Future City Game
An exciting way of creating ideas for the future of places.
How did it come about?
Can we have a process which stimulates creative thinking and generates new ideas for city development? From this question in mid 2006, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) with British Council and Urbis[i] began investigating and developing the Future City Game[ii].
What is it?
Whilst a ‘game’ it is serious! Indeed the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) Academy has recently approved the game under their ‘place-making’ recognition scheme. The gaming element is reflected in the quest for a winning idea. Thus the game is very different to many workshop type experiences. Competing for a winning idea, creates a purposeful dynamic. As a result, teams made up of various public, community, voluntary and private representatives, need to work effectively together and they quickly develop into working groups where institutional, professional and individual roles and barriers break down. Covering three stages (visioning, testing and presenting) with ten steps, the game balances creative ‘free thinking’ with rigour and discipline. Furthermore the testing stage involves interaction with real ‘experts’, local residents and interest groups.
The winning idea is developed throughout the three stages of the game and is also voted on using the seven game criteria (fun, innovative and futuristic, meets local challenges, meets global challenges, sustainable, relevant to the community, feasible and achievable). In creating ideas which straddle the social, economic, cultural and environmental problems of our age, the criteria are designed to be contradictory and difficult to reconcile, thus forcing creative and imaginative thinking.
Who has played it?
From a rigorous period of piloting, which took the CLES staff in a joint development team to Oslo, Bogota, Manchester and Glasgow, the fully formed game, has now been played and assisted development via generating creative ideas within over 100 locations across Russia and North Europe. http://creativecities.britishcouncil.org/future_city_game/about.
It has recently been played in Blackburn with Darwen, with CLES[iii] acting as ‘games masters', please view Podcasts here.
To date the game has been played across local authority administrations, city, neighbourhood and site scales and has developed a range of innovative ideas, this includes ideas which have unlocked seemingly intractable issues around community cohesion, use of derelict buildings, and dealing with future demographic economic and environmental change.How useful is it?
For CLES, its interest in the game stemmed from, a sense that the traditional disciplines and policy making surrounding corporate planning, regeneration, land use planning, and economic development, in some cases, get bogged down in the immediacies of the present and as a result future thinking, new ideas and future resilience of place is sometimes overlooked. Furthermore, the British Council and CLES, are now committed to using the game as part of sustainable community planning, corporate visioning and corporate policy within local authorities and Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP’s).
How can I get involved?
The Future City Game a Registered Trade Mark owned by British Council and CLES are uk licence holders.
CLES and the British Council are now seeking to speed up the roll-out of the game with a number of local authorities and Local Strategic Partnerships in the UK. In particular, in these challenging times, we seek to use the game to assist with ongoing strategic visioning and the development of signature ideas, which can increase the resilience of place.
Summary
- The game can run over one or two days
- The game has three distinct phases and ten steps (see figure).
- There are up to 30 players in up to five teams
- The game generates up to 50 ideas in total, with up to five thought through ideas
- The ideas can be a project, behaviour, action or policy
- Teams compete on the basis of coming up with a single winning idea
- Teams contain a mix of public, private, community and voluntary representatives
- The group work develops creative thinking
For more info contact CLES on 0161 236 7036 or info@cles.org.uk
[i] Urbis an exhibition centre about city life. http://www.urbis.org.uk/
[ii] The Future City Game a Registered Trade Mark owned by British Council
[iii] CLES are
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