Speculation City places the player in the role of a developer building luxury housing throughout Boston, watching as each decision reshapes the city. The simulation is grounded in real baseline data from the City of Boston, including property values, demographic information, and construction records.
Our team created custom scripts and predictive models to estimate how nearby rents might respond to new market-rate development, using spatial regressions based on real lot-level and census tract data. However, while these models inform the logic of the game, they are not intended to imply causal relationships or statistically significant findings—this was not the scope of our project. Instead, the game's mechanics are inspired by patterns identified in peer-reviewed housing research, translating observed correlations and academic insights into an interactive experience that visualizes how development can contribute to displacement and demographic change.
This project was complete for MIT Interactive Visualization & Society (Spring 2025) in collaboration with Sergio Mutis, Emma Wawrzynek, and Javier Ricardo Diaz.
Tools used: HTML, Svelte, D3, Java, CSS
Website can be visited here.