CLES News

Games without frontiers

9th February 2010

Need fresh ideas for your area? Neil McInroy, Gaynor Anthony and Kate Dempster explain why it’s time to get out of the office for some fun and games

Can we have a process which stimulates creative thinking and generates new ideas for city development? From this question in mid-2006, the British Council with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (Cles) and Urbis began investigating and developing the Future City Game. From a rigorous period of piloting, which took the joint development team to Oslo, Bogota, Manchester and Glasgow, the fully formed game has now been played and has assisted development by generating creative ideas in over 100 locations across Russia and northern Europe. It has recently been played in Blackburn, with Cles acting as ‘games masters’.

While a ‘game’, it is serious! Indeed the Homes and Communities Agency 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.

For Cles, interest in the game stemmed from a sense that the traditional disciplines and policymaking surrounding corporate planning, regeneration, land use planning and economic development, in some cases, get bogged down in the immediacies of the present. 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.

To date the game has been played across local authority administrations, city, neighbourhood and site scales and has developed a range of innovative ideas, including some that have unlocked seemingly intractable issues around community cohesion, use of derelict buildings and dealing with future demographic, economic and environmental change. A supportive network of players, games masters and host cities has developed. This includes links between Blackburn and Pilsen in Czech Republic and London with Kaunas in Lithuania.

From the Blackburn with Darwen experience, Cles and the British Council are now seeking to speed up the rollout 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.

It’s a game that broadens horizons, as Ken Barnsley explains

Back in early 2009, when the full complexities of comprehensive area assessment were unknown and Total Place was unheard of, let alone a website, Blackburn with Darwen Strategic Partnership was looking at the next stage of development for the place.

The partnership has always been committed to innovative ways of working together, delivery of services to communities and strategic thinking. The outcome from that winter meeting was to agree to develop a vision for 2030 as the high level strategy to lead the development of future plans.

Soon after, the partnership approved an ambitious programme of research, engagement and consultation to involve residents, neighbourhoods, businesses and partners in the development of Vision 2030, running from May 2009 though to the launch next month. The partnership was clear the vision should present a realistic future, fundamentally based on the totality of thoughts, feelings, associations and expectations of local communities, but with clear future goals.

Right from the outset, Mike Murray, a local industrialist and chair of the partnership, was enthusiastic about including innovative methods and approaches to encourage creative thinking about how communities and business saw Blackburn with Darwen in 20 years’ time. The partnership was so often working on short-term plans, looking at performance indicators for the previous year or setting targets for next year, so the capacity for visionary civic leadership was often masked by weight of regulation.

The process of developing Vision 2030 involved residents from across each of the borough’s five neighbourhood areas, workshops for key themes such as children and young people, economic regeneration and community safety. As part of the process, the top-level partnership demonstrated commitment to innovative thinking and taking risks. The Future City Game was just one of the examples of this thinking.

The game was held at Ewood Park in December over two days, with members of the local strategic partnership as players. It worked really well, encouraging creative thinking about the future in the context of global and local change to generate detailed ideas for development into transformational projects. Games master Neil McInroy from the Centre for Local Economic Strategies was instrumental in creating an atmosphere where the players could jump out of their senior professional and organisational roles to develop groundbreaking and innovative ideas. These ideas were then put through a rigorous, though rapid, testing process with professional advice to teams mixed up with five separate presentations to expert panels of schoolchildren, business, neighbourhood board, residents and the interfaith forum.

Each team ended up with an idea that could be developed further as an exemplar project for inclusion in Vision 2030, which goes to the conference on 12 February for testing with everyone involved in the research, engagement and consultation. From the launch in March, Vision 2030 will lead the development of the sustainable communities strategy and the next local area agreement.

The winning idea from the game was called Electra, which envisages the widespread availability of electric cars for commuters and families. The scheme and the other ideas from the game will help inform the Vision.

As Mike Murray says: ‘Not every aspect of the ideas that came up in the Future City Game will be able to be included in the Vision but the logic and principles behind them will definitely help shape the future of Blackburn with Darwen… sometimes you have to dream of the impossible to reach the attainable.’

Ken Barnsley is head of corporate research at Blackburn with Darwen Council.

Playing the Future City Game

The game can run over one or two days

It 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

Find out more

Neil McInroy is chief executive of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, Gaynor Anthony is UK project manager of the British Council’s Creative Cities programme and Kate Dempster is the instigator of the Future City Game at the British Council and adviser to the Creative Cities programme. Future City Game, http://snurl.com/u4vr9

Watch a podcast of the Blackburn with Darwen game at http://snurl.com/u4vrh