How Block By Block uses video games for participatory city planning

Ryan Conway|April 18, 2018March 4, 2019

Here's the problem: Urban planning has historically relied on top-down processes in which technical experts create land use designs that are then authorized by municipal officials. Even though international development agencies and many professional planners have endorsed the extensive research supporting participatory approaches, the wide variety of challenges that each urban planning project faces has made it difficult to establish transferable methods, even among wealthier cities in the world. How can organizations collaborate to create public spaces in impoverished areas such as the Kibera neighborhood in Nairobi?

Here's how one organization is working on the problem: In 2011, Mojang — a video-game studio based in Stockholm, Sweden, founded by the creator of popular gaming platform Minecraft — partnered with the Swedish government to develop new tools for urban planning. Utilizing Minecraft, Mina Kvarter was introduced as a program to involve the tenants of nearly 1 million public-housing apartments in reconstructing and revitalizing their neighborhoods. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme or U.N. Habitat then partnered with Mojang to use similar methods in the United Nations's Global Public Spaces Program that sought to upgrade 300 public spaces, starting in Nairobi.

The program, called "Block by Block," is primarily sponsored by Mojang. The company works with organizations like FyreUK, a Minecraft modelling group, to build the initial renderings. U.N. Habitat coordinates participatory design workshops for community groups, empowering them to alter the renderings in ways that reflect their real needs, and presents the results to city officials.

Results:

In a study on the 15 projects — in 12 countries — completed through Block by Block, U.N. Habitat found that using the technology as a tool for participatory urban planning and design was "a powerful way to include nontraditional stakeholders in decisionmaking processes," and that "[v]isualization is crucial in how people perceive reality, and Minecraft is therefore useful for agreeing joint policy positions and solutions."
Prototyped at the Undugu playground in Nairobi's Kibera neighborhood, the participatory method immediately proved useful, allowing residents and architects to collaboratively resolve design discrepancies and create a plan they could agree upon.

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Block by Block

This case study is adapted from our latest book, "Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons." Get a copy today.

Header image of the FyreUK initial rendering of Undugu Playground, Kibera, Nairobi provided by Mojang Team

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ryan Conway

Ryan is a political economist and community organizer with a passion for the democratic self-organization and ethic of stewardship found frequently in the establishment and endurance of community commons. As Co-Coordinator of the Applied Community Commons Research Team at The Ostrom Workshop at IU and a student of the late Elinor Ostrom, Ryan seeks synergies in rigorous academic research and community-generated best practices, bringing citizen science to policy science and Workshop wisdom to commons sense. Continuing to build experience as a “pracademic,” he set out, in 2015, to set up ShareBloomington, which is a fiscally sponsored project of the Center for Sustainable Living and the first organized presence of the sharing movement in Bloomington, Indiana. Ryan is co-founder of hOurBloomington, Bloomington's first time bank, and he co-directs several sub-projects of ShareBloomington, including: the Glenn Carter Memorial Toolshare, the Bloomington Seed Library Network, and Bloomington Little Free Libraries. The substantive topics of Ryan's research are diverse yet hold a common thread: building collaborative capacity in social and inter-organizational networks, especially when communities face novel circumstances: natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy; sites of social struggle, like the Zapatista Autonomous Zones in Chiapas, Mexico and the public square and park occupations of 2011; and, sites of economic disparity met by creative community solutions from gift culture\economy and sharing culture\economy. Ryan has observed that successful and sustainable coalitions are premised on commitments to sharing: sharing information, sharing best practices, sharing in planning & decision making, and sharing infrastructure, to avoid the waste and inflexibility rendered by isolated competition and possessiveness of excess capacity. When existing social institutions are disrupted by uncommon circumstances, Ryan has come to believe that communities must develop resilient and context-sensitive social arrangements to facilitate good health and cooperative relationships among their members and in relationship with their local, environmental context. Ryan is invested in exploring, discovering, and implementing potential best practices that can either emerge in the midst of these situations or collaboratively established in their anticipation.

Things I share: Time, tools, food, seeds, information, strategic analysis, methodological perspective, writing coaching, concepts of resilient municipal infrastructure, and social network connections.

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Ryan Conway

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