If you were to ask me to name my favorite things growing up, there is no doubt that the list would include LEGO bricks and SimCity. Well, it turns out that these two things can be even better when combined: there is a wonderful subculture of people who build LEGO cities at micro-scale, such as the impressive Shannonia.

I decided to explore these constructions, as well as what they mean for how cities grow and develop in a recent piece for The Atlantic Cities:

But these sorts of creations (successful or not) raise an interesting question: how do we make sure that these cities look city-like? When we construct a city in SimCity, it has a historical path to it. We don't just say "I want to build midtown Manhattan." You first have to build a small town, make sure it functions properly, and then slowly grow it, adding bit by bit. You are making choices based on the city as it is, with all of its problems and virtues, from financial difficulties and crime sprees, to available land. The resulting city often has an organic nature to it -- a bit haphazard with that "city feel" -- as opposed to looking like it was constructed whole cloth.

This is known as path dependence, where one’s current state is highly dependent on where one came from, and the decisions one has made along the way. Essentially, the state of the system is dependent on its path through the space of possible states. Choosing where to start on a map, for example, or in which direction to expand, can have important implications.

And it led me to procedural city generation:

Whether in the world of LEGO, or even the virtual world, there are tricks to create systems that have the feel of cities. This involves techniques derived from the world of computer graphics, and it's known as "procedural city generation." If you want to make a complicated city map, but don’t want to draw it by hand, or define it explicitly, there are a variety of ways to procedurally—or, algorithmically—generate a map, or the structure of a building, or a skyline.

Read the rest of the piece here.

Top image:Sonny Abesamis/Flickr/CC