Project name: Urban Resilience Game

Funder/Sponsor: Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Thammasat University

Collaborator: Dr Wijitbusaba Ann Marome from the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Thammasat University

Year: 2016

Project type: Knowledge Management

Background

In 2016, Openspace partnered with Dr Wijitbusaba Ann Marome from the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Thammasat University to make the findings of the five-year research project of the Coastal Cities at Risk (CCaR) accessible to a wider public.

Looking at Bangkok, Manila, Vancouver and Lagos and funded by Canada, Coastal Cities at Risk: Building Adaptive Capacity for Managing Climate Change in Coastal Megacities examines climate change and urban resilience, with a focus on flood trends, using VENSIM modelling to produce future scenarios. Openspace built on the technical reports produced for this project to create the Urban Resilience Board Game, a video and a the book Building Resilient City in BMR.

The Urban Resilience Board Game

The game asks each of the players to become the mayor of a Bangkok Metropolitan Region. They are provided with the background characteristic of their region characteristics, mirroring CCaR’s findings, with respect to four drivers – socio-economic factors, housing and land use, environment and health, and flood management – and given a budget. Each player takes a turn rolling the dice to advance on the board and is then given an event. They can choose to invest using their budget and asked to identify the risk, opportunity, solutions, and investment to deal with the event. Achieving all three allocates them with the maximum points for each round.

Flood rounds force players to deal with issues of preparedness and cooperation, as mayors need to approve investments in these rounds. The game allows players and facilitators to learn about what makes cities resilient in a fun environment.