Second Life/Urban Studies?

Could Second Life be a effective teaching tool for an urban studies course? I found that although Second Life may be able to be a teaching aid generally, that it does not incorporate any urban issues. Examples of urban issues that could relate to a urban studies course would include: a city center (althoguh transport centers kinda provide this function), a transportation network, some sort of governing law, zoning/building codes/ordinanaces,etc.) population patterns within the city,(does this "city" exist)? If anyone has some time or insight I would greatly appreciate it!

Katherine, sociologists, economists and legal scholars are examining various MMOG systems to learn about emergent behavior of the kind you mention, and are doing some work on how folks will interact in online systems. Much of this work is just starting to trickle down to particular MMOGs.

I believe that you can use SL as a teaching tool. Linden Lab does have some requirements if residents are using SL in research or for a class or school study, to preserve the privacy of residents.

There are also numerous examples in SL of the consequences of uncontrolled land usage and deliberate use of annoying behavior to drive out residents so that the annoyers can buy their land cheap. Sounds like the Salem witch hunt or "ethnic cleansing," doesn't it?

Just in the last few weeks, the Law Society of Second Life was formed to objectively examine the forms of governance, contracting and dispute resolution emerging in SL. We've already begun work on figuring out a few "challenges" as well as documenting some workable "solutions."

For example, a group of residents have organized a municipal government structure (Neualtenburg) that occupies one 64-acre "sim" that is a representation of a modern European city with medieval heritage structures and a city center with public buildings. Neualtenburg provides a democratic republican form of self-government, zoning restricitions, municipal debt structuring and regular financial accounting. A summary analysis of its structure is in the Law Society forum.

Another Law Society Observer, Spengler Roo, may be involving a college student group in the examination of several forms of self-government in SL, during the coming semester, reporting out in May. Spengler mentioned this in the open forum, so I'm not revealing any confidences by mentioning it. You may want to compare notes with Spengler. If you search the forums using his name, you'll find his profile page with a link to send him a private message.

You can read more about the Law Society in its group forum. A link is in the last line of this message.

SL as is seems to mostly have a suburban character to me; quick and easy transportation to desired areas, cheap property away from those areas. There isn't much in the way of cultural and architectural homogenisation (not down to those factors anyway) but there's the same sense that each individual development was dropped from the moon and has little to do with the surroundings, compounded by the ability of people to build whatever they feel most comfortable with. No local centres for people to meet, no common areas.

More advertising in these areas than in RL suburban areas though, which do have ordinances and zoning and so on - and the social implications are different as well. I do feel a little like I did living in the US suburbs though in that I don't have a clue who my neighbours are (apart from that some of them are bloody land spammers).

Katherine, you mention the notion of a city center. LL set up four city sims, collectively called Nova Albion. They are Miramare, Barcola, Grignano and Sistiana. City sims have dense LL infrastructure such as walkways and canals and bridges. The way the land is platted suggests that LL envisioned fine-scale dense highrise construction there. Landowners in the city sims get a double prim allotment, which tends to attract those who are serious about architecture and good design.

If you're new to SL this won't be very meaningful, so I'd suggest talking to some of the committed residents of the city sims. Some have been improving their land in these dense urban sims for more than a year. Others have moved in more recently, and are contributing site-specific new construction that complements the best of the existing built environment. I've just arrived in Miramare, drawn there by the interesting combination of sleek sculptural skyscrapers and ground-oriented shops with real character. The urban plaza (public gathering space, not a mall) I'm constructing will be complemented by a slender highrise continuing the rough stone of the plaza, complemented by architectural detail in that sleek vernacular used by my neighbors.

If you visit Miramare please click Edit/Preferences/Graphics and check the box for Shiny Objects. You'll have to restart, but it's worth doing in order to see the best of Miramare as those builders intended. You'll also see generic buildings that look like many in various sims, but Miramare is gradually tranforming as people acquire more skill, and build a new improved version of what they own. It's an evolving community, and no single person has outlined a vision of where the sim is heading; we just cooperate, and we're going somewhere!

The sim of Grignano is home to a resident urban planner who has implemented his vision extensively, making that city sim a friendly, architecturally coherent gathering place including an art gallery and an active photography group. You'll find warm brick surfaces, midrise scale, and lots of amenities. Grignano has a real sense of place. I don't know much about the other two city sims, but a good rule of thumb is to do the field work -- find a building that arrests your attention, and click on it to find the name of the creator. That's the person to IM for insight.

I've just covered the four city sims, but you might find the suburban sims interesting too. Ingrid Ingersoll and Barnesworth Anubis have put a lot of work into Boardman, and could give you much information. All these efforts have one thing in common: they are enduring community efforts, not a land developer scheme or the vision of one person who buys a sim and runs it.

Oh boy, it's always nice to see another urban studies/planning/design person in here (Urban PLanning undergrad here)

Anyways, to answer some of your questions...

SL is a unique environment in that it doesn't really need any sort of transportation, except that which is for pleasure (hot air balloons, race cars, and the like). Right now, there is a system of teleportation "bus stops" called Telehubs, that were supposed to act as a sort of de-facto zoning/commercial aggregator. When someone wants to go to a place, they first get teleported to a Telehub, and then they have to fly/walk/run/race the rest of the way there, perhaps up to a kilometer away.

While it sounded good on paper, the Telehubs became, essentially, digital slums; commercial megamalls flocked to the place, designing draconian buildings to trap users in while they were being downloaded around them. The lag around them was usually atrocious. Yet, land values were highest around Telehubs, without any actual concrete evidence that TH land actually increased sales or traffic.

In the coming weeks, LLab is doing away with the Telehubs, and replacing them with more public, civic architecture (at least in theory). They're actually open to designs from residents living around these telehubs to fit in with the community (hint hint, builders).

Anyways, so we don't have much of a need for transportation.

Zoning is usually poo-pooed away, and probably rightly so; it gets complicated to zone when you have an equal chance of a castle, a dungeon, a skyscraper, or a small house being rezzed next to you.

Governing law = the Terms of Service and Community Standards.

The City, nominally, is Nova Albion, which is currently neglected west of the welcoming area.

If you'd like to discuss this stuff further, please IM me in-world

This is a good question, one that connects to ongoing discussions, re: What is Second Life?

SL is urban in spirit. Despite visible lack of RL urban fixtures like transportation, zoning, density or policy that might adjudicate these sorts of things, I find that Second Life nevertheless renders up some of the substance of a modern global city. Here you have competing and often disparate ideals/ideas about urban form, economy, conduct and accountability. What it lacks in diversity -- it's no Hong Kong or Toronto, I can assure you -- it makes up for in the intensity of its community.

So once you get past the literal differences, I would argue that SL is essentially urban, insofar as everything happens here within a prescribed set of boundaries, and there is real interdependence, both economically and socially. One indication of the city-ness of SL is the multitude of disputes and debates -- some petty, some not -- which tend to shape and define cities in RL. Here too is lament about suburbanization (new sims anyone?), transportation (teleporting, etc.), crime (griefers, very current question) and overall rules and policy (should there be zoning options, does everything need to be either private or protected?), not to mention ongoing sniping about favoritism, complaints about neighbors, rumors of new developments, etc. that resemble what you might hear at a RL city hall on any given day.

Conversely, I would argue that SL still lacks the civil society and non-governmental institutions that make RL cities and governments truly great. Non-profits, public service organizations, cultural/arts institutions, etc. are yet scarce, tho they do exist and I'm sure people would provide their own list of worthy third-sector groups and projects in SL, perhaps in a separate thread. (Scarcity in SL civitas is partially because existing developer incentives favor gross traffic numbers, not diversity in outcomes, a related issue of virtual policy.) So in this sense, SL shares less with modern RL cities and more with newly-democratizing countries, places that are still politically young and learning how to cultivate social capital, economic diversity and cultural depth.

I think it has been said elsewhere: SL is more of a city-state than a virtual country, since its orientation is highly local, it lacks democratic governance and comprehensive policy process, plus all of the points mentioned above. Especially inter-dependance and interaction -- there are no sole agents in SL, no independent citizens here.