Cities at Play: Children’s redesign of deprived neighbourhoods in Minecraft

This paper presents a community-driven science gaming project where students in collaboration with urban planners and youth project workers in the City of Copenhagen used Minecreaft to redesign their neighbourhood to generate solutions to problems in their local area.
The project involved 25 children from a school located in an exposed area in southern Copenhagen ages 13–15. The redesign process was conducted as part of science education in eighth grade. The specific area in southern Copenhagen has problems with organized crime and gangs and is defined as a focus area for various projects administrated by the City of Copenhagen. Resources were allocated for one of these projects to recondition the subsidized housing for this area. A community-driven science gaming process was designed in which overall challenges for redesign, defined by urban planners, were given to the students to highlight their local knowledge about living conditions and solutions for the problems identified. As part of the process students were introduced to central concepts in urban planning defined by leading Danish architects. Over four days, the students defined problems and potentials of the area, constructing models for redesigning the neighbourhood in Minecraft and LEGO. These were presented to City of Copenhagen architects and urban planners as well as the head of the Department of Transport, Technology and Environment.
Overall the study showed that tasks focused on solving local living problems through neighbourhood redesign were strongly motivational for students. During the process students constructed models focused on the various needs of different types of residents and argued the models’ redesign, in terms of their local knowledge area and in terms of fulfilling the mixture of needs of different groups of residents. This paper presents the Cities at Play research concept and explores the potentials and pitfalls of introducing user involvement in community-driven science gaming environments for integrating exposed groups.