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There’s a game I used to play called SimCity 4. It’s a city building simulation game where you can plan where people live, zone areas for offices and skyscrapers, build schools and hospitals, set taxes, virtually control every aspect of building and maintaining a city. Now, I wasn’t very good at this game. Despite my efforts on making sure the streets were lined up nicely and schools and city municipals had decent city coverage, my city would always either go into massive debt, protesters would shut down city functions due to pay cuts, or fires would destroy entire city sections because fire trucks couldn’t wade through the traffic. And every time I got to that point, I just started a new game.
“What Comes Down Must Come Up” by Keven Rozario explains the phenomenon on post disaster rebuilding of cities. People since the colonization of New England have demonstrated a need to rebuild after a major catastrophe and not just simply leave the ruins as is. Rozario brings forth a point that businesses and city officials had always wanted to keep infrastructure updated for the sake of making the city profitable thus disasters such as the San Francisco earthquake and Chicago fire were seen as ample opportunities to pave ways for more modern cities. In all, it does benefit the city in general; beautification makes the city more open to tourists, modern sewage systems keep the city clean, and wider streets keep the city from becoming too suffocating. Alas, sometimes disaster doesn’t hit fast enough for a city to be able to modernize to these standards but when it does, history has shown that the planners don’t hold back, such as Haussmann’s development of Paris before Napoleon’s reign.
This aggressive “creative destruction” comes at a price; a price that the low working class peoples have to pay. As explained through the rebuilding of San Francisco, the buildings that were rebuilt were formerly those of the working class, those who worked in the manufacturing plants in the city. But those buildings were rebuilt to now house the middle, upper class as the city transitioned from manufacturing to financial institutes. This pushed the former lower class out of the city and most of them homeless. So although the city had gained much more capital after its destruction, it had to put the burden on someone. ploopy1 makes an excellent point, “I agree that society can be given a second chance, but it is up to the people that will determine how society is rebuilt from the ashes.”
So in the end, completely resetting a virtual city in a video game might not hurt anybody, but the same cannot be said about rebuilding a city after a disaster especially taking into consideration what the city officials want to take into priority.