Playing out Tough Decisions in Urban Planning History: Cross Bronx Expressway
In 1980, New York City government workers began applying vinyl decals to the windows of more than five hundred abandoned apartment buildings throughout the Bronx. Depicting half-open shades and louvered shutters, the stickers were to provide a “lived-in look” and boost neighborhood morale as the city awaited federal rehabilitation funds. Instead, they symbolized America’s crumbling urban housing and the failure of (depending on one’s viewpoint) government, the private sector, or residents themselves to address those conditions. Yet the Bronx was always more complicated than the dystopian stereotypes in the national news and films like Fort Apache, The Bronx.
Cross Bronx Expressway, to be published by GMT Games in 2024, explores the circumstances and decisions that led the South Bronx from a poor but stable multiethnic neighborhood in the 1940s through its 1980s nadir to what scholar Jill Jonnes calls a “resurrection” at the end of the twentieth century. The game’s designer, Non-Breaking Space, (or NB, a pseudonym to keep his personal and professional life distinct from his design identity) lived in the Bronx for over two decades, witnessing many of the events covered in the game.
Figure 1. Prototype game board for Cross Bronx Expressway set up to begin the 1965 scenario. Courtesy Non-Breaking Space.
Cross Bronx Expressway extends game mechanics developed for GMT’s counter-insurgency (COIN) series. COIN games highlight the military, political, economic, religious, and social factors that shape asymmetrical struggles, from the Gallic revolt against the Roman Empire (Falling Sky) to the decolonization of British India (Gandhi). They feature different factions, each with its own actions and victory conditions, vying for power, legitimacy, financial resources, and territory. A faction may assist another to further shared goals, but ultimately only one can win.
Players of Cross Bronx Expressway assume responsibility for one of three factions. The “community” player represents residents, small property and business owners, nonprofits, and gangs. Community succeeds by increasing activism, social coalitions, and self-determination; meeting social needs; and protecting its population from the correctional system. Government and public service entities like social workers and police are represented by the “public” faction. It must increase quality of life and protect the city’s solvency and reputation. The “private” faction takes up the interests of developers, banks, businesses, and large property owners. To win, it builds a workforce and economic coalitions, and ensures a consistent revenue stream and the predominance of private enterprise. Each turn players undertake actions — building physical and organizational infrastructure, taking out loans, paying off bonds — that help their faction realize its vision for the South Bronx’s future.
“Players have to make difficult decisions about the allocation of limited energies and resources and choose between short term triage and long-term stabilization.”
Figure 2. Prototype event card for Cross Bronx Expressway. Courtesy Non-Breaking Space.
At its core, the game (like much of urban governance) is about balancing self-interest and collaboration. The draft rule book describes it as “a socio-economic simulation in which the competing factions must manage their resources to achieve their goals while mitigating the societal effects of their decisions.” If two organizations are placed in the same locale, they become an economic or social coalition that increases the area’s strength and resilience. The game ends early with all factions losing if the number of “vulnerable” population lost to the prison system exceeds a specified limit. It also ends in a collective loss if the public and community factions go too far into debt, bankrupting the city. Recognizing that power and resources are not equally distributed in the Bronx, the game prompts each faction, as explained to me by NB, “to learn when and how to use what power they have first just to avoid losing. Only then can they think about their individual chance to win.”
The game presents South Bronx history (including construction of its namesake highway) as exemplary of postwar urban processes and conflicts beyond just New York. The designer’s stated influences include Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Kim Phillips-Fine’s Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, and Jonnes’ South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. Players become familiar with the history through an overview in an accompanying playbook and through contextual text on ninety event cards. More direct engagement emerges when players see the South Bronx from a factional perspective that may be far removed from their lived experience. When they act as a city official dealing with debt and scarcity, or as a property developer concerned about a diminishing investment, or as residents determined to protect their homes, players have to make difficult decisions about the allocation of limited energies and resources and choose between short term triage and long-term stabilization. According to NB, “When you start making decisions yourself, you see why a historical decision was made.”
Figure 3. Prototype event card for Cross Bronx Expressway. Courtesy Non-Breaking Space.
As attested in the new collection Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space from which this article is adapted, all games reflect the cultural environment from which they emerge. In recent decades, the United States has begun to grapple more fully with the legacy of the historical decisions that left the Bronx, like much of urban America, in rough shape. Hilary Ballon’s 2007 exhibition and book reassessed the reputation of city official Robert Moses as monolith and monster. Graduate programs at University of Oregon and University of Minnesota have partnered with local organizations to examine the heritage of marginalized communities impacted by postwar renewal and highway projects in Portland and South Minneapolis. A growing number of U.S. cities have committed to repairing the injury these projects caused to the socioeconomic, infrastructural, and cultural well-being of the communities involved. Cross Bronx Expressway, the game, can contribute to such conversations and help forge deeper understandings of how cities evolved, what choices were available to the players involved, and why they chose the moves they made.
Author’s note: This article is adapted from Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space, edited by Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky, published by The MIT Press. Copyright © 2023 MIT. All rights reserved.
Citation
Chad Randl, “Playing out Tough Decisions in Urban Planning History: Cross Bronx Expressway,” PLATFORM, Aug. 28, 2023
