“Today, thanks to ever more sophisticated software, urban planning itself has increasingly come to resemble a SimCity-style public-policy game. Since the game’s debut, the maturing technology known as Geographical Information Systems (GIS)–software for synthesizing database, mapping, and modeling data–has supplanted the paper blueprint roll as the urban planner’s dominant tool, enabling planners to map over a geographic region everything from gas lines to transit systems to weather patterns. But it’s not just professionals who have their hands on the technology.”