The URBAN GAME Prototype is here and we got to test it!
All started one year ago when with the support of UNDP Georgia and ServiceLab, ordinary employees of Rustavi City Hall united around the idea of going an extra mile for the big goal: to transform Rustavi into a modern post-industrial city and co-create a better life for its citizens. Since then, besides working our full-time jobs, we have been trying to get our innovations hub up and running and turns out, we haven’t done a bad job.
During our study tour in Poland, we met with Ms. Justyna Crol, the CEO of Urban Workshop, specializing in innovations for local governments — from socialized urban foresight to public consultations on technology in cities. Since then, we have been working with Justyna on the urban development of Rustavi. Returning from Poland, we had identified several challenges of transforming the post-industrial city into modernized innovations hub at the local level in the country with increased citizen participation. So, with Ms. Crol we worked on the foresight report Rustavi2050 with four development scenarios of the city. The report provides grounds for broad, multi-sector engagement in urban development and explains how urban foresight can benefit from building public sector innovation capacities and addressing the needs of the Rustavi community.
As citizen engagement is the crucial part of transforming Rustavi, Justina offered to create the board game with her team at Urban Workshop (Pracownia Miejska), and after few months of hard work, we finally got to play it. A few days ago with UNDP Georgia, ServiceLab and Orbeliani Georgia we organized the Urban Game workshop at International Scout Center Rustavi. It was very exciting and important to have a few highly motivated youngsters from Rustavi on board.
The workshop started by discussing previous public consultations to reflect on mistakes made, as well as what went good and why. We also went through the best-proven practices in increasing public engagement in public consultations in local government decision making, as well as following up on project implementation.
The second part of the day was dedicated to THE GAME. We were beyond excited to test the prototype of our very own Urban Game. As we were trying to learn the game, we went through an interesting journey of how a simulation board game can be used as a modern consultation tool to solve real-life problems and come up with great ideas, while informing and engaging the local community in the process.
Even though the game seemed to be a bit confusing for us at first, it turned out to be very interesting, and shortly, we were actively discussing what and how could be improved for different parts of Rustavi in terms of developing tourism potential. Throughout the process, we shared our feedback on how to improve and finalize the game.
As one of the volunteers mentioned, the game was highly engaging and
After a few days from the workshop, Columbia University students visited the hub within the framework of the partnership with UNDP NY for supporting SDG Innovation Labs in Eastern/Central Europe. After they got to know our projects, we went through the whole game process with them once again to get more outside feedback.
At the end of the meeting, we agreed that the students will create Impact Assessment Framework to support the development of local governmental innovations labs starting with Rustavi Innovations Hub.
So now, while working on other projects, we are looking forward to the further improvements of the game, to finally get our locals “on board”.
