At Spillway, Will Wiles writes about a series of contradictory tensions at the heart of SimCity:

“…there’s a sheer atavistic thrill that comes from playing the game fast and loose, with all sorts of destruction and little thought of consequences. Your urgently needed relief road happens to pass straight through a small, comfortable middleclass neighbourhood? Pah, build it anyway. Sure, you could spend the money on a neat little bus system, but isn’t a glistening motorway just a bit more swanky? Similarly, a vast stadium complex is always going to be more appealing to the ambitious mayor in a hurry, even though a well-funded local library network could yield better results for a fraction of the cost. Huge engineering projects will always be more fun to put together, and more impressive onscreen, than microscopic local initiatives. A mayor should be building suspension bridges and airports – leave the rest to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”

[If you are looking for more evidence that SimCity has permanently altered the way we look at cities, then the above view of Shanghai from Chinese search engine Baidu's "dimensional map" is probably a pretty good place to start; seen via @doingitwrong.]

Both (b) and (c) may shed some light on another excellent recent article, “Lethal T-Square” published at Places, which, taken together with a similar Plantizen article from 2008, offers a reading of Charles Bronson’s vigilante-architect from the film “Death Wish” as either crusading proto-NIMBYist par excellence Jane Jacobs or Jacobs’ most famous antagonist and symbolic figurehead for modernist urbanism’s self-destructive relationship with central planning, Robert Moses.  Keith Eggener, author of “Lethal T-Square”, and Nate Berg, author of the earlier Plantizen article, offer up Bronson as either Jacobs (because Bronson is willing to fight for his community) or Moses (because Bronson is willing to break some things in order to fix others), but perhaps it is most useful to realize that, just as Hill suggests that urbanists should continue to pursue both better central planning and better emergent process, both readings may be accurate at once, though there are elements to be both lauded and to be condemned in the fruits of both Jacobs’ and Moses’ labors.

While moderation, whether in reading a film or planning a city, can at times be bland, it can also be realized through the vibrant pairing of extremes: not just vigorous centrally-planned transit infrastructures or motivated communal self-re-organization (or a muddled combination of neither, which might be the most accurate characterization of contemporary American urbanism), but both in tandem.