SimCity 2000
Global economic crises are tied to the internal contradictions of capitalism; overinvestment and overproduction produce an unsustainable bubble that eventually bursts. While financialization works to dematerialize architecture into units of intangible capital, Big Architecture makes such large, exuberant, and expensive forms that it sinks institutions and cities that can not sustain the capital to pay for them. The architectural form remains intact, but the ability to fill these buildings with uses, and surround them with activity and life is tenuous. After a crash, overproduction typically inspires a shift in planning from the physical to the temporal. Realizing that it did not plan ahead properly, society concerns itself not with designing and producing things but rather with drawing up plans to safeguard that such crises do not recur in the future.
Well known iconic buildings were produced using the SimCity 2000 Urban Renewal Kit, running only on iOS Classic, in order to run simulations of scenario planning in which Big Architecture and the Bilbao effect catastrophically fail. The images accompanied "Personal Lubricants: Shell Oil and Scenario Planning", a text by Kazys Varnelis and Robert Sumrell of AUDC, published in New Geographies 2: Landscapes of Energy.
