The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

Mobile Forum is a truck on a mission: to bring together communities, designers, developers, and policymakers to build the future of housing.

If you had the keys to Los Angeles, what would it look like in 2050? Using the LA Forum’s online city generator game, S(t)imulate LA, you can make planning decisions, set zoning policy, and create regulatory incentives to set Los Angeles on a path toward fulfilling your vision in the next 37 years. What many residents of LA don’t realize is that the City’s planning policies restrict a lot of development and have at times resulted in challenging the implementation of ideas that would make LA a more sustainable, connected, innovative, and fun place to live. Planning decisions have a direct impact on our open space, air quality, and water supply and quality. By manipulating the City of LA’s current planning and building policies, we can generate an alternate city that could be healthier, happier, and wiser, all while accommodating the explosive population boom that we expect to continue in Southern California. This free website game, which we plan to jointly develop with 8-80 Cities, the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, and software developer Esri, allows players to become the master planner for LA, toggling through a series of metrics that establish a basis for how the city could potentially develop. Once the metrics are defined, players push “go” and watch as the city transforms based on project population increases and climate changes over 37 years before coming to a rest at 2050. The resulting city that emerges from each player’s choices can be saved and shared with other players to form a larger on-line conversation about how we as LA residents can improve the city. At the end of six months of play, the LA Forum will organize the best LA scenarios from the website into an interactive exhibit in our Hollywood gallery, where they will be shared with the general public, as well as reviewed by city planners, politicians, and members of LA’s urban design and architecture communities. We will host a series of discussions aimed at analyzing the game’s outcomes for potential influence on future planning in the city. The game’s outcomes are influenced by two sets of variables—baseline metrics and projections that can be dialed up or down and big ideas that have the potential to change the geography and morphology of Los Angeles. Examples of the metrics will include the following as a minimum, but we expect to create more as the game develops: (1) Access to transportation and commute length/time/type; (2) Access to green/open/recreation space; (3) Zoning districts (commercial, residential, industrial); (4) Density; (5) Environmental conditions (air quality, water quality, microclimates); (6) Demographic changes—population aging and immigration; (7) Opportunities for broadening the tax-base; Examples of big ideas could include: (1) High-speed rail; (2) Coastal redevelopment to combat global warming; (3) Habitat restoration; (4) LA River redevelopment; (5) Changing energy usage and generation; (6) Regionalizing air-travel; We hope the game will provide a platform for reconsidering the City of LA’s planning and building policies, informing a much-needed debate that will start as the City begins to internally revise its own policies throughout the coming years.