Press

How can designers reclaim their relevance in city planning?

The question should be what the the relevancy is of designers and planners to the society, more than designers position in the planning discipline.

I see many designers feel threatened by changes mainly in the political, technological and social fields. I believe constant innovation of new methods and tools can grant the position designers desire in the society. Typically such tools adapt to a changing society with higher individual access to information and technologies of communication for efficient collaborations and interactions such as the new media. This is designers’ acknowledgement for the new citizen ready to undertake further responsibilities. For example crowdfunding and crowdbuilding a communal edible garden in a neighborhood. If you as a designer can detect such energies and mechanisms to include in your practice, you can also set rules not only for the paper plans but also for making the city together with other players.

You've developed Play the City to be such a tool. Can you explain first in short what 'Play the City' is?

Play the City is a young foundation aiming to introduce city gaming into official planning and city design procedures.

To reach this goal we are designing city games for local governments, influential cultural organizations or housing corporations. These games typically provide a common interface to create for professionals, stakeholders and citizens. We opt for a planning and design system where gaming is used intensively before, during and after legal plans are made. This way gaming could provide input for new plans, and evolve existing plans by creating real-time input of city’s complex agents. Carefully modeling interaction of engaged players and their powers, being involved with those parties throughout the entire process and designing interactive formats for the collective intelligence to evolve the urban form can be an alternative stance in positioning today’s designer.

Are you saying today's urban designers should consider to become gamedesigners and gamemasters?

I believe solid borders of established disciplines such as architecture and urban planning is blurring rapidly into disciplines like game design, cognitive sciences, film and animation more than ever.

As Play the City, we see cities as complex systems. Modeling the cities into games with simple and evolving rules, defined constrains, multiple players with complementing and conflicting targets, 3D physical models as play setting, and dataset as game props has been delivering a good tool for city design. In short I see gaming as a proper method to understand cities and act as an architect and urbanist.

Is Play the City the successor of the masterplan?

Play the City’s games are not meant to replace legal plans, but strengthen such design and planning processes by involving crowds.

Play the City is tool that supports decision makers in exploring possible scenarios and testing their ideas against real end users, entrepreneurs and investors. Currently we are working on the expansion of the analog game into the digital media. We use the ‘Anymeta’ software, a GIS-based social network program developed by the new media firm Mediamatic. Here our aim is to generate online local communities as a new infrastructure to evolve and maintain static masterplans. As you also know masterplans are problematic in respect to time. They require a long process before legalization and become quickly outdated often times at the time of realization. Play the City games take this aspect of citymaking as a challenge to handle.

Could you explain, in short how the game works?

Entrepreneurs, active end users with plans as well as policy makers, designers, planners, housing corporations, developers and investors related to an urban question gather. By role playing and following simple rules adapted from reality, they evolve collective future scenarios by negotiating, collaborating as well as conflicting with one another.

We typically collect and connect usual and unusual suspects of an urban design process to generate realistic future scenarios.

We asked you to develop a game for the Binckhorst. Where do you start in designing the game and how does it commence?

Play the City games are based on real urban questions. Initially we map the power and interest relations between stakeholders. Next we decide the significant parameters of a given urban assignment. This helps us to simplify the complex reality and translate the reality into game rules and constraints.
By adding datasets, accuracy of the game output can be improved as well as the knowledge gap between the professional and non-professional players. The datasets are presented as game props. They vary depending on the scale; the game can simulate an urban block, network of public squares, a neighborhood, a city or an urban region.
During the course of the game, players work toward different 3D solutions, meanwhile real governance rules frame to the gameplay. Regular polls and voting help in raising the quality of different spatial solutions. Vote ranking is visible to everyone, giving a clear picture of what are the most and least valued solutions.

What was the urban question for the Binckhorst and how did you translate it into the game?

In Binckhorst, the burning question was the failing of two consecutive masterplans for the site: 2006 OMA plan and 2009 plan by Urhahn.

Currently the local government is hesitant about its plans and investments in Binckhorst, while existing occupants feel anxious about the unclear future of the site. With the game we tried to create a setting where players could help clarify a future without any pre-determined or common vision agreed before the game. We created two settings for this future-mapping of Binckhorst. The first setting simulated a minimum rule condition we aspired from the Balkan cities. Second setting simulated stricter rules of the Dutch condition. We observed a more fictional but a more progressive future vision in the former, while the latter delivered more realistic and concerned discussions with little progress and agreement on the Binckhorst’s future.

How do you process and reflect on the results of your games, and does it already generate useful output for planning in real life?

We analyze the game result as a collection of collaboratively managed decisions by multiple players.

To make the analysis possible we systematically record our city games by dynamic and static cameras, take interviews with players during and after the games. We map acts of players on GIS maps, finally our analysis method focuses on two aspects: patterns and innovations. Repeated ideas and decisions by players are patterns that come back during the play[s]. Rarely but surely players generate unique ideas or plans which is not heard and considered before, which we call ‘innovations’. Looking at these two aspects, a planner or a designer can conclude a good overview of agreements and possible original approaches, tested by players in the game. To our experience, city games deliver better results if they are played multiple times by different groups who have direct interest or stake on the given urban question.

For example, the game we designed for Amsterdam Noord delivered very realistic results and stroke attention of policy makers and planners in the city. Currently we are invited by the planning office of Amsterdam Noord [Aafke Post and Henk Grotendorst] and the alderman Kees Diepeveen to deliver an interactive mapping using our games to reflect the Noord of citizens, their plans and ideas for the vision plan ‘Toekomst Amsterdam Noord’. This is exactly what we wish to achieve with Play the City games; creating tools to support professionals in charge of creating legal plans for our cities.