Video game platform for the participatory design of public spaces

As citizens we live in public and urban spaces that are mostly determined and designed with little or no participation from us. At the same time, the digital era has allowed us a unique interaction between the physical and the digital.

With the aim of empowering citizens and involving them in the design of public spaces, the SuperBarrio project uses digital gamification strategies.

As an open-source tool, SuperBarrio manages to potentially broaden the audience in participatory design processes. Everyone can play and decide on the design of their public space.

In this way, new paths are opened in the future of the design and planning of our cities. Responsive technologies such as gamification or mixed realities are transformed into new tools for the architect’s action to understand the urban space through quantitative data (environment, context) and qualitative data (wishes, needs, emotions). Additionally, new paths of interaction and connection between citizens and the inhabited space are opened. As co-creators of the spaces we inhabit, citizens of future cities take responsibility for them, increasing our empathy, connection and sense of “place making”. The city of the future, thus, is a city designed and created WITH people rather than FOR people.

SuperBarrio is a flexible and replicable tool in different urban contexts. The first version was developed in 2017 within the framework of the Master in City & Technology (MaCT) of the IAAC - Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia for the «Superilla» in Barcelona. Successively, it has been developed for the Italian cities of Genoa and Favara, as well as the cities of Porto, Nantes and Sofia, within the framework of the European project URBINAT (Horizon 2020).