleep over at Kevin’s house so they could stay up late constructing their vision of a future Los Angeles on his parents’ home computer.

Then an earthquake hit.

“We forgot to turn off the disasters,” and the computer-generated Big One leveled their “town,” explains Wendall Hubbard, 14, showing off their digital republic at the Westchester Lutheran Church school near the airport. “We had to build the whole city over.”

As experts ponder the theoretical possibilities for rebuilding LA in the quake’s wake, kids (and a few computer-prone adults) are busy figuring out the practical implications of the trade-offs of that task--with the help of a computer game called Sim City.

One of Sim City’s main virtues--and differences: If you mess up, you can always start again.

In the Sim City that Cory Jobst built with two classmates at Bernardo Yorba Middle School in Yorba Linda, crime virtually vanished, and between every fourth building is a park. Their city design won a recent Southern California competition and will compete at the National Future City Contest in Washington later this month .

“Hopefully,” says 13-year-old Cory, “Los Angeles can be like our city some day.”

It is, of course, just a game. Sim City’s algorithmic logic--like guaranteeing that crime falls every time you build a police station, or that natural disasters happen only if you press the right button--tends to simplify reality.

But what-if games, from children’s “let’s pretend” to the virtual realities of science fiction, can often be more instructive than the real-life decision-making of the adult world.

Marie Tinson’s students at Miracle Baptist Christian School in South-Central Los Angeles went through 37 variations before they were satisfied with their city. Sim City residents “were always complaining about the taxes,” recalls 10-year-old Danielle Brewer with undisguised annoyance.

Facing Sim citizen demands for rail systems, less crime and better housing (“People didn’t too much care to live in industrial sites,” notes Alfredo Noble, 13), the students found themselves clashing over what to do first.

Across town, similar disputes arose between Kevin Parker, 13, and Wendall. “I would want football stadiums, and Kevin would want something like commercial zones,” Wendall recounts.

Sometimes, Sim City taxpayers are the victims of power struggles at the top--like the time Wendall went construction-happy only to find his partner, on his turn, had been equally liberal with the bulldozer. Kevin relented a little when he saw the stadiums attracting residents to the city, which in turn increased tax revenue.

And Alfredo sums up what most Sim “mayors” learn: “You can’t please everyone, but you can learn how to please enough of them so they don’t move out and you can get a good score.” Welcome to the big time, kids.

Mark Pisano has been a Sim City aficionado since his son gave him the game a few Christmases ago. Pisano does this stuff for a living as executive director of SCAG, the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

“Sim City shows you the complexity and the interrelatedness of urban systems--and the absurdity of what we’re doing in day-to-day life. We separate everything, nothing is considered as a whole.”

Like all what-if games, Sim City can spark fantasy beyond its limitations. And such speculation also reveals the wide range of realities in today’s Southern California.

To the students in South-Central, for example, crime is the paramount concern. The cardboard-and-foam model they built of their Sim City has a stadium with schools inside, where, explains 12-year-old Summer Giles, they are “safe from drive-bys.”

To the Yorba Linda students, an ideal transportation system, with a magnetic levitation train that makes cars obsolete, was key. It couldn’t show up on the computer, but they want subterranean malls and restaurants at the intersections of each underground rail line.

If this sounds like irrelevant kids’ stuff, it won’t for long. According to Richard Weinstein, dean of UCLA’s graduate school of architecture and urban planning, a community development simulation game that will make Sim City look like the Flintstones is coming soon.

Using high-speed computers produced by Silicon Graphics--whose products helped to create dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park”--UCLA is working with Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez to build a 3-D computer model of riot-damaged parts of the Pico-Union.

With the push of a button, residents will see what their street would look like a year from now, five years from now or 20 years from now, if, for example, trees are planted there tomorrow. They can see how new business would affect population and traffic, or they can “stand” on their own porches and hear the differences in noise generated by each development scenario.

“Sim City is just the first picture we have of what the computer can do,” says Weinstein. “The great potential that the computer brings is to explain complex policy alternatives to a broad audience. It becomes an extremely powerful communication tool which may make it possible to talk about things the way they really are instead of simplifying them.”

Exploring Urban Options

Los Angeles without freeways? That’s the vision created by the computer game Sim City 2000 and a rather daring “mayor.” In this digital future, rail lines and a few surface streets have taken the place of the city’s present-day road maze. Residential areas are marked in green. Industrial zones show up in yellow. Got a better idea? Click on the “toolbar” symbols at left to add roads, airports or schools. The bulldozer in the upper left corner also might come in handy.