'Managers' Use Computers To Learn City Techniques

About 60 people at the Law School are playing a computer game this weekend to develop skills for managing modern cities.

Law school students, city planners, and professors from the University of Michigan, are participating in APEX-a computer game-which will simulate pollution problems in Lansing, Michigan and permit the group to make decisions and witness the results.

To play the game, each person assumes a management role, such as politician, city planner, air pollution control officer, industrialist, or real estate developer. Using data supplied by the computer-which simulates the physical, economic, and political environment of Lansing and offers policy alternatives-the players make decisions concerning a wide range of urban problems.

The decisions, which effect one year of simulated change in Lansing, are then fed into the computer which, within two hours, informs the players of the consequences of their actions.

After five decision cycles, the game will end. By that time, the players' decisions, along with the computer's estimation of community change, will have simulated the physical, economic, and political environment of Lansing, through 1972.

Richard Duke, the creator of the program and a professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of

University of Michigan, said that APEX, which stands for Air Pollution Exercise, will be devoted mainly to portraying air pollution and the factors related to air pollution in the total context of the metropolitan area," adding that, "It is pretty clear that the computer is here to stay and that it is going to be central in the management process of middle-sized urban areas."

Duke said that the program is aimed at "training people who ten years from now will hold very responsible management positions." Charles Haar, professor of Law, explained that the interaction among interest groups would give the participants insight into the complexities of the decision-making process in urban government.