In class today we did an activity called the SymbioCity City Development Game. What this game was about was creating a city of our own. Everybody's initial city had the same problems. Some of those problems were waste buildup, water contamination, and landfill. So above the spots of our city that were being affected, we had to click on the small exclamation points and read about the arising problems. Next we had to click on city plan solutions and we were given a budget of 42,000 dollars. Without exceeding the limit we had to try to fix our problems by choosing what we thought was best. The purpose of doing this experiment was to see how these real life problems can be solved and seeing the progress we were making through every decision we chose.
Some challenges I never heard of were of urban sprawl. Which is city growing at an uncontrollable manner causing city segregation. Another challenge I had heard of but did not know that much of was the growing landfill. Many lands that could be used for something else, are contaminated by all the waste piling up. Also how it may end up getting burned so the city could have more room. I think a challenge Boston has currently is polluted air. I think a lot of cities have that problem rather than just Boston. The reason behind this is that cities are naturally busy and there is a lot of ways of transportation. And with a majority of people moving around, it takes a toll on the air due to all the cars and buses. A challenge I think that is most important is growing landfill. I think its important for us to expand and make use of the land, but keeping it piled up with a lot of trash is not effective. Although it keeps the mess out of our city, its just making a bigger mess over in other places. Ways to reduce this is definitely recycling and using our products for as long as we can.
