Two decades ago, in 2006, Vincent Ocasla, a Filipino architecture student, began designing a city intended to fulfil a single wish: to accommodate as many people as possible and to endure. His tools came from the game ‘SimCity 3000’, which gave the player a virtual city and almost unlimited power over its development. A few years later, the experiment took the form of Magnasanti – a radically regular megastructure in which space and infrastructure were subordinated to the overriding logic of optimisation.

Seen from above, Magnasanti may appear to fulfil many an urban planner’s dream: a compact, efficient, perfectly organised city, capable of accommodating millions of residents and functioning almost indefinitely. Repetitive modules form an ornamental pattern, and chaos gives way to order. However, the system’s efficiency comes at a price. What appears rational and effective from the perspective of the masterplan turns out, when viewed from the standpoint of an individual resident, to be far from a good life.

After all, our aspirations for cities usually sound reasonable. We want them to be better connected, more accessible and safer. Each of these desires, however, clashes with other needs, interests and constraints, which the virtual city allows us to set aside for a moment, whilst testing radical ideas almost as if in a laboratory. Magnasanti does not faithfully replicate the city – paradoxically, it is precisely for this reason that it more clearly illustrates the consequences of subordinating the city’s complexity to a single overarching principle. One need only take a well-intentioned wish too literally for utopia and dystopia to begin to look surprisingly similar.

The exhibition transposes this perspective from the city plan to the scale of a single flat. Its space becomes the speculative interior of one of Magnasanti’s millions of flats. Rather than viewing the city from the privileged perspective of a player who sees the whole picture and controls the parameters, we attempt to see it from within – from a place where virtual urban planning would have to become someone’s everyday reality. How does our conception of the ideal city change when, instead of looking at its plan, we try to live in it?

We are organising this exhibition in collaboration with the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław.