Developing a serious game for the 15-minute neighbourhood transition: Lessons learned from an expert workshop

• Focus on barriers and needs of different citizens linked to the 15-min city concept. • A serious game was developed for the design of a 15-min neighbourhood. • Applied in an expert workshop, with 32 participants divided into 4 teams. • Results reveal the potential of the game to grasp citizen’s needs and barriers. Popularity of the 15-minute city concept has been increasing in recent years. The concept is seen as a way to improve accessibility, sustainability, and liveability; however, there are knowledge gaps in finding successful pathways for its implementation. For instance, there is scarce research on the barriers and needs of different population groups for the uptake of the 15-minute city concept. The contribution of this study is to investigate how a serious game focused on 15-minute neighbourhoods can be developed as a tool to eventually contribute to the co-creation of neighbourhoods. For this, a serious game was developed and experimented with during an expert workshop, where four teams played the game and designed a 15-minute neighbourhood. The workshop’s results show how the developed game could potentially help stakeholders and civil society, such as researchers or municipalities, understand citizens’ perspectives. However, the game as is needs future adaptations to fit the local context of players better and have an impact on the co-creation of neighbourhoods. When applied with real stakeholders in real urban settings, the game could contribute to real-world co-creation processes to give citizens a voice to share their needs within the development of 15-minute neighbourhoods.