How can cities prepare for uncertainty while fostering collaboration, creativity, and trust?

up:town is a serious game that enables urban leaders, planners, researchers, and communities to co-create resilient futures. Developed at our lab, it integrates play with purpose to advance strategic foresight, innovation, and collaborative governance.

up:town is a participatory simulation where players take on roles in a fictional yet relatable city. Together they work through pressing urban challenges such as climate shocks, migration, housing pressures, or social tensions. By drawing on approaches from serious gaming, participatory foresight, and design research, the game provides a bridge between scientific inquiry and practical decision making.

Participants use simple creative tools, such as Lego bricks or modeling clay, to visualise complex dynamics and make abstract concepts tangible. These playful methods lower barriers to participation while opening pathways to structured exploration of urban futures. The game creates a safe, experimental environment where participants can:

• Explore uncertainty without real-world risks

• Engage in hands-on scenario building and collective decision making

• Experience the tensions of competing perspectives

• Prototype strategies for sustainability, resilience, and transformation

The game offers a safe and flexible space for prototyping ideas, testing strategies, and engaging in interactive decision-making simulations that reflect real-world pressures. It fosters collaborative problem-solving, supports the tangible exploration of complex urban issues such as climate adaptation and governance reform, and nurtures a culture of innovation and resilience. These qualities make the game valuable for city administrations and public agencies seeking to test policy pathways, urban planners and designers exploring transformation scenarios, community organisations pursuing participatory engagement, universities and research labs integrating foresight into teaching and research, and corporations or utilities examining their roles in shaping sustainable urban futures.

up:town evolves continuously through the contributions of its participants. Each play adds new insights, making the game a living laboratory for resilience and foresight. It has been featured in international academic, civic, and innovation arenas, including: re:publica Berlin (2022), the MIT City Science Summit in Cambridge (2022), SXSW in Austin (2023), the Future Forum in New York City (2023), the German-American Conference at Harvard (2023), CityClimate meets CreativeCoding in Hamburg (2023), HSLU Teaching Urbanism in Lucerne (2023), Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (2024), Merck S&Q, the BIFOLD Summer School (2024), the Sinking Cities project, Dar es Salaam Summer School (2025) and many others.

Please contact Annika Kühn for more information about the project.