RIGHT TO THE CITY: The Card/Board Community Resilience Game

Intro

Gameplay

RIGHT TO THE CITY is a cooperative/ competitive game designed to get people thinking and talking about our relationship to land use.

Play as community organizers, developers, or city government to advance or defeat proposals, impacting quality of life in the neighborhood.

There are a wide variety of LAND USES in the game, corresponding to city zoning codes. Each one comes with its share of ASSETS or BURDENS, which enhance or diminish quality of life in the neighborhood. 

Every asset or burden falls within one of twelve ECOSOCIAL DIMENSIONS such as food, water, energy, or shelter. Each improves or deteriorates with each new development, changing the neighborhood thriving score. 

Players use different tactics to shift the momentum of a proposal, change current game conditions, and boost or weaken other players and factions.  

In addition to the three factions, players may choose to act as one of nine POWER PLAYERS. Each archetype has their own private victory objective, loss condition, and a unique special ability that can be used once per game.

Pledge Levels & Rewards

Social Mission

It probably sounds pretentious or self-important, but RIGHT TO THE CITY is not just a game. It has from the beginning been a mission-driven project, and the convergence of multiple streams of work. I haven't yet mentioned Henri LeFebvre, to who the game owes its name, nor David Harvey, whose rearticulation of the concept of the Right to the City has been very influential. That is because they are not where this project began...

The beginning of any story never really is, because there was always a before, and a before that. I could tell you about how I used to be a teacher, how I always sought to "empower" my students, or how my career dead-ended with an analysis of the material, further inflamed by a once-in-a-century global pandemic. 

But, it'll probably be more fun to talk about the village...

It started with a CandyLab car. (You know CandyLab, right, Kickstarter??)

A nice wooden ice cream truck I bought for my almost-three year old. Before I realized what was happening, cardboard, pipe cleaners, construction paper, found objects, all kinds of random stuff, spontaneously and somewhat virally started self-aggregating into a little town worthy of the ice cream truck's boutique craftsmanship.

At first it was something I was doing for my kid, but I started contemplating how he might eventually decide for himself what goes into the village. And so began a years-long project, that my kid and I do together, now that he's almost-five. The question of how to create a decision-making process hovered in the air for awhile until...

Later, I was tapped to consult on a project to develop an environmental justice (EJ) mapping tool for the city of Philadelphia. There were already plenty of maps, mostly managed by the federal government, and mostly of no use to everyday people. Too technical and functionally "read only". Their perspective suggested that environmental injustices were things that just happened to people, but that we should track them, so that very smart people could apply for a slew of grants to at least study, if not try to mitigate their impacts. 

My role was as thought partner, as well as to hold the project accountable to the team's own noble goals of making the tool as participatory as possible, both in how it was designed, its functionality, interactivity, and what data should even be mapped to make it most useful to people living in environmentally vulnerable areas (most neighborhoods in Philly). 

My background in teaching and organizing, my direct experience living (and raising a child) in an EJ community, as well as my own research, pointed to the importance of land use, and how every instance of environmental injustice could be traced to a decision someone made about something extractive or toxic that would be sited a community that was not their own. 

It made sense to me for land use change to be the reference frame for the EJ Map, for people to be able to identify how metrics like air quality, heat index, flooding, to be connected to concrete changes in their environment. Because people could get lost in all the different numbers and units, perhaps a comprehensive THRIVING SCORE could be calculated, while also flagging the particular DIMENSIONS that contributed the most to its improvement or decline. If people could see the connection between land use change and their quality of life, they'd have the data they need to advocate for or against different kinds of development. 

And there it was. The answer to my question about my kid's village, how I might give him real criteria by which to decide what we built out of cardboard and pipe cleaners. As all my experience with the politics of land use came to mind, the mechanics for the game quickly became too much for a 3-4 year old, and took on a life of its own. A year and a half of designing and testing later, and here we are. The game is complete, envisioned as one tool of many to help people get organized around what changes in their environment. 

With your support, I can move beyond single-handedly facilitating game sessions from my backpack with a Staples-printed prototype. 

As for my kid, and the village, well...stay tuned for information about a little something called RIGHT TO THE CITY MINI. 😁

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