Reading cities: Towards a participatory tool for disentangling the complexity of urban systems

This paper assesses the contribution that board games can make as decision support tools to offer stakeholders another option to better navigate the complexity and wicked nature of urban challenges using more novel participatory techniques. Using the example of Birmingham, the design, play and evaluate phases of the ‘Urban Placemakers’ game are described and analysed with respect to synergies between key literatures on games and public participation. Using the Urban Placemakers game in a workshop setting to identify and explore the problems facing urban areas, complements traditional approaches to participation and policy-making, but provides additionality through creating more accessible and enjoyable end-user experiences through which policy-focused research models and supporting outputs can be co-developed with stakeholders. The core ingredients of co-design and co-production within the Urban Placemakers game ensure that academic rigour, policy relevance and pragmatism intersect. This convergence space provides a safe hypothetical fertile space for thinking and deliberation that enables players to discuss ‘wicked’ urban problems outside usual agency restrictions, yielding insights to challenges championing innovation and social learning in a fun setting. Whilst playing the game was an enjoyable experience for the majority of participants, it also helped the research team better understand the urban interdependencies within their own work packages and research and was used to help prioritise a set of indicators to explore and diagnose the problems facing the city of Birmingham. This use of a game board approach was found to be a valuable additional method for engaging with urban problems in innovative ways that were grounded in co-creation, play and fun with a computer nowhere in sight.