Urban Renewal Department

Urban Renewal is a piece of Horizon focused on, long term, building a better city. The Urban Renewal Department is a project based on the use of Gridguide as a primary city building project. The pilot project was to correlate Social Purchasing within Persona 2.0 to Gridguide movements. One of the first major roles was to place Dunkel Donuts's in specific locations that change the purchasing habits of consumers away from Soybucks as a consulting gig, in order to prove the viability of the project without ruining the name of the project. By changing the locations of a single logo, the colour in the logo, and the way the stores were spread throughout a city, the project quadrupled the store's revenue inside a quarter, and did real damage to Soybuck's market share.

Once this was the case, the project began to begin doing larger scale urban renewal projects, the main goal was to find a street layout and specific locations to make specific behaviours. The long term goal of the project was to find a way to divert a significant portion of Stuffer Shack's revenue away from Aztechnology, preferably to Wuxing or Mitsuhama, in order to make it less obvious.

By 2070, the bulk of the project had become a series of potemkin villages, where anthrodrones become a copy of the gridguide and Persona 2.1 profiles of a different city. Using personality profiles pulled from the research of Dr. Igor Bannivir the drones were programmed with secondary personalities, so that they would then begin to go through the motions of changing variables in the city, and seeing how the drones and profiles changed their daily routines. Once a theory was formed, a series of memeticists would begin to apply the learnings to a larger scale, typically a city block or set of stores.

The role of the Urban Renewal Department, more than any other of the Horizon black projects, funds the Horizon covert budgets, and keeps the projects only slightly less in the red than it would otherwise be.

Justin Duval was a memeticist, working in Las Vegas to try to increase profits for the Pathfinder Multimedia by changing how commutes work using Gridguide to change the billboards in the area to make people watch more Trideo in their car on the way to work.