Participatory planning board game

Cities are shaped through everyday life, through encounters, conflicts, care, and imagination. Engaging with them means engaging with complexity, difference, and shared responsibility.

At URBANA, we use play as a collective language to open up conversations about how cities are planned and who gets to shape them. Through participatory planning games, adults and children are invited to step into urban questions together, explore diverse perspectives, and reflect on how shared spaces can better respond to everyday needs.

A pilot version of this game was played at TEDx NTUA 2022 PLAY, hosted at the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation, and focused on the collective reimagining of America Square in central Athens.

As Jane Jacobs reminds us, cities are where life unfolds in its most complex and intense forms. Participatory urban planning responds to this reality by involving the whole community in shaping the city, giving space to voices with different backgrounds, identities, and lived experiences. In the Greek context, this approach remains both innovative and necessary.

Play becomes a vital practice in this process. It lowers barriers, brings people closer, and helps make visible the diverse desires, priorities, and tensions that coexist in urban space.

The aim is not only to record everyday needs, but to create conditions where people can creatively reclaim their neighbourhoods and imagine alternatives together. Designed to be played in real urban environments, the game invites neighbours and everyday users of a place to become active participants in shaping its future.