Cities Skylines: Co-existences of Co-designs
How do we use a video game to manifest public’s ideas, and how do we potentially reshape the architectural profession?
Half of the people on our planet are living in urbanised areas, but we don’t seem to be able to control the environment that lives with us. Sometimes we hear things like “That church’s cross is blocking our favourite view of the river”, “this area is lacking a quality park with enough benches”, “That new pavilion in city center looks very out of place”, etc. Comments and opinions of the public are voiced and sometimes even if they are heard, minimal changes can be made when the design is built. The consequences of lack of proper communication between public and government in architecture and planning are materialised in our built environment, such as Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens by Tadao Ando, built in 2002 as part of the city makeover, often criticised as “Berlin Wall”. The regeneration plans have emerged following a series of public campaigns against Ando’s design, including a petition signed by over 20,000 residents of the city that demanded “either demolishing or transforming its unloved concrete wall, once and for all” many years after its completion.
And yes, one may argue that there are public consultations, but there are problems and limitations within the current public consultation system: When are these public consultations held? What questions and answers are we expecting when it comes to design when most of the people within the public consultation are not trained to explain design ideas? How to make the public get involved in the design? How does the public make changes to the design when they don’t have knowledge of architectural design and urban planning? As traditionally architects are most likely to work for the wealthy and powerful individuals, how the general public comes into the design process? The inconsistency and unreliability of conventional public consultation results in low level of public engagement and further result in public discontent due to the dissatisfaction of the final project. I believe the operation has to be changed and CITY COL[lab] acts as a platform that primarily focuses on extending public involvement from the brief development, conceptual design to the developed design stages (Stages 1 to 3 in the RIBA Plan of Work 2013) that are conventionally confined as the scope of work of architects and planners only however we utilise collective intelligence to inform the designs further than just the brief from the clients, in order to achieve better-built environment that is public driven rather than hidden in the dark all the way from start to finish, we treat the ones who will potentially use the design, sees the design, walks past it everyday to have the equal right to inform the design, all the time, everywhere.
A Serious Game
From the age of films to now the age of video games, the industry of video game is now worth more than both music and film industry combined since 2017 and it keeps on growing. We are witnessing a shift in the method of storytelling, its far-reaching market and the capability to communicate through as virtual existence has huge potentials — but it is not just about its ability of powerful storytelling, it is also its interactivity. The interactivity of video game is not merely controlling a character or moving a block from one coordinate to another, it is a creative process to manipulate the appearance or the outcome of something by your own hands without having the real object in your hands. This can be a powerful tool in architecture and city planning that used before laying down the foundations — and architects are already doing it: 3D modeling — extruding blocks and creating forms in a three-dimensional empty space, however, it is very complicated to the ones who are not experienced to this specific skill set. The city needs a more sophisticated way to collect ideas from the public, and the public can use this to shape the city.
CITY COL[lab], as the name suggests, and it is defining the practice’s ideology of collaborating with everyone who uses us as a platform to contribute and to change the design and co-design are the collaborators, which is more empowering to the players than just by the name like City Builder or other names that do not make the ones who use the platform to feel “professional”, therefore making them to treat this as “just another city builder game”. Moreover, the practice encourages the experimentality of public’s ideas towards a new form of architecture that is designed around specific experiences and activities for specific neighbourhoods. For example, when the design brief or a new design is patched to the game, players can start to assemble their ideas and change the design using the tools provided, such as walls, doors, benches, different kinds of materials. Sometimes the tools are not enough, they could put a simple comment label on different areas like “we don’t need another basketball court here, there is another one 3 mins away.”, “different design for bench is needed”, “can we get a new type of tree”, architects can use comments like this to revise their designs, and CITY COL[lab] here is going to add new designs from the architects and we develop different tools, to make sure the game is working properly and as freely and creative as possible.
At first, and as one can imagine that the collective design will look very out of place, but after the time period that the players are allowed to change the design, the architects will revise the design to reflect the previous collective design, and proceed to further changes on the design by the players, from phases to phases, and within a certain time period such as 60 to 90 days, the design will be finalised, then proceed to technical design and construction (Stage 4 and 5).
The Image of “Game”
Branding and the image of the practice should be serious, it is a game, but it is a very serious game that is able to shape the built environment. If we look at the documentaries Serious Games I/II/III/IV directed by Harun Farocki, there are already example of how video games are utilised as a medium for other serious purposes such as military training and therapy for PTSD for US soldiers who came back from Afghanistan — They are already very effective, even when the time when the documentaries were filmed, the video game technology and hardware were not capable to produce photorealistic graphics.
The seriousness of this serious game has to be apparent, it has to notify to the users that every opinion and every change on this virtual platform will have consequences in real life and on the realisation of the design. Hence, the game needs to have photorealistic graphics that is immersive, and reflecting true details in real life in a non-artificial perspective (i.e. axonometric) that allows players to browse. Moreover, the current generation hardware is already capable to produce realistic ray-tracing graphics, even if the user does not own the latest hardware, there are workarounds like streaming the game from the server to the end-user(see Google’s latest service Stadium, it is a video game subscription service that streams games from Google’s server to end-users, to evade the needs of high-end hardware to play the latest games), so there are no needs for very expensive hardware requirement since our practice has already handled it for them.
After all, the goal of CITY COL[lab] is to bridge the government, the architects and the public closer to achieve a better city that people are satisfied to live in. It is crucial for architects to listen to what people really need rather than simply another piece of parametric pavilion or concrete wall to shield the bus stops. For the architectural profession, hopefully, with CITY COL[lab], it will shift the architects’ image of “work for the rich and powerful” to “serve the public”.
