VIRTUAL Barcelona Livable Cities

Abstract

Creating livable cities requires systems thinking and multidisciplinary teams to manage and solve the complex system of urban living. However, achieving solutions is challenged by the language, culture and years of isolated, regression single disciplinary oriented education of practitioners. Furthermore, many multidisciplinary projects fail to activate decision makers to think outside their box or participate effectively on teams. Gameplay offers an opportunity to bring together teams and activate problem solving. This paper and presentation describe the Water-Energy Urban Design Challenge (WEUDC), a holistic education and design environment to foster a new generation of system thinking engineers, planners, and urban designers. The first WEUDC was hosted by a team of researchers from the Water Research Foundation (Denver, Colorado, USA), Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada), and the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia) in 2015. Since then, it has evolved to a broader educational structure bringing students, industry, and academics together to address the intertwined challenges of water and energy management in urban environments through interactive gaming. WEUDC are run on three continents and feature a weeklong scenario gameplay that guides participants through visioning and creating integrated solutions that optimize the use of water and energy resources to promote livable, sustainable, and resilient cities. Participants combine systems thinking, design principles, renewable energy sources, advanced technologies, and sustainable practices to prepare and design, through Lego visualization, a proposed solution to local council and land developers. This paper will document learning and procedural outcomes from a decade of game play to provide insights on how cities can use activate teams for local urban designs.