Suncity

Project Description

Communication between the world and the sun, the most ancient friendship, is hampered by human and human productions. New urbanization methods and architectural researches should be developed to keep this communication constant. Along with SunCity, these new methods are continually researched and produced. The game raises awareness of the importance of daylight for the players.

The city is a mutualist way of life. Each building has the right to receive sufficient light and protects the right of other buildings' daylight accessibility. The buildings keep the general interest of the city in their interest. If current trends continue, the global population will peak at 11 billion in 2100 which causing to dense and rapid urbanization. Apart from illegal settlements, regulations of zoning law do not contain adequate regulations of daylight access. Access to the sunlight is crucial to have passive heating of buildings and improve the comfort conditions of people, However, cumulative structuring is resulting in blocking the sunlight to enter the buildings, streets, and public spaces. Healthier societies and living spaces require adequate daylight access for each living and artificial things.

SunCity Suncity is a ‘massively multiplayer online/real-time strategy game’ that is challenging the players with creating cities and architectural forms to access equal daylight for cities against the rapid population growth and urbanization. The game experiments the dynamics of planning and architecture to the players and raise awareness about the light rights of buildings in the city. Each game is resulting in primitive design proposals of future city scenarios with a unique combination of forms. The game universe contains planet sunlight and a star that has the earth and sun features and relationships. Planet sunlight contains 32 cities with different geographical features. Each city is available for 5 players at the same time. Players can quit and involve the game through empty slots while the cities are constantly evolving to get adequate daylight for the specific requirements and given challenges of each city. Each city has 400 square blocks (20x20) to be build to populate the required number of people while creating adequate park/public spaces and roads to access to each building blocks. Each block contains 25 units (5x5) and each unit populates a person.

Sun as the sculptor The game allows generating urban rules consistent with the climate context and needs of shading and sunlight for a given region. Sun/daylight is the main concern of the form-finding process in the game. Players are challenged with optimization of the required daylight access for each building and the city as a whole. With the help of the sun diagram panel in the interface of the game, players can always check the areas that are in the solar field or shadow. The solar diagram shows the player the daily and yearly sun path for the specific city.

Use build and carve tool to distribute daylight throughout the city. After joining a city in planet sunlight, players can start shaping the city to create equal daylight access throughout the city with the build and carving tools from the game set. Build tool has different building blocks with different daylight transmittance rates. Carve tool involves blocks such as parks, roads or supporting scaffold to create empty areas and gaps between building blocks and allow daylight to pass through. Players can build or carve with three different impact areas of 1 block, 9 blocks(3x3), and 25 blocks(5x5). Different ranges allow the player to build in the city planning scale and also architectural scale.

Negotiations between city boundaries In the edges of the cities, 3 block space offsets are under the control of the cities that is intersected. These common blocks can be built with the negotiations of the players.

Future City Scenarios The game creates outcomes of the involving cities throughout the process to create an exhibition of city patterns and architectural forms built by the players. Visitors or players can join the form-finding investigation of the daylight exhibition.

Rules and Challenges 1. The main challenge is to create adequate daylight usage in each bock in the city. City-specific sunlight requirements should be considered to create the optimization in the daylight accessibility. 2. Players should populate the required and growing number of people in the city. If carved a habitable block, the player should build it somewhere else instead. 3. Players should build the required number of parking blocks. These parks can be places on the ground or the building blocks. 4. Each site is specified with different landscapes and dynamics to challenge the players that would either create gaps to allows the daylight to come easier or create blockages. 5. Players should negotiate with the intersecting cities for the common blocks and define an arterial road in the city to be connected to the intersecting cities’ arterial roads.