Play the City

Explore urban expansion challenge through an interactive gaming method.

Learn about the city expansion through the Play the City method. We welcome teams that have a serious interest in the new urban development challenge of urban expansion. In an interactive, multi-actor environment you can test your ideas, build a strategy to test design and finance for new city development rules with your peers.

Are you an investor, project developer, city official or a non-profit organization? Would you like to know how the city of Almere used city gaming to test the Do-it-Yourself Master Plan in Oosterwold?

City gaming is a working method that allows participants to collaborate, learn and experiment in a realistic yet safe environment. This method allows experts to step outside their usual environment to think freely about ideas and scenarios that might help develop an integrated approach to new city development.

There are no prescriptive scenarios or solutions. The game training serves players who, with their real-life expertise and experience, create scenarios based on tested policies. Then they assess their decision with and against other players. It is fast-paced and competitive, yet there are no winners and losers — everyone learns!

In this training, we present the City Expansion Game - a game designed to be played by stakeholders involved in developing empty urban land, localized for the future development of Oosterwold in Almere. To trigger creative partnerships, players take on game roles, which include politicians, city officials, designers, private investors, and developer. Game materials introduce ideas and innovations from around the world on decentralized clean technologies for flows of people, food, water and energy.

By learning about this method, you will:

*Enhance effective decision-making

*Learn from real world cases while networking with professionals from diverse sectors

*Learn how to adapt to and take action in multidisciplinary environments

*Elaborate on the new role of government, companies and communities

*Learn about your own negotiation skills, how they are perceived by other professionals and how you can improve them

If your team is interested in playing with another team from a particular stakeholder group, we can engage actors from municipalities, city-networks, universities, companies and citizen groups to test-play with your team for more diverse knowledge-exchange.

You may choose to book:

Demo session - lasts 1.5 hours

Full training session - lasts 3 hours

More info about Play the City’s practice: www.playthecity.nl

Explore circular city strategies through an interactive gaming method.

Learn about working circular city development through Play the City method. We welcome teams that have a serious interest in circularity. In an interactive, multi-actor environment you can test your ideas, build ‘circular city’ scenarios and exchange knowledge with your peers.

Are you an engineer, investor, urbanist, project developer, politician or a non-profit organization? Would you like to know how Buikslotherham neighborhood engages influential stakeholders to enable exchange of knowledge on circular urban transition through a city game?

City-gaming is a working method that allows participants to collaborate, learn and experiment in a realistic yet safe environment. This method allows experts to step outside their usual environment to think freely about ideas and scenarios that might help integrate clean technologies and urban metabolisms for overcoming the complexity of circular transformation.

There are no prescriptive scenarios or solutions. The game training serves players who, with their real-life expertise and experience, create scenarios based on tested policies. Then they assess their decision with and against other players. It is fast-paced and competitive, yet there are no winners and losers — everyone learns!

In this training, we present The Circular City game - a game that merges clean technologies and urban development principles. Built to become applicable both at the institutional and household level, the game’s dynamic relies on the principles of renewable sourcing, repair, reuse and recycling of materials, biodiversity, and attractive human-scale built environment.

By learning about this method, you will:

*Enhance effective decision-making

*Learn from real world cases while networking with professionals from diverse sectors

*Learn how to adapt to and take action in multidisciplinary environments

*Elaborate on the new role of government, companies and communities

*Learn about your own negotiation skills, how they are perceived by other professionals and how you can improve them

If your team is interested in playing with another team from a particular stakeholder group, we can engage actors from municipalities, city-networks, universities, companies and citizen groups to test-play with your team for more diverse knowledge-exchange.

You may choose to book:

Demo session - lasts 1.5 hours

Full training session - lasts 3 hours

More info about Play the City’s practice: www.playthecity.nl

Explore housing strategies through an interactive gaming method

Learn about housing policies through the Play the City method. We welcome teams that a have a serious interest in housing affordability. In an interactive, multi-actor environment you can test your ideas, build housing scenarios and exchange knowledge with your peers.

Are you a housing provider, investor, project developer, city official or a non-profit organization? Would you like to know how Dublin and Amsterdam engage influential stakeholders in addressing their housing affordability through a city game?

City gaming is a working method that allows participants to collaborate, learn and experiment in a realistic yet safe environment. This method allows experts to step outside their usual environment to think freely about ideas and scenarios that might help overcome the barriers to providing sufficient, good quality affordable housing in their city.

There are no prescriptive scenarios or solutions. The game training serves players who, with their real-life expertise and experience, create scenarios based on tested policies. Then they assess their decision with and against other players. It is fast-paced and competitive, yet there are no winners and losers — everyone learns!

In this training, we present the Affordable Housing Game - a policy-making game for developing an implementable agenda for affordable housing across European Cities.

By learning about this method, you will:

*Enhance effective decision-making
*Learn from real world cases while networking with professionals from diverse sectors
*Learn how to adapt to and take action in multidisciplinary environments*Elaborate on the new role of government, companies and communities
*Learn about your own negotiation skills, how they are perceived by other professionals and how you can improve them

If your team is interested in playing with another team from a particular stakeholder group, we can engage actors from municipalities, city-networks, universities, companies and citizen groups to test-play with your team for more diverse knowledge-exchange.

You may choose to book:
Demo session - lasts 1.50 hours
Full training session - lasts 3 hours

More info about Play the City’s practice: www.playthecity.nl
The Affordable Housing Game is developed in collaboration with Urban Land Institute Europe.

The Games for Cities programme is hosting it's first international conference with leading ‘city-game’ design experts from around the world discussing the potential for games to facilitate more effective and inclusive city-making. The conference will be held in Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut on April 20-21 and is open to the public. This promises to be an intriguing conference with keynotes on how city-gaming is the future of city-making, as well as numerous city-game break-out sessions to experience this future for yourselves. You will get the chance to meet Paolo Pedercini from Molleindustria, Urban Think Tank’s Alfredo Brillembourg, Boston-based social designer Eric Gordon from Emerson’s Engagement Lab, The Why Factory’s Felix Madrazo, and Ekim Tan from Play the City as the invited speakers at the conference. During the conference, 10 internationally active city-game developers will also be present to run game sessions of leading city-games. Join us at the conference and find out why it's more than just fun and games!

Join us at the Games for Cities conference where leading ‘city-game’ design experts from around the world will gather to discuss the potential for games to facilitate more effective and inclusive city-making. The conference will be held in Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut on April 20-21, and is open to the public. Get your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/games-for-cities-conference-tickets-31317310920. There will also be Doctoral Consortium for early career researchers wishing to present their ongoing research and receive feedback from industry experts. See more on the application procedure for this here: http://gamesforcities.com/challenges/doctoral-consortium/
More information on the event: https://amsterdamsmartcity.com/events/games-for-cities-international-conference

Games for Cities in an initiative of Play the City (Amsterdam) and generously funded by the Creative Industries Fund NL with the aim to explore the role of gaming for complex urban issues.

Initiative

Work on an actual urban project through a serious game.

What if you could test your development strategies against otherstakeholders in an interactive environment? The best way to learn about consensusbuilding is experiencing it. This is why Play the City offers monthly GameTraining in the City Simulation Room, hosted by Pakhuis de Zwijger. Through anexclusive afternoon program, you can choose to join a game session addressingone of two city making scenarios:

a. Inner-City Redevelopment about the area Amsterdam Noord

b. Off-Grid City about the area Almere Ooosterwold

A game session gives you the chance to network withother curious designers, planners, gaming enthusiasts.