City Craft Event, powered by: Rezone

Last week I attended a seminar in Tilburg that focused on the possibilities of gamification for regional development. The presentations were aimed at exploring how playing games (or better: interaction through game-play) can redirect the planning process and the decision-making process of regional development and deliver alternatives for top-down planning.

The event was prompted by the arrival in Tilburg of the travelling exhibition MozaïekBrabant which incorporates Carpet Metropolis Brabant City (although Tapestry Metropolis would have been a better translation of Tapijtmetropool) a vision of the future of the urban landscape as a mosaic of functions and possibilities literally woven into a large carpet.

As was clear during earlier events by Rezone, game-play is useful as a tool in negotiating development processes and organising participation. All spatial development games revolved around organising stakeholder wishes and creating insight into the spatial and functional effects of certain choices (through simulation and role-playing devices). The games varied from very low-tech (Simlandscape) to high-tech (Rezone the Game) and from organising the decision making process (Play the City and The Making Of), channelling initiatives (SpoorLoos) to organising awareness and participation (Leve de Krimp and Enercities).

Most games were directed towards urban redevelopment and urban infill projects. So here regional planning was the framework that these project functioned within as the issues were of a lesser scale. Especially Leve de Krimp truly had a regional focus as it is aimed at translating and simulating the effects of population decrease combined with an ageing population and shifts in employment opportunities away from low-skilled industrial and agricultural work.

I was very impressed with the SpoorLoos board game (on the left) that coupled an attractive design with an interesting game play. The game is centred around an inner-city brown field site along the railway. Rezone the Game (shown in the middle) is played against a computer and is mainly concerned with buildings that stand empty. These can be former industrial sites, factories, schools, office blocks and blocks of flats. The game Play the City had a lovely design (as can be seen on the right) and seems to be a very useful and fun way of organising participation in an open-ended planning process.