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.

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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 developing 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.

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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

Figure 2: Patent drawing for The Landlord’s Game, 1904, United States Patent and Trademark Office.

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Figure 3: Patent drawing for Monopoly, 1935, United States Patent and Trademark Office.

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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, coupled with the expectation that cities will physically expand as their economies 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.

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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 specific 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. In North America—in George’s time as well as in the present—a landowner could charge more rent for being near a subway station while paying a relatively small portion of the overall tax burden for that privilege.14 George proposed a land value tax—to replace all other taxes—that would charge property owners for the external values produced by that subway, or any other local attribute that inflated land value.15 From his proposal to tax externalities we infer a desired outcome to decrease the unevenness in property values. Lacking such an incentive to speculate, George infers that property owners are less likely to leave land unimproved and to wait for value changes before building. In fact, he argues, a land value tax would incentivize owners to optimize their property or to build as much 94 as possible on it. He reasons that with more building and a greater housing supply, rents would return to a more affordable level.16

In spite of theoretical proof, efforts to implement George’s land value tax have been difficult to enact. Some attribute this to the problems of speci- fying the relationship between land value and public investments, or perhaps to the issue of identifying the geographic or temporal catchments

12 George doesn’t use the term externalities, and is vague about where value derives from. He primarily attributes it to increased surrounding density, but Joseph Stiglitz, as shown below, describes public service as one cause for increasing value. 13 Arnott, Richard J., and Joseph E. Stiglitz. “Aggregate land rents, expenditure on public goods, and optimal city size.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 93, no. 4 (1979): 477. 14 In the United States, taxes on real estate are based on fair market value of both the land and all permanent improvements to that land, including buildings or driveways. 15 His single tax on land value was intended to replace all other taxes, and particularly taxes on wages, or income. This would shift the majority of tax revenue from laborers to property owners. Henry George, Progress and Poverty, edited and abridged by Robert Drake (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 2005), 231. 16 Ibid., 245.

Thresholds 46 Scatter! Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00030 by guest on 24 September 2021 of such expenditures.17 There are many critiques of George’s hypothesis, but his idea that private land owners should pay back for the gain in value resulting from public investment is one which has persisted in various forms over the subsequent century and have been succinctly summarized by urban economist and planner Rachelle Alterman.18 George’s tax fits within a broad category of public instruments known as value capture, or a type of policy designed to recover the value that public infrastructure generates for private landowners.19 Alterman describes George’s single tax as a type of direct value capture, or a public claim on private property. Lizzie Magie’s Landlord’s Game models an even more direct form of value capture through the nationalization of private property.20

More common in today’s late-capitalist political economy are nimble instruments that Alterman describes as indirect value capture. Indirect instruments are less visible than direct taxes or levies and are often negotiated on a context-specific, case-by-case basis.21 With such policies, public amenities may be built or financed by private landowners, often in the vicinity of the project. For example, incentive zoning is a process through which property developers provide a public benefit in exchange 95 for relaxed regulations or increased development rights. Development charges or privately owned public spaces are other examples.

The popularity of this strategy of using nimble tools for capturing land value for public good motivates our use of the game as a platform for dynamic negotiations between multiple players. While economists have tested the economic theories above using mathematical models, we propose to model the spatial conditions that accompany processes

17 Laurence Moss provides a historical overview of the critics and advocates of Georgist theory. The ambiguity of determining land value is a recurring theme. Laurence S. Moss ed., Henry George: Political Ideologue, Social Philosopher and Economic Theorist (New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell, 2008). More specifically see William Fischel,Zoning rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2015), 16-17. 18 Rachelle Alterman, “Land use regulations and property values: The ‘windfalls capture’ idea revisited,” in The Oxford Handbook of Urban Economics and Planning, eds. Nancy Brooks, Kieran Donaghy, and Gerrit-Jan Knaap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, (2012). 19 Ibid., 759. 20 Ibid., 762-765. 21 Ibid., 766, 775-776.

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A Boardof regionalGame speculation. About Our intent with Mallopolis is to simulate the Megalopolitanproduction ofUrbanization built form under the influence of changing land values, dynamic value capture, and planning processes.

Poor Sprawl George’s theories influenced some regional planning schemes at the time that cities began to sprawl in the late nineteenth century. To provide more affordable housing for workers, Ebenezer Howard conceived of “garden cities” to take advantage of the value difference between the city center and peripheral land. Housing could be built more affordably on lower value sites. Distinct from the speculative practices of private developers, however, the appreciated land value of Howard’s garden cities would be channeled through the township’s cooperative ownership toward public investment.22 Coupled with mandates to retain farmland around these townships, garden cities established a clear polycentric structure for London’s urban region. Howard’s regional plans, though, met a fate similar to that of Lizzie Magie’s board game, as its economic logic would be stripped of its equitable ambitions. In North America, the 96 cooperative, garden city model gave way to large-scale subdivisions, and the clear diagram of discrete townships would shift to more continuous forms of urbanization.

During the postwar years in North America suburbanization and decen- tralization persisted. Though the footprints of suburban buildings varied greatly, from single-family homes to shopping malls, the built form was a relatively undifferentiated low-rise fabric. It was at this time that the term “sprawl” was coined to describe the seemingly disordered and undifferentiated spread of urban space.23 Some years later Rem Koolhaas wrote an essay about how Atlanta, a quintessentially sprawled city, was a landscape of disordered dispersal.24 At about the same time, others observed a logic

22 Howard embraced Georgist Theory, though was wary of his negative characterization of landownership. Howard instead argued to empower workers to become collective landlords, or members of cooperative townships. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (Lemur Books, 2014), 113-131. 23 The term “sprawl” was coined in 1937 by Earle Draper. Thomas J. Nechyba, and Randall P, Walsh. “Urban sprawl.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, no. 4 (2004): 177-200. 24 Rem Koolhaas, SMLXL (New York: Ed. Monacelli, 1995); 832-860.

Thresholds 46 Scatter! Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00030 by guest on 24 September 2021 for sprawl that would influence its physical change. Joel Garreau provided empirical evidence for how that region, and others, were developing a latent polycentric structure that he named Edge Cities.25 Designers and planners in the 1990s saw this emergent form of polycentricity as an opportunity to reorganize urban regions into a series of dense mixed-use hubs also known as Transit Oriented Developments (TODs).26 Accompanying the idea of these TOD hubs came the redevelopment of many North American downtown cores and a recentering of the urban region.

Along with this recentering and polycentric restructuring, there has been a demographic shift complicating some of the ambitions such changes represent. Through most of the twentieth century, many lower-income residents lived in the downtowns of American cities. As city centers were redeveloped these residents relocated in large numbers to the suburbs.27 The 2010 US census showed that more residents who are below the offi- cial poverty line now live in the urban periphery than in the downtown of cities. TODs were imagined to provide service to lower-income suburban families that perhaps could not afford cars. In the context of regional land speculation, however, where developers seek profit from externali- 97 ties like transit stations, these new well serviced hubs have the effect of increasing property values and therefore rents. Thus, as several studies have shown, the lower-income residents for whom improved density and transit are primarily designed can rarely afford to live near them without subsidies.28 This phenomenon is playing out the Henry George Theorem at the scale of the megalopolitan region today.

25 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. (New York: Random House, 2011). 26 Robert Lang, Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003). 27 Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. (New York: Vintage, 2012). 28 Several studies conducted for different cities show this to be a recurring problem across North America. Sean Hertel, Roger Keil, Michael Collens, Switching Tracks: Towards transit equity in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (City Institute at York University, 2015), http://suburbs.apps01.yorku.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ Switching-Tracks_9-March-2015.pdf ; Rolf Pendall, Urban and Regional Policy and its Effects (Brooking Institution, 2012) http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt12632t ; Stephanie Pollack, Anna Gartsman, Jeff Wood,Oriented Toward Equity: A Rating System for Equitable Transit-Oriented Development, (Northeastern University Dukakis Center for Urban & Regional Policy, 2015), http://www.northeastern.edu/ dukakiscenter/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/NEU_eTOD_rprt_web.pdf.

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A BoardMixed-Bag Game AboutFutures MegalopolitanNot everybody Urbanization agrees that such a polycentric system of large hubs is the best form for North American urban regions. Some planners and theorists argue that new technological advances will render large-scale, property-inflating transit obsolete.29 Others have noted how the development that many planners hoped would migrate to TODs was in fact moving else- where.30 In any case, it seems clear that, unless a wholesale change in the economies of real estate occur, it will be unlikely that housing and other development will take place only in the city center and its satellite TOD hubs. The future of North American sprawl is likely to be a mixed bag.

The first iteration ofMallopolis is modeled on the Greater Toronto Area, a Canadian urban region that sprawls as much as those in the United States, but whose specific form of postwar planning has left traces of an underlying order. The city’s combination of comprehensive regional planning and permissive project-by-project development controls provides an ideal context to consider this kind of mixed-bag future. The game is organized by shopping malls, the commercial centers around which much suburban infill development has occurred. While malls were 98 overbuilt in the US resulting in many of their so-called deaths, in Toronto mall construction was limited to prevent overlap and redundancy in their catchment areas. As a result, the city’s malls have survived and served as the anchors for the location of public service and transit development across the region. In this context we have discerned a formal logic for urban sprawl that serves as a basis for the rule set of Mallopolis. With our game, malls, transit lines, and service amenities produce value on the game board. The goal is to assemble these parts to best serve the housing buildings that each player places in a given area on the board. The chal- lenge is to realize such equitable assemblies in the context of regional speculation.

To model the speculative processes of urbanization, the game board has a map of four value zones where players may place the different amenities

29 Alan Berger, “The Suburb of the Future Almost Here,” The New York Times (New York), Sept 15, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/sunday-review/future-suburb-millennials.html Accessed 31 October 31, 2017. 30 Robert Lang, Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).

Thresholds 46 Scatter! Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00030 by guest on 24 September 2021 $ A Good $ Bet From Bank $ $ $$ $ $ $ $$ $ $ $ $ $ $ + + +

= 0 Points = 3 Points = 5 Points +$150

1. Player builds Housing on low value site. 2. Transit is built to the Housing site. 3. A Mall is built: the Mall Catchment Zone now includes Housing and Transit.

At Pay Day, the Player receives $150.

A Bad Bet

To Bank $ $ $$ $ $ $ $$ $ $ $ $$ $

= 0 Points 0 Points 0 Points - $150 1. Player builds Housing on low value site. 2. Transit bypasses the Housing site. 3. A Mall is built but the Mall Catchment Zone does not include Housing. 99 At Tax Day, the Player pays out $150. Figure 5: A diagram of speculation or how to play Mallopolis, 2017, by Emma Dunn.

through the course of play (Figure 4). Like the practices of speculation that George critiques, players may bet on the expectation of future services by placing housing in unserved zones at a lower cost. If a mall, service building, or transit line is built nearby that housing later on in the game, its value will increase and that player will earn a profit. If a speculative bet fails, however, leaving residential buildings in unserved areas, the scoring structure penalizes that player in the end (Figure 5). Although the game never transcends the reality of speculation, it does seek to expose players to the consequences of a bad bet.

Mallopolis provides an open-ended environment to visualize the different spatial configurations that may result from its indirect system of value capture and particular geography of land value. We designed the rule set to operate like an open-ended planning structure that neverthe- less guides development towards a certain range of conclusions. In this

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A Boardway Game the game About elucidates the specificity and definition of urban sprawl Megalopolitanand possibly Urbanization offers insights into how one might imagine alternatives for the future of North American megalopolitan regions. The game is about the possibility of producing a coherent picture for such a sporadically constructed urban space.

Play Seriously Games are useful tools for modeling city building as they abstract and scale some of the complex mechanisms of city production and make them more tangible to a broader audience. As a didactic tool, they disseminate knowledge through experience rather than through textual explana- tion. Simply speaking, while Henry George explained the problem of monopoly, Lizzie Magie provided people with a participatory simulation of it. One presumes that with the Landlord’s Game, the frustration one experiences when another player has a monopoly was exactly the intent. Mallopolis simulates speculation and negotiation, exposing players to the game-like draw that it holds for property developers or the strategiz- ing thrill of public actors. 100 In his 1944 book, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga shows how play is more than an ancillary relief from the toils of everyday life, but can also be understood as an underlying characteristic of our unselfconscious cultural production. Huizinga finds the “play-character” in activities where one might expect to find it, such as sporting events or performances, but he also argues that a “play-element” belies some of the seemingly serious aspects of human life. The theatrics of a lawsuit, the ceremony of religion, and the tit-for-tat of commercial exchange, for example, all bear some quality of play. Such serious activities as real estate, for example, can in certain circumstances be understood as a game.31 His book endeavors to define transitional moments where “play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play,”32 not- ing that self-consciousness of intent acts a primary trigger for the switch. Huizinga’s theory underlines the power of play as a vehicle for dissemi- nating social realities thanks to the very presence of play within them.

31 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture. Trans. by RFC Hull. (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 5. 32 Ibid., 8.

Thresholds 46 Scatter! Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00030 by guest on 24 September 2021 Mallopolis immerses players in the game-like exchanges of real estate and exposes them to the serious consequences of speculation. Importantly, though, with this critical experience that mirrors the exist- ing city, the game also has a rule set that deviates from the seemingly messy reality of speculation and its piecemeal processes of tax or fee collection. The object of the game is not to make more money, but rather to score points by making sure residents have access to commerce, transit, and service. This potential of the play environment—at once real and imagined—suggests that a game might serve as more than a didactic tool, also providing a medium through which players visualize alternative futures embedded in the constructs of a given system.

Mallopolis It may be naive in our capitalist political economy to propose plans that are as sweeping as George’s Single Tax, but that doesn’t mean that the ambitions behind such plans should, or have, altogether ceased. Some cities have financial tools that indirectly capture the appreciated value of property created by public investment for public good. Such instruments 101 may not yet contribute to a more equitable or perceived common space of the city, but understanding the relationship between these economic tools and the logic of physical space that they help pay for provides a way for designers and planners to engage in debates about their future. Games provide a means to simulate these kinds of conditions, particularly in those contexts where city building and public action take place indirectly or incrementally. We are designing Mallopolis to elucidate some of the logics behind the seemingly random actions that constitute market-based city building today, to visualize the spatial products of such actions—and in doing so, to identify potential opportunities for their reinvention.

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