“This is how you can shape a metropolis for generations”

[Image: Robert Moses, via Wikipedia].

I’ve been meaning to post about this since I first heard about it: a competition to design a game based on Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

As Tim Hwang of the Infrastructure Observatory writes, “we are launching a competition that challenges game designers to adapt The Power Broker into a playable, interactive form that preserves the flavor and themes of the written work, while leveraging the unique opportunities the game medium provides.” They are “seeking submissions both in a video game category, as well in a separate tabletop game category.”

Although I am obviously already biased toward game-creation as a form of urban analysis, the possibilities here are incredibly interesting. If you missed Gothamist’s great interview with Robert Caro, meanwhile, it’s well worth reading, serving as an engagingly free-wheeling introduction to Caro’s now-classic book, including several damning insights into how Moses abused infrastructural design as a new form of political power.

“Moses came along with his incredible vision,” Caro explains, for example, “and vision not in a good sense. It’s like how he built the bridges too low.”

I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways.
Then he had this quote, and I can still [hear] him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.
We used Jones Beach a lot, because I used to work the night shift for the first couple of years, so I’d sleep til 12 and then we’d go down and spend a lot of afternoons at the beach. It never occurred to me that there weren’t any black people at the beach.
So [my wife] Ina and I went to the main parking lot, that huge 10,000-car lot. We stood there with steno pads, and we had three columns: Whites, Blacks, Others. And I still remember that first column —there were a few Others, and almost no Blacks. The Whites would go on to the next page. I said, God, this is what Robert Moses did. This is how you can shape a metropolis for generations.

You have until April 29th to register for the game-design competition; you can find more information on the competition website.