City planning

É sua primeira vez no blog? Leia antes o post “Uma Introdução” (em português).*

Of all the places in Brazil, I didn’t expect Brasília to look familiar. But as toon as I caught glimpses of the city out the window of the plane, I was transported in time and space. To Chambersburg, PA in the mid-1990s, of all places.

At my grandmother’s house, my cousins and I had exactly one entertainment. When we weren’t being forced to see other elderly relatives, we’d dash to the dark computer room and spend the interminable dusty afternoons there, jostling for control of the bulky mouse (I never won) and resentfully backseat-driving as the lucky one got to play. Sim City 2000.

My cousin Stu, a computer geek from the womb, was always the best at playing. Because he knew the cheat codes.The crucial thing to understand about Sim City is that you can’t win without cheating. In theory you can, of course, but in practice, who spends days and weeks honing their city planning skills on that game? Nobody. Or at least nobody with the power to play the code “IMACHEAT” and get $500,000.

The only code that I ever learned, incidentally, was “FUND,” which isn’t even the best one. “FUND” gives you a bond. Now, my elementary-school education had not yet imparted the knowledge that a bond had to be repaid. My cities would flourish for a few years, and then creditors would come knocking at the door of City Hall and everything would go to hell in spectacular fashion. The newspapers vilified me, the neighborhoods went downhill, and I was tarred and feathered. Then Stu would take the mouse back and start his own game.

Eventually we got our own version of Sim City, a newer edition, but even with copious cheat codes I could never quite manage to make my cities work. My citizens didn’t like the way I zoned things, they took issue with my construction priorities and luxury projects, and I would usually end up vengefully setting fire to a good portion of the downtown, triggering a nuclear meltdown or unleashing a mechanical spider.

A city planned by one guy, built from scratch in the middle of nowhere in neat little blocks, where nothing works quite like it should and everyone knows that to get anything done you have to cheat? The similarities are eerie. I’m just knocking on wood that there are no mechanical spiders in the pipeline.

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

É escritora, tradutora, brasilianista e diretora de pesquisa na Rádio Novelo