I noticed over the weekend that my local London authority needs to provision 2,000 extra school places over coming years. Yes, you did read that right: 2,000 extra places. Set this alongside several weekends of local traffic gridlock and Tube trains too full to get onto (and at times, believe me, you wouldn't want to try anyway) and you begin to wonder what's going on.

The answer seems self-evident. The policy of so-called "brownfield" development has stuffed thousands of extra flats and apartments into the already over-heated part of the economy referred to as "London and the South East". An already busy, highly populated region has seen land that was previously used for light industry and open land for local use repurposed into residential accommodation.

The detrimental impacts are becoming clear to see.

But is anyone really surprised by this outcome? It seems fairly predictable surely that if you squeeze more and more people into the same overall area, you will soon witness more and more people moving in, bringing with them their cars, family aspirations and the need to commute to work (whether by private or public transport). And yet all around London and the South East there are still signs on nearly every vacant plot indicating that yet more flats and apartments will be built.

In my 2006 blog "Better than reality? Synthetic environments for real world people" I wrote:

Can policymakers learn from games? I think so - or, to be more formal, they can certainly learn from synthetic environments.

Programmes like Sim City seem more grounded in the real world at times than actual urban and rural decision-making. At least in Sim City you can't build new housing without investing first in other necessary infrastructure such as power stations, roads, public transport, parks and other recreational facilities, hospitals, schools and so on.

The concept of "serious games" may sound a tautology, but the UK has already has a Serious Games Institute in Coventry which runs events looking at the impact of virtual and immersive technologies upon government processes and policies.

At Microsoft we're developing the potential for simulated environments through our ESP initiative, which includes the potential for visualising outcomes, plans, and design specifications in 3D for better-informed decision making and R&D modelling.

I can't help thinking that it's long overdue for local planning to be more systematic in the way the existing evidential base is used to inform simulations of the way our neighbourhoods, communities and regions function in response to planning decisions. Technology of course won't on its own have a magic answer, but it certainly has the capability to better inform and support the decision making processes and avoid the types of foreseeable problems now impacting on London and the South East.

When even games like Sim City do a better job of showing the fall-out of simplistic planning policies (such as building residential accommodation on so-called brownfield sites without assessing the onward impacts) it's essential we have a better understanding of the role technology can play in helping us build better, more sustainable communities.

Technology is no longer something that we can use merely in support of better operational and administrative processes, but something that impacts the very art of policymaking itself.

Or, at least, it should be ...

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