Michael Piper and Zoé Renaud Mallopolis a Board Game About Megalopolitan Urbanization

MichaelGeorge and Magie Piper and Before Monopoly became the world’s bestselling board game about real estate, it was first a didactic tool for communicating a socialist economic theory to the masses.1 The theory, as laid out by Henry George in his book Progress and Poverty (1881), critiques the relationship between property ownership and rents in the early industrial city. George laments Zoéthat, as long as land isRenaud held as private property material, progress will lead to land speculation, inflated property value, and higher rents. In order to temper the negative effects of speculation he proposes that states levy a land value tax, also known as a single tax, which he argues Mallopoliswould keep property value, and therefore also rents, in check.2 Lizzie Magie, a late nineteenth-century stenographer, writer, and amateur inventor, liked George’s theory and developed a game to com- municate its premise to a broader public. She called it The Landlord’s Game (1904) (Figure 2), which was eventually trademarked by others as Monopoly (1935) (Figure 3). One way to play her game is quite sim- Ailar Board to the current and familiar version. Players Gamepurchase property and About charge rent until one person comes out on top, thus immersing game 88 participants in the processes of property acquisition and rent extraction. Beyond this simulation of reality, Magie wrote an alternate set of rules for the game that could be voted in by a majority of the players when one Megalopolitanplayer, for example, was hoarding all the property and cash.3 These rules Urbanization declared all property as publicly owned and canceled the profits made from speculation. Her intent was to teach players about Georgist theory, whose ideal state would be of common property ownership that con- trolled rents and fostered more productive use of land.4 1 Henry George, on whose theories the original game was based, is considered by many not to be a socialist. His politics are somewhat ambiguous. However, his theory is about socialization, or nationalization of land value, and so by inference, of land. 2 This brief description derives from the succinct summary George provides in the introduction to his book. Henry George, Progress and Poverty, edited and abridged by Robert Drake (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 2005), XVI. 3 Magie’s patent application in 1903 describes these two rule sets. The Landlord’s Game, 1904 Patent and Game Rules, accessed 30 June, 2017, http://landlordsgame.info/rules/ lg-1904p_patent.html. Mary Pilon also outlines the two rule sets for the Landlord’s Game. Mary Pilon, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2015), 33. 4 Ibid., 31. Thresholds 46 Scatter! Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00030 by guest on 24 September 2021 Michael Piper and Zoé Renaud Figure 1: Slushie, one of the player piece Mallopolis tokens for Mallopolis, by Emma Dunn. Though it never gained wide commercial appeal, The Landlord’s Game was well liked and shared by word of mouth from Quakers in Atlantic City to fraternity brothers outside of Boston.5 People fashioned their own version of the game based on Magie’s rules and in 1933 Charles A Board Game AboutDarrow—a domestic heater salesman from Philadelphia—copied and published a version under the name Monopoly. The story of how Magie’s 89 game was stripped of its more equitable ambitions and eventually got bought up by Parker Brothers is a tragic one for those with an egalitar- ian bent, but her ambition to use the game as a medium through which theories about economy and urbanization could be experienced by play is Megalopolitan Urbanization6 something worth reconsidering today. This paper provides the theoretical context for a game we are develop- ing named Mallopolis (Figure 3). Like Lizzie Magie we propose to use the game environment as a popular medium to immerse players in the competitive machinations of market speculation that has shaped contem- porary cities, and as a fictive tool through which more equitable futures for such processes may be considered. Mallopolis, though, differs in how such an alternative reality is explored. The nationalizing of land in Magie’s game was perhaps too radical a departure from the market reality it sought to engage. Below we explore the relevance of George’s ideas in the economic and spatial context of North American megalopolitan 5 Ibid., 76-90. 6 Pilon provides a well-documented history of Lizzie Magie’s Landlord’s Game that covers her invention to its appropriation and afterlife as Monopoly. Ibid. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00030 by guest on 24 September 2021 Michael Piper and Zoé Renaud Mallopolis A Boardregions Game today About and the possibility of using a board game as a medium to Megalopolitanelucidate and Urbanization imagine alternatives to such conditions. Speculation and Value Capture Impoverishment is not a product of natural resource scarcity nor of dimin- ished overall wealth, George argued against some of his contemporaries. Rather, it results from property speculation or withholding land from use 90 Figure 2: Patent drawing for The Landlord’s Game, 1904, United States Patent and Trademark Office. Thresholds 46 Scatter! Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00030 by guest on 24 September 2021 91 Figure 3: Patent drawing for Monopoly, 1935, United States Patent and Trademark Office. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00030 by guest on 24 September 2021 Michael Piper and Zoé Renaud Mallopolis A Board Game About Megalopolitan Urbanization 92 Figure 4: Mallopolis, 2017, by Emma Dunn. with the expectation of prices eventually rising.7 In his writing George explains how land speculation inflates rents and drags down wages. In the nineteenth-century George observed that dense industrial city centers in North America experienced perpetual cycles of growth (progress) and crash. In times of depression, speculators would buy up cheaper property with the expectation of its value appreciating in the future. They would hold onto this property, without building on it, until 7 George dedicates four chapters to refuting Malthusian theory which says that poverty is due to resource scarcity that results from a growing population. For Thomas Malthus, big cities with their ever growing populations cannot be sustained by a limited quan- tity of resources, leading to competition between residents for those resources and ultimately to poverty for those less fit to compete for them. Henry George,Progress and Poverty, edited and abridged by Robert Drake (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 2005), 51. Thresholds 46 Scatter! Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00030 by guest on 24 September 2021 it reached what was considered to be its optimal value. The problem with land speculation, from George’s nineteenth-century perspective, has to do with its inelasticity as a resource, meaning that withholding land from use increases the demand for it. This promises higher profits in the future when that land is resold, but it also has the effect of raising rents in the present owing to the scarcity that this speculation creates.8 George warns that, as a consequence, high rents engender low wages.9 This type of speculative thinking in a denser downtown urban fabric is what Lizzie Magie modeled in The Landlord’s Game. Another type of speculation takes place at the fringe of an urban area where land is cheaper than it is in the city center. This lower value, cou- pled with the expectation that cities will physically expand as their econ- omies grow, fuels a form of regional speculation. As George describes, a regional speculator will buy up land at the urban periphery and wait for the city to grow up around it.10 When the city does expand, the lot that was once surrounded by low-value farmland will eventually have new and more valuable neighbors with built-up property or infrastructure. Mallopolis models this kind of regional speculation (Figure 5). 93 Although these two types of speculation seek out cheap land in different locations across the urban region, they share a reliance on the improve- ment of outside conditions to produce value. George defines speculation as “withholding use,” which means neglecting to make improvements on a piece of land such as adding a new permanent building or structure. 11 He laments that speculation does not produce value; rather it derives value from adjacent sources such as nearby infrastructural improvements, publicly funded amenities, or new density. Such value producing 8 His description of speculation is set within a larger context of industrial production and economic theory where such practices offset the margin of production to more peripheral sites. He is referring here to how firms at his time would seek out formerly agricultural land for industrial purposes. Ibid., 142. 9 He explains how paying higher rents for industrial land diverts a business’s capital away from wages, diminishing the wealth of the working class: “As productive power increases, rent tends to increase even more—constantly forcing down wages” Ibid., 155. 10 George describes this as an anticipation of urban purposes in the future. Ibid., 143. 11 Ibid., 142. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00030 by guest on 24 September 2021 Michael Piper and Zoé Renaud Mallopolis A Boardattributes Game may About also be referred to as positive externalities.12 In 1973, Megalopolitaneconomist Joseph Urbanization Stiglitz mathematically proved this part of George’s hypothesis and named a theorem after him. In short, it states that in spe- cific conditions, positive public investment has the effect of raising land rents by at least as much as the cost of the investment.13 To reduce the rent-hiking effects of speculation, George proposed that governments tax the positive externalities of a property.

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