The British Council, the UK’s international cultural relations body, has been running a co-design process with local government that they call the Future City Game. The intent with these two-day exercises with city inhabitants and various planning disciplines it to generate the best ideas for improving quality of life.
The intent of wanting to make change and impact often doesn’t consider negative effects. Sometimes the solutions that are proposed and enacted don’t make the problem better or make something else worse. Best policy intentions also don’t necessarily achieve the desired outcome.
The approach that they’re taken to combat these issues is “top down, bottom up,” meaning that the policies are enacted only after careful scrutiny and input from those they will effect. We have big challenges from globalisation, migration, climate change, urbanisation and social needs, and big answers, but by not doing them together with people, we set ourselves up to make big mistakes.
The reasons for doing co-design is that they get concrete solutions as well as buy-in from citizens. With people understanding the full breadth of the problem, and participating in the planning process, they are apt to participate more.
This design process for cities aims to engage and work with people in order to create robust and workable solutions. There have been 170 games conducted all across Europe so far, including a game in Warsaw, Poland last week with the Conference of Youth Council’s. Last week’s exercise aimed at a broader scope than individual cities, tackling the need to enhance a feeling of European unity.
The group has also conducted the process of the Urban Ideas Bakery in four cities so far as a follow-up to the Future City Games. This more intensive planning session is centered on community building, developing creative clusters, cultural policy and programs, environmental issues, sustainable transport, health, and crime prevention.
