2 July 2016 – by Geoff Manaugh SimCity it ain’t. Soviet City takes city-building simulations in an interesting, if slightly ominous, new direction. Updating SimCity for an era of militant sleeper cells, colour-co-ordinated terror warnings and anonymised civilian unrest, the game’s ultimate goal is not to protect its virtual citizenry from harm, but rather to maintain an acceptable level of unease. If the game’s eponymous city becomes too safe, the player’s job will be at risk, an administrative role made redundant. Yet if things utterly fall apart, the player – not to mention their digital population – will lose. The incentives in Soviet City, which reward an ethically dubious stalemate between safety and disorder, freedom and repression, have interesting implications for how we understand and model cities in the first place. Simulations can change how we think about the real world. What we choose to include – and omit – says much about our biases and preconceptions. And Soviet City reveals more about what really goes into urban planning and management than most city sims. In an essay about the game’s approach to architecture, games writer David Rudin argues that Soviet City straddles two competing images of the Soviet-era metropolis. It neither resorts to the clichés of so-called ruin porn by basking in scenes of dereliction and architectural abandonment for their own sake, nor does it fall prey to a lazy romanticising of a communist utopia that never was. Instead, Soviet City repackages the idealism of central planning with a strong undercurrent of insurgency to instigate a carefully engineered political stasis. As a player, your goal is purgatory, not paradise. “You play as a central planner tasked with keeping the populace in line and the government’s five-year plans on track,” Rudin writes. But unlike SimCity, say, becoming mayor of a perfect metropolis is not the aim. “A certain amount of volatility is desirable. Your goals as a planner are not perfectly aligned with those of your citizens or your overlords.” A critique of a game might at first seem like a trivial way to arrive at this observation, but Soviet City reveals something intriguing: what we choose to include in our models and incentivise in our urban simulations is an inherently political act. Indeed, every city is a tissue of competing interests. The police, artists, entrepreneurs, renters, families, students: from the perspective of each group, any city succeeds or fails for reasons that are often in direct conflict with another group’s needs or expectations. In this sense, any city is already a game, as a strategic landscape navigated using tactics directed towards particular goals. All the content from this weekís magazine, including this article, is available in the new app. Hidden within these observations is the idea that modelling the behaviour and expectations of different, often competing groups – that is, treating the city as if it were a game – can reveal new and more effective ways to govern. Far from a distracting or frivolous way to spend time, urban simulation games are in fact valuable tools for anticipating future conflicts of interest, impending moral risks, and even crises of infrastructure. Governing is gaming, we might say. SimCity remains the go-to reference for all urban simulation games. First released in 1989, the title has also become popular shorthand for particularly detailed acts of urban planning. When ambitious tweaks to a city’s budget are announced or aggressive alterations to its policing strategy enacted, it is not uncommon to hear that the authorities are playing SimCity with people’s lives. Every simulation betrays the biases and interests of the people who create it. This point was made amusingly clear when I spoke to SimCity designer Stone Librande in 2013, after the release of the most recent iteration in the series. According to Librande, the original idea was to model real cities. But he says: “We quickly realised there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.” So car parks were cut. Creating an enjoyable game was just not compatible with modern parking requirements. Soviet City, however, not only goes out of its way to include things that other sims leave aside – such as terrorist cells and organised crime – but encourages players to manage such things with an openly dubious sense of compromised morality. The simulation deliberately steps away from any sort of utopian promise into something darker and less alluring. And with this off-the-shelf dystopianism, the game becomes far more realistic. Soviet City has much in common with the game Prison Architect, which developer Introversion Software describes as “an enthralling tale of corruption and human misery set against the background of the modern prison industrial complex”. Prison Architect grew out of the abandoned city-simulation game Subversion, evolving into a peculiar fantasy land of endless incarceration and workplace logistics. But here, too, we butt up against what the game does not represent. As games critic Will Partin writes for website Kill Screen, Prison Architect offers no insights into the role of race in the US criminal justice system, nor how ethnicity might play out in the complex power struggles between prisoners, other prisoners, and their guards. These omissions are instructive precisely for the things they reveal about what we prioritise in our urban models, with implications that reveal first-hand the moral complications of urban governance. Perhaps, then, city-simulation games are important less for their entertainment value and more for being, in a sense, as real as real life: not everyone can win. Source link

The government claims that its new steel procurement guidelines are already have an impact, with almost all reinforcing steel bar in the UK now sourced domestically. Above: Steel for Scotland’s Queensferry Crossing comes from China, Poland and Spain but none from the UK Imports of reinforcing steel bar in January 2016 were down 99% on January 2015, it said. In October 2015 new procurement guidelines came into effect to encourage greater use of UK steel. All central government departments must now consider the social and economic impact of the steel they source across all major projects. Public procurements that involve the supply of steel are now required to consider responsible sourcing, the training that suppliers give to their workforce, carbon footprint, protecting the health and safety of staff and the social integration of disadvantaged workers. The aim was to help save the UK steel industry by providing public procurement officers with a reason not to take lower costs bids from overseas, and particularly from China. These guidelines have now been extended from central government departments to the entire public sector. Cabinet Office minister Matt Hancock, in charge of public procurement policy, said: “We are going further than ever before to support British steel. Taxpayers spend billions of pounds buying steel for public projects. Last year we changed the rules across all central government procurement to ensure buyers take into account the true value of British steel – including local impact and jobs. “The industry is responding positively to this so I want to go further. Now we will apply this guidance across the public sector so that, from operating theatres to new buildings, public sector buyers will need to consider social and economic benefits, alongside value for money. When public bodies buy steel they must taking account of the true value of buying British.” However, it all seems to be too little too late with the announcement last week that Tata Steel was selling its UK operations because it is no longer prepared to sustain losses of £1m a day. The Port Talbot plant is now heading for closure, with thousands of jobs at risk. Trying to deflect blame for any responsibility that it might have for the collapse of UK industry, the government said that 96% of Network Rail’s steel (120,000 tonnes a year) and 85% of Crossrail’s steel (7,000 tonnes) came from Tata Steel in Scunthorpe. It was also keen to highlight that Tata Steel supplied 40,000 tonnes of steel for HMS Queen Elizabeth and developed new grades of lighter and stronger steel specifically for the future flagship of the Royal Navy. Tata Steel is also booked to supply steel for the second carrier, HMS Prince of Wales. However, precisely none of the 37,200 tonnes of steel being used to construct Scotland’s new bridge across the Forth, the Queensferry Crossing, comes from the UK. On this project, 4,200 tonnes of steel has come from Gdasnk, 8,500 tonnes is from Seville and 24,500 tonnes is from Shanghai. The Scottish government transport minister Keith Brown has said that he was “content that proposals for sourcing steel represent best value for money for the public purse”. [See our previous report here.]       This article was published on 4 Apr 2016 (last updated on 4 Apr 2016). Source link

Focus Consultants has been appointed on a major national framework to supply consultancy services in leisure, culture and tourism, as well as asset management and delivery. The position on the ESPO 664-17 framework will run until April 2019 with an option to extend for a further two years until April 2021. It means that public-sector clients, registered charities and social housing providers in the UK can procure services from Focus in the knowledge that the procurement process has already been carried out in a professional manner, avoiding the need for a full tender process when searching for suppliers – saving them time and money. The ESPO 664-17 framework is the eighth framework that Focus is currently appointed on. “As well as working in the private sector, the teams at Focus Consultants work extensively across the public sector – providing specialist services to councils, charities and other organisations,” said Focus partner Heather Frecklington. “Our services are unique – ranging from funding support, feasibility studies, commercial reviews and economic development through to evaluations, maintenance, management and delivery, and rationalisation and remodelling – and we have worked with a huge range of clients from internationally known museums and high-profile UK arts organisations through to local councils and small heritage projects. “The appointment on the ESPO framework means that it is easier for clients to procure our services in the field of leisure, culture and tourism, as well as in asset management and delivery, and allows Focus, as a company, to potentially reach out to a wider client base. “We are delighted to have been appointed to this framework – the eighth that we are now on – as it recognises and confirms our skills and professional services in these areas, and is an endorsement of our expertise.” Focus Consultants is based at Phoenix Business Park, Nottingham, and has offices in London, Leicester and Boston in Lincolnshire. It specialises in creative approaches to securing funding packages and delivering high quality projects across the UK. Since its creation in 1994, Focus has helped to secure more than £953 million of grant assistance for a range of projects and businesses across the UK and delivered more than £1.3 billion of projects and programmes – making it one of the most successful companies of its kind. The firm has worked with many well-known organisations including the V&A Museum, the Science Museum and the National Army Museum. It is currently project managing the £44million Devonshire Quarter redevelopment scheme in Eastbourne. In the East Midlands, the company has played a role in a number of high-profile projects such as the Sky Mirror in Nottingham and the Curve in Leicester, and is involved currently in the refurbishment of the Theatre Royal and Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham and was a member of the team redeveloping the newly re-opened Bridgford Hall near Nottingham- the first completed project in the East Midlands to benefit from a Heritage Enterprise Grant. ESPO (Eastern Shires Purchasing Organisation), based in Leicestershire, is a public sector owned organisation committed to helping customers achieve the best results by practice in procurement, sourcing, supply chain partner support and management and contract management. The 664-17 framework is fully compliant with UK/OJEU procurement legislation, where all providers listed are assessed prior to being accepted onto the framework. For more information, please visit www.focus-consultants.com