As cities around the world begin the slow and careful process of recovering from the initial wave of devastation caused by the novel coronavirus, their quest for resilience hinges on one characteristic that has long been a foundational asset: density.

The ravages of the last six months — 500,000 lives lost and counting, record unemployment, bankruptcies, trillions of losses in assets and tax revenue — have hit cities particularly hard. The crisis threatens the building blocks of a functioning urban economy, including residents and businesses located downtown, transit systems that serve them, thriving colleges and universities, and amenities and services including restaurants, retail, sports, and entertainment.

Given that more than half of the world’s population lives and works in urban areas — a number that is expected to increase to 68 percent by 2050 — the recovery of urban areas is of vital importance.

Historically, cities have responded to disease and disaster with affirmative measures: first responders and building codes after great fires, water and sewer infrastructure prompted by cholera, or tightened security to guard against international terrorism. This time around, amid social distancing requirements and concerns about contagion, density has been in the spotlight, with skeptics in media and policy circles questioning its merits and advocates quickly rising to its defense.

A closer look at the realities of this virus and the way it has spread makes it clear that density itself is not the cause of collective pain. Density defines cities; it’s what makes them work. The more significant factors powering the pandemic — and the issues cities urgently need to address — are overcrowding, lack of affordability, and economic and racial disparities.

The management of the pandemic has several components, including testing, contact tracing, treatments, and ultimately, the world hopes, a vaccine. In the meantime, the public health protocols of social distancing — a minimum six-feet buffer between people — rely on reducing proximity. That can be achieved by, for example, limiting the number of people in a workplace, elevator, or subway car, or on a college campus, at any one time; drawing circles in a park to delineate safe distance between visitors; or letting a restaurant spill into the street for more space between tables.

In that sense, density is just one more thing that needs to be managed. But a closer look raises myriad questions about whether cities can function economically and socially with reduced proximity — let alone navigate a recovery that makes cities more sustainable and equitable. The pandemic has highlighted extensive economic and racial disparities, and the recent worldwide wave of protests over police brutality and structural racism further underscores how much work remains.

At the height of the pandemic, the world saw wealthy city-dwellers decamp to second homes or hunker down in larger apartments, but lower-income workers in service jobs — disproportionately in communities of color — could not work from home and could not afford not to work. If their jobs didn’t vanish, they risked higher exposure to infection, and if they got sick, their often crowded living conditions — necessitated in part by the high costs of housing — made self-isolation more difficult.

As the author Jay Pitter wrote when the coronavirus was sweeping across North America this spring, there are different kinds of density at issue. There exists, she noted, a “dominant density . . . designed by and for predominately white, middle-class urban dwellers living in high-priced condominiums within or adjacent to the city’s downtown core,” and “forgotten densities” that include those in the periphery: “favelas, shanty towns, factory dormitories, seniors’ homes, tent cities, Indigenous reserves, prisons, mobile home parks, shelters and public housing” (Pitter 2020).

So while taking over parking spaces and making other changes to the public realm may be salutary short-term fixes, says Amy Cotter, director of climate strategies at the Lincoln Institute, “it won’t even begin to be sufficient. We’re going to need policies that do double- or even triple-duty,” addressing structural issues in housing, transportation, and the environment, to realize an equitable and sustainable recovery for the four billion-plus urban residents worldwide.

In the 19th century, the global rise of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever led to new design practices and systems intended to keep people healthier, in part by giving them more space (Klein 2020). Formerly cramped and dirty cities introduced wide boulevards, water and sewer infrastructure, and public parks that served as the “lungs of the city,” a concept embraced by Frederick Law Olmsted, whose landscape designs include New York’s Central Park and the Emerald Necklace in Boston.

Such improvements were inarguably positive, but some came with economic and social consequences, intended or otherwise. To execute the cholera-inspired widening and straightening of Paris streets, for example, authorities razed lower-income neighborhoods. They also smoothed the way for the military to conduct surveillance and suppress potential rebellions, notes Sara Jensen Carr, an assistant professor of architecture, urbanism, and landscape at Northeastern University, who is author of the forthcoming book The Topography of Wellness: Health and the American Urban Landscape.

In the early 20th century, separated-use zoning in the United States was driven in large part by public health concerns in congested urban areas — that a tannery shouldn’t be allowed to be sited next to tenement houses, for example. Arguably, that change in land use rules ended up reinforcing racist housing policies and enabling suburban sprawl. The redrawing of zoning maps extended to the racial segregation of residential areas, and set the foundation for federally imposed redlining in the wake of the Great Depression. The separation of uses is the basis for far-flung, low-density suburban development generally, following World War II.

Striving for more “light and air” in cities, the modernist pioneer Le Corbusier proposed clearing out the cluttered section of central Paris and replacing it with towers in parks. The United States embraced the idea in the era of urban renewal, building housing in windswept plazas, and bulldozing the urban fabric — often houses and businesses in communities of color — to make way for extensive parking facilities and destructive freeways.

The history of urban interventions in response to crises underscores the need for policy makers and planners to be more thoughtful about what problem they are actually trying to solve, and what impacts and ripple effects the fixes could have. That means understanding more about how the coronavirus is actually spread, across all human settlement.

The scientific literature supports the broad supposition that infectious disease spreads more easily in densely populated urban environments, whether the plague or the Spanish flu of 1918. “Scholars have argued that virtually all human infectious diseases due to microorganisms arose out of the emergence of urbanism,” writes Michael Hooper, professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. The association of density and disease, he notes, became known as the “urban penalty” (Hooper 2020).

But epidemiologists say that airborne infectious disease spreads at a more fine-grained level, such as in crowded churches, military barracks, or homes shared by large families — a significant narrowing of scale from the city as a whole. The drivers of the spread of the coronavirus are close contact in crowded indoor spaces, with the duration of time spent together another factor, says Muge Cevik, an infectious disease specialist at the University of St. Andrews. “There is a strong correlation between indoor crowding and pandemic hot- spots, especially in packed cities for sure. But the same pattern is also reflected in nursing homes or meatpacking plants,” she says. Indeed, the virus has torn through rural areas with comparable force, fueled by flareups in factories or prisons and, as an analysis by the Wall Street Journal shows, exacerbated by crowded family housing. This has all happened far from any urban center (Thebault 2020, Lovett 2020).

One recent study found that COVID-19 death rates were higher in low-density counties, in part due to differences in access to health care (Hamidi 2020). Early data suggest that even within cities, for every apartment complex like the one dubbed the “death tower” in the Bronx, there’s a relatively low-density neighborhood that has been hit just as hard (Freytas-Tamura 2020). Several devastated New York neighborhoods, like Elmhurst, Borough Park, and Corona, had a high population density, measured as people per square mile, without sufficient housing density, as measured by units per acre, says Julie Campoli, principal at Terra Firma Urban Design in Burlington, Vermont. “In other words, larger households living in small spaces,” Campoli says. “For the low-income residents in affected areas of Queens and Brooklyn, sharing tight quarters is the only affordable option in a city with very high rents.”

New policies and practices to confront the coronavirus, whether incremental measures or more revolutionary change, will be informed by nuanced analysis of what’s actually happening on the ground, in the spread of the disease.

It’s a matter of following the string back to why there is a greater concentration of people living in the same household, says Yonah Freemark, a doctoral candidate in urban studies at MIT and founder of The Transport Politic blog.

“Any sort of condition where you see crowding for any period of time seems to be a vector of this disease, and that can be people living closer together. People are more likely to be crowded because housing is expensive,” he says. “If we had more density and more housing for people, we would have less crowding within the units and people could afford to be in larger units.”

Many other systemic problems have made residents in poorer urban neighborhoods more susceptible to this disease, ranging from a lack of adequate health insurance to a legacy of environmental injustice. A study by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that communities with higher levels of fine particulate matter — air pollution from nearby power plants or highways — have recorded more deaths from the coronavirus (Wu 2020).

Confronting all of those issues, which were intensifying long before the current pandemic set in, may seem as daunting as a massive overhaul of society. But when it comes to housing, at least, advocates suggest that now is the time to begin to address the inequities and lack of affordability the pandemic has so starkly revealed.

Many states have put a hold on evictions and instituted other tenant protections, not only for residents but also for small businesses and nonprofits (Howard 2020). Those policies could become a more permanent safety net. California passed an initiative to allow the most vulnerable and homeless populations to safely isolate in vacant hotel rooms. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has suggested seizing the moment to keep that policy in place, providing safer and more secure shelter than temporary encampments.

Campoli, who wrote Made for Walking: Density and Neighborhood Form (Campoli 2012) and coauthored Visualizing Density (Campoli 2007), echoes the idea that the need to address affordability is more pressing than ever. “A long-term solution to fighting the spread of pathogens in cities is to make housing a right,” she says. “Investing in affordable housing and implementing policies that ensure everyone has a home to shelter in will help cities achieve density without the overcrowding and homelessness that bring suffering and spread disease.”

New approaches in the design of multifamily housing should also play a role in urban recovery, Campoli said. “Experimenting with temporary installations for social distancing makes sense, but when it comes to expensive investments like buildings and public spaces, let’s make changes that add value well beyond the immediate crisis,” she says. Campoli suggests that multifamily housing should increasingly include features such as carefully designed outdoor spaces, better ventilation systems, flexible partitions that enable privacy, and even touchless doors and hand washing stations in public rooms.

Policy makers will have to be creative and work with what’s feasible. State and local budgets are piling up record deficits, just when added services are most needed. The economic downturn triggered by the pandemic will almost certainly slow down real estate development, which could lead to a decrease, at least temporarily, in such market-based solutions as inclusionary housing. Privately built multifamily housing below the luxury level, with its lower profit margins, may get put on hold.

Yet local governments might be able to take advantage of the massive reshuffling in urban real estate that is already underway, according to the Lincoln Institute’s Martim Smolka, a senior fellow who is advising cities in Latin America on their response to the pandemic. That means special attention to land policy, regulations, and financing mechanisms related to urban development and land markets.

Office space in central business districts, with busy elevators, shared bathrooms, and scarce parking, will likely be abandoned in favor of properties in lower-density residential zones at the urban periphery, Smolka says. Less space will be needed as more employees work remotely more often (Seay 2020). An appropriate intervention might be to acquire the now lower-valued office buildings and convert them to affordable housing — and to charge development rights for those areas that require a zoning change from residential to commercial.

Trading places in this manner would present new opportunities to reenvision metropolitan areas in terms of housing and labor markets. Large metropolitan areas might see increases in density in suburban areas, in what urban planners refer to as the polycentric model: multiple urban villages across a larger area (Zeljic 2020). “That could actually increase economic efficiency and social equity, due to lower mobility costs and flatter land price gradients,” Smolka says.

Similarly, looking at recovery in a larger, more regional framework — the New York–Boston corridor, for example — opens up possibilities for smaller legacy cities to play a more prominent role across a larger landscape. If more employees are working from home, they could live in more affordable places, like Hartford or Worcester, and make only the more occasional trip into head- quarters in bigger cities.

There is already evidence that major companies are staging an exodus, as reduced workplace density fails to justify high rents (Davis et al., 2020). Higher-income residents, young professionals, and aging boomers may well follow, drawn once again to large suburban houses with big back yards, accessed by car — especially as the amenities that attracted them to the city in the first place steadily disappear (Davis 2020). As jobs at many levels vanish, middle- and working- class populations might also quit the metropolis

Others hope the advantages of downtowns will persevere, fueled by persistent demographic trends. “For the next two decades, 80 percent of net new households [in the United States] will be singles and couples,” says David Dixon, a partner in the urban design firm Stantec. “A majority of our population growth will be folks over 65. That means unprecedented demand for urban living and a knowledge-dominated economy.”

“Everyone deserves to live in a community that is healthy, equitable, and resilient,” wrote Smart Growth America CEO Calvin Gladney as protests unspooled across the country. “These communities have housing their residents can afford, provide access to transportation options that affordably connect people to jobs and opportunities, and offer public spaces that anyone can safely enjoy.” Gladney pointed out that decisions made over decades related to land use, transportation, and the built environment have led to an unequal system, urging the country to use this moment to do better.

In early May, C40 Cities, which represents more than 750 million people around the world, released a statement of principles that embraces building “a better, more sustainable, and fairer society out of the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis,” warning against a return to “business as usual” (C40 Cities 2020). “The only parallel to what we’re facing right now is the Great Depression,” said New York City Mayor and C40 member Bill de Blasio in a statement. “Against that kind of challenge, half-measures that maintain the status quo won’t move the needle or protect us from the next crisis. We need a New Deal for these times — a massive transformation that rebuilds lives, promotes equality, and prevents the next economic, health, or climate crisis.”

Other organizations including the World Economic Forum are promoting the idea of “building back better” as the world copes with the repercussions of the COVID-19 crisis. Setting the bar higher will mean confronting persistent and pernicious problems in our cities. It will also mean building on the strongest physical assets of those same cities: walkable, mixed-use environments served by transit and mobility systems other than private vehicles. “Smart density and the agility and creativity of cities is what’s going to allow us to not just get through this health crisis, but emerge with a more equitable, healthy environment,” says Schaaf.

Resilient cities will recover from this crisis, and density — adjusted as it must be to ensure greater accessibility and affordability for all — is sure to be a critical component. “Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with cities and an aversion to density, so it’s no surprise that spreading out would be considered an appropriate response to this moment,” Campoli notes. “But in the long run, proximity is essential for healthy communities and the environment. We aren’t planning to give up on the essential activities that sustain us.”

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute and a contributing editor to Land Lines.

Photograph: Data suggest the spread of COVID-19 has far more to do with overcrowding in indoor spaces than with neighborhood density. Credit: Joey Cheung via iStock.

Note: This article appears in the July 2020 print edition of Land Lines with the title “The Future of Density.”

References

C40 Cities. 2020. “No Return to Business as Usual: Mayors Pledge on COVID-19 Economic Recovery.” Press release. London: C40 Cities. https://www.c40.org/press_releases/taskforce-principles.

Campoli, Julie. 2012. Made for Walking: Density and Neighborhood Form. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/books/made-walking.

Campoli, Julie and Alex S. MacLean. 2007. Visualizing Density. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/books/visualizing-density.

Carr, Sara Jensen. Forthcoming. The Topography of Wellness: Health and the American Urban Landscape. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.

Davis, Elliott. 2020. “A New Report Highlights What Binds People to Their Cities.” US News & World Report, May 20. https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-05-20/a-new-report-highlights-what-binds-people-to-their-cities.

Davis, Michelle, Viren Vaghela, and Natalie Wong. 2020. “Big Banks Plan Staffing Limits, Shift to Suburbs After Lockdown.” Bloomberg Law, May 20. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/big-banks-plan-staffing-limits-shift-to-suburbs-after-lockdown.

Freytas-Tamura, Kimiko de, Winnie Hu, and Lindsey Rogers Cook. 2020. “‘It’s the Death Towers’: How the Bronx Became New York’s Virus Hot Spot.” The New York Times, May 26. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/nyregion/bronx-coronavirus-outbreak.html.

Hamidi, Shima, Sadegh Sabouri, and Reid Ewing. 2020. “Does Density Aggravate the COVID-19 Pandemic?” Journal of the American Planning Association, June 18. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2020.1777891.

Hooper, Michael. 2020. “Pandemics and the Future of Urban Density: Michael Hooper on Hygiene, Public Perception, and the ‘Urban Penalty’.” Harvard University Graduate School of Design. April 13. https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/2020/04/have-we-embraced-urban-density-to-our-own-peril-michael-hooper-on-hygiene-public-perception-and-the-urban-penalty-in-a-global- pandemic.

Howard, Miles. 2020. “Response to Pandemic Shows What’s Possible in Housing.” Shelterforce, May 20. https://shelterforce.org/2020/05/20/response-to-pandemic-shows-whats-possible-in-housing.

Klein, Christopher. 2020. “How Pandemics Spurred Cities to Make More Green Space for People.” History Stories, History.com. April 28. https://www.history.com/news/cholera-pandemic-new-york-city-london-paris-green-space.

Lovett, Ian, Dan Frosch, and Paul Overberg. 2020. “COVID-19 Stalks Large Families in Rural America.” Wall Street Journal, June 7. https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-households-spread-coronavirus-families-navajo-california-second-wave-11591553896.

Morgan, Richard, and Jada Yuan. 2020. “Frustrated and Struggling, New Yorkers Contemplate Abandoning the City They Love.” The Washington Post, May 25. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/frustrated-and-struggling-new-yorkers-contemplate-abandoning-the-city-they-love/2020/05/25/153ca71e-9c5b-11ea-a2b3- 5c3f2d1586df_story.html.

Pitter, Jay. 2020. “Urban Density: Confronting the Distance Between Desire and Disparity.” Azure, April 17. https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/urban-density-confronting-the-distance-between-desire-and-disparity/.

Seay, Bob, 2020. “How Working from Home May Change Where Mass. Residents Live.” WGBH News. Boston, MA: WGBH, May 29. https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2020/05/29/how-working-from-home-may- change-where-mass-residents-live.

Thebault, Reis, and Abigail Hauslohner. 2020. “A Deadly ‘Checkerboard’: COVID-19’s New Surge Across Rural America.” The Washington Post, May 24. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/24/coronavirus- rural-america-outbreaks.

Wu, Xiao, Rachel C. Nethery, M. Benjamin Sabath, Danielle Braun, and Francesca Dominici. 2020. “Exposure to Air Pollution and COVID-19 Mortality in the United States.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/covid-pm/files/pm_and_covid_mortality.pdf.

Zeljic, Aleksandar Sasha. 2020. “Polycentric Cities: The Future of Sustainable Urban Growth.” Dialogue (blog), Gensler. https://www.gensler.com/research-insight/blog/polycentric-cities-new-normal-manila-finance-centre.

Carlos Morales-Schechinger sabía que estaba condenado. Era funcionario en el ministerio de desarrollo urbano de México, y se suponía que debía hablar en una conferencia en San Luis Potosí inmediatamente después de una mañana llena de compromisos y un almuerzo extenso. Ante la ola de bostezos que los alumnos no pretendían disimular, Morales tuvo que recurrir a su creatividad.

Sin pensarlo demasiado, decidió renunciar a la lección formal acerca de las políticas territoriales urbanas nacionales en México. En cambio, le pidió a un estudiante de las primeras filas si podía comprar la silla en la que estaba sentado, y le ofreció un billete que tenía en el bolsillo como forma de pago.

Luego de un poco de confusión inicial, el estudiante aceptó. Entonces, Morales empezó a subastar el lugar. Hablaba en voz baja para ilustrar la ventaja de la ubicación, y así aumentó la demanda. Pronto, los estudiantes estaban involucrados en su presentación y en el mueble, cuyo precio rápidamente se había tornado invaluable. Hacia el final de la sesión, valiéndose apenas de los objetos del salón de clase, había dado vida a los procesos que determinan el valor territorial y de densificación, así como a otros fenómenos relacionados con el tema de los mercados territoriales urbanos, tema de gran complejidad y, en general, tergiversado.

Eso fue hace 30 años. En las décadas que siguieron, el intento espontáneo de Morales por involucrar a los soñolientos estudiantes evolucionó en varios juegos educativos y se transformó en ellos, como un juego organizado de varios días llamado GIROS. GIROS, llamado así por el doble significado de “transacción” y “dar vueltas”, que captura la noción de las interdependencias de los mercados territoriales, fue diseñado por Martim Smolka, director del programa en América Latina y el Caribe del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo, y mejorado con la ayuda de Morales, que hoy pertenece al cuerpo docente de dicho instituto. GIROS se jugó más de 150 veces e inspiró recursos derivados en gran parte de América Latina, además de en los Países Bajos, Taiwán, Ghana, Kenia, Filipinas y otros países. Los participantes han variado desde estudiantes de planificación urbana hasta funcionarios públicos de altos cargos.

GIROS requiere poca utilería. Smolka y Morales desarrollaron un juego de mesa básico con piezas divididas por color que se usan para mapear la evolución de una ciudad imaginaria. Los participantes se dividen en equipos y usan gorros para indicar roles como funcionarios de gobierno, organizaciones no gubernamentales, distintos tipos de ciudadanos y desarrolladores. Durante las primeras rondas, los jugadores (con “planes ocultos” asignados para simular la naturaleza oscura de los mercados territoriales) negocian y comercializan terrenos en un mercado con poca regulación. En la mitad de la jugada, el “gobierno” introduce normativas como zonas de alta densidad, que alteran la trayectoria del desarrollo de la ciudad. Cuando termina cada ronda o sucede un fenómeno teóricamente importante debido a una transacción, los estudiantes se quitan el gorro para debatir qué ocurrió y por qué.

Según las decisiones que toman los jugadores, el juego puede cobrar muchas formas. Pero siempre surgen dos moralejas, evidentes desde el origen del juego. La primera es que el valor territorial no es intrínseco, sino que se forma debido a factores como costos de transporte, reglamentaciones sobre el uso del suelo, tributación y otras condiciones externas. La segunda moraleja, que el Instituto Lincoln adopta por completo como parte de su labor actual de diseño educativo, es que los juegos son una parte de enorme importancia en la enseñanza de políticas del suelo.

GIROS es solo uno de los juegos educativos y herramientas interactivas del paquete del Instituto Lincoln, que crece cada vez más. Si bien estas herramientas se usan más que nada en los cursos del Instituto en América Latina, el aprendizaje activo tiene una función cada vez más grande en toda su oferta educativa. “En términos de diseño educativo más amplio, de verdad queremos cambiar el equilibrio de nuestros cursos presenciales, alejarlos de las presentaciones y las lecciones y acercarlos a las actividades de aprendizaje activo”, dijo Ge Vue, director asociado de Diseño educativo en el Instituto Lincoln. “El juego es un ejemplo de esto”.

Los juegos son una herramienta pedagógica única y útil por varios motivos, afirma Vue. Alientan a la acción, la interactividad y el pensamiento innovador de formas que no logran los enfoques tradicionales de clases. Vue enfatiza que los juegos tienen el potencial de enseñar no solo contenido, sino también habilidades de resolución de problemas más aplicables. Son una herramienta flexible; permiten a los estudiantes ofrecer comentarios y opiniones en tiempo real, y a los moderadores aportar sus propios conocimientos y orientación en el transcurso de la actividad.

Giovanni Pérez Macías, un abogado que jugó a GIROS por primera vez en 2007 como parte de un curso de tres meses sobre políticas del suelo del Instituto Lincoln en Panamá, reconoce que una de las fortalezas del juego es la capacidad del instructor de cambiar el rumbo que toma. “Si Carlos ve que un grupo necesita aprender sobre un tema específico sobre desarrollo urbano o políticas de suelo, puede orientar el juego [de modo que enseñe] ese tema”, dice.

En un video acerca del juego producido por la Universidad Erasmo de Róterdam, Morales explica que, cualquiera que sea el resultado, los estudiantes deben comprender su propia influencia. “Si ganas el juego, debes explicar por qué”, dijo. “Si no puedes [explicar por qué ganaste], pierdes puntos. La intención principal no es ganar ni perder, sino aprender”.

Enseñar con juegos

Los juegos populares que invitan a los jugadores a asumir la función de desarrollador o planificador urbano son una parte conocida del paisaje cultural. Elizabeth Magie, devota de Henry George, fue quien inventó Monopoly en 1903; luego, en los 30, lo compró Parker Brothers y lo transformó en el juego capitalista que todo el mundo conoce en la actualidad. Otros juegos digitales modernos mantuvieron viva la tradición, como SimCity, en el que los jugadores construyen y administran áreas urbanas, y Minecraft, que ubica a los jugadores en un paisaje no desarrollado con las herramientas que necesitan para construir ciudades y otras estructuras.

Estos juegos se superponen con el mundo de la planificación urbana y la influyen: “No estaría donde estoy hoy si no fuera por SimCity”, dijo un funcionario de la National Association of City Transportation Officials (Asociación Nacional de Funcionarios del Transporte Urbano) a Los Angeles Times en un artículo sobre el 30.º aniversario del juego (Roy 2019); pero no siempre reflejan las realidades del desarrollo urbano.

Por ejemplo, en el caso de Monopoly, Smolka apunta al hecho de que los valores territoriales no varían según la conducta de los jugadores, y lo usa como ejemplo de que el emblemático juego refuerza ideas equivocadas acerca de los mercados territoriales. Smolka explicó que la inspiración de GIROS vino, en parte, de un juego que se había concebido en Bogotá para enseñar principios de captura de valor territorial, pero que tenía este mismo problema: “Se pierde la parte más importante de la conversación. La racionalidad de los agentes debe afectar el uso y el valor territorial”.

Smolka no es el único con esta postura. En un artículo sobre juegos populares de construcción de ciudades, Bradley Bereitschaft, profesor adjunto de geografía de la Universidad de Nebraska, escribió: “las limitaciones e imprecisiones de estos juegos limitan su utilidad para comprender procesos urbanos complejos” (Bereitschaft 2016). De hecho, fue ese tipo de inquietud académica lo que llevó a desarrollar los llamados “juegos serios” a partir de los 60. Clark C. Abt, educador e ingeniero alemán, le dio un nombre a la tendencia emergente en su libro Serious Games (Juegos serios), de 1970. Escribió que estos juegos “tienen una finalidad educativa explícita y planeada con cuidado, y su principal objetivo no es la diversión. Esto no quiere decir que los juegos serios no sean entretenidos, o no deban serlo” (Abt 1970).

Muchos de los primeros juegos sobre planificación urbana fueron “producto de necesidades locales”, según indica Eszter Tóth, estudiante de doctorado en la Universidad HafenCity de Hamburgo, quien investiga el campo de la participación de los niños en la planificación urbana (Tóth 2015). Estos juegos, que suelen desarrollar las universidades a pedido de los municipios locales, se solían jugar solo un par de veces, y nunca se publicaban. Uno de los que sí tuvo más vida útil (y algunos lo citaron como el origen de los juegos de simulación, que imitan situaciones de la vida real) fue Metropolis. Richard Duke, profesor de la Universidad de Míchigan, diseñó esa simulación en 1966 para ayudar al Ayuntamiento de Lansing a superar un proceso presupuestario complejo.

Poco después, Alan Feldt, profesor de planificación urbana y regional en Cornell, quien luego sería uno de los colaboradores de Duke, diseñó un juego de mesa de planificación urbana con la finalidad específica de utilizarse en la educación superior. El Juego de Uso Territorial Comunitario (Community Land Use Game, CLUG) se centraba en un tablero con 196 cuadrados de 2,5 centímetros de lado. Durante 20 horas, cinco equipos formados por dos o tres estudiantes de sus cursos de grado y posgrado sobre planificación regional pretendían construir fábricas, tiendas y residencias en relación con transporte, recursos y servicios, con el objetivo de maximizar el valor territorial.

Un artículo de 1969 en Cornell Daily Sun acerca del juego de Feldt, que ya se había usado como auxiliar didáctico en México, Alemania, Israel e Inglaterra, opinó sobre la nueva tendencia: “Antes, jugar con bloques se veía como una conducta apropiada para niños de jardín, pero la teoría de la enseñanza moderna de hoy está transformando esos pasatiempos que antes eran infantiles en técnicas universitarias aceptadas”.

Por qué jugar es bueno para los planificadores

Paul Sandroni, economista y ahora profesor retirado de la Fundación Getulio Vargas de San Pablo, Brasil, quien ha colaborado con el Instituto Lincoln y desarrolló simuladores y juegos propios, cree que los juegos tienen una utilidad especial para enseñar a los planificadores urbanos.

“En general, los planificadores urbanos toman decisiones, y un juego les da la oportunidad de practicar y jugar en un campo de intercambios; si quiero más de X, tendré menos de Y”, dijo Sandroni. “Los planificadores urbanos lidian con una ciudad entera, un organismo muy complejo. En otras profesiones, hay limitaciones porque se trabaja con temas más específicos, pero los juegos se pueden adaptar a cualquier situación que implique elegir distintas formas de resolver un problema”.

“Se pueden enfrentar las mismas preguntas y los mismos problemas en tiempo real, aunque simplificados, que los que enfrentan los verdaderos encargados de tomar decisiones en su vida profesional”, dijo Pérez Macías.

El aspecto físico de los juegos como GIROS podría ser particularmente útil para los planificadores urbanos, quienes son más físicos por la naturaleza de su interés en el diseño del entorno construido, expresó Daphne Kenyon, miembro residente en el equipo de política impositiva del Instituto Lincoln. Kenyon ayudó a simplificar el juego en PLUS, un derivado condensado de GIROS, en la conferencia nacional de la Asociación Americana de Planificación (APA), en abril de 2019. Durante la sesión de la APA, los planificadores se movían entre sillas y mesas que representaban unidades de viviendas y terrenos. Al final de la primera ronda, cuando los jugadores que cumplían la función de desarrolladores produjeron de más para los ricos y de menos para los pobres debido a la falta de intervención del gobierno, un grupo de planificadores verdaderos vestidos como profesionales se reunió en el suelo para representar que no tenían un techo. Vue explica que la interacción física de los estudiantes con un juego o la creación de objetos nuevos ofrece más opciones para representar su forma de pensar y comunicar los motivos de sus acciones.

Los juegos de rol de GIROS también ayudan a los estudiantes a habitar perspectivas que, de otro modo, no verían, dice Kenyon, quien planea usar una versión condensada del juego en un curso sobre economía que enseña en la Universidad Brandeis. Kenyon cree que el juego podría enfrentarse a las suposiciones de algunos de sus alumnos, porque los obligaría a ver los desafíos que los desarrolladores en particular pueden afrontar en las situaciones de construcción de ciudades.

Los juegos del Instituto Lincoln también forman parte de una respuesta más grande a una tendencia persistente: muchos programas de maestrías de planificación urbana, tanto en los Estados Unidos como en América Latina, ofrecen poca capacitación o nula en economía urbana y tributación inmobiliaria en su plan de estudio principal. En cambio, se enfocan más estrechamente en el diseño urbano y la naturaleza física de las ciudades. Smolka y otras personas consideran a los juegos y otras técnicas de aprendizaje activo como una forma de llenar ese vacío. Según explicó Smolka: “GIROS está diseñado para enseñar al tipo de profesional reacio a las ecuaciones o fórmulas que determinan los fundamentos de los valores territoriales, y cómo las normas y regulaciones afectan a las ganancias públicas”.

En las últimas décadas, a medida que los municipios rechazaban cada vez más procesos de planificación verticales, los juegos serios se convirtieron en una herramienta cada vez más popular para ayudar en los procesos públicos y a los dirigentes a resolver situaciones reales con datos reales.

Play the City, una firma con base en Ámsterdam cuyo lema es “juegos serios para ciudades ingeniosas y sociales”, cree que los juegos tienen el potencial de reemplazar los formatos tradicionales de compromiso cívico. La empresa diseña juegos físicos a la medida de ciudades específicas que unen a las partes interesadas para tratar temas como viviendas asequibles, expansión urbana, cambio climático y diseño participativo. Play the City también se dedica a documentar juegos que mejoran la creación de ciudades, y mantiene una base de datos que incluye a GIROS.

El contexto latinoamericano

Hoy, el Instituto Lincoln utiliza GIROS y otros juegos principalmente en América Latina, donde se ofrece la mayoría de los cursos de la organización (centrados en mercados territoriales urbanos formales e informales, captura de valor territorial, proyectos de redesarrollo urbano y otros temas relacionados). Si bien algunos gobiernos locales de la región aceptaron la función de los juegos en el proceso de planificación, históricamente los académicos estuvieron menos dispuestos a usar juegos en los salones de clase universitarios.

Sandroni cree que esa indecisión se puede atribuir a falta de tiempo, financiación y exposición a estos auxiliares didácticos. Él comenzó a experimentar con el uso de juegos en el salón de clase en los 90. Notó que los estudiantes siempre jugaban a las cartas entre clases, entonces desarrolló dos juegos de cartas propios y los llevó al entorno formal de la clase. Dirige O Jogo da Economia Brasileira (Juego de la economía brasileña) desde 1999, un torneo nacional en el cual los estudiantes de economía de todo el país compiten y comprenden mejor los tipos de cambio, la inflación, la deuda externa y otros conceptos. Sandroni dijo que, al apoyar a los profesores y modelar el uso de juegos en las aulas, “el Instituto Lincoln realmente lidera el uso de juegos en educación en América Latina”.

Pérez Macías cree que la clave para cambiar la resistencia cultural a los juegos es ofrecer oportunidades profesionales de desarrollo, para que los profesores puedan experimentar los juegos por sí mismos. Al menos, así funcionó para él, dice. Luego de hacer el primer curso del Instituto Lincoln, en el que accedió a casi todos los juegos que se habían desarrollado hasta entonces, Pérez Macías comenzó a tomar cursos adicionales de ludificación, se convirtió en practicante de ludificación autoproclamado e incorporó derivados de GIROS a sus propios cursos. Hoy, usa una metodología llamada LEGO Serious Play, que se suele usar para facilitar reuniones y comunicación en entornos corporativos, que él adaptó como herramienta para enseñar temas urbanos, como diseño participativo, negociación y construcción de edificios entre las partes interesadas del sector.

Gislene Pereira, profesora de arquitectura y planificación urbana de la Universidad Federal de Paraná, quien vio GIROS por primera vez en 2009 en Caracas, dice que lo valoró porque permitía a los participantes “pensar con la lógica de cada uno de los agentes de la ciudad”, porque se ponían en su lugar. Desde entonces, ha ayudado a supervisar el desarrollo de una versión simplificada para usar en cursos con estudiantes de arquitectura y urbanismo, y en capacitaciones de concejales de políticas de suelo, impuestos e instrumentos no impositivos.

En América Latina el interés por los juegos creció, tendencia que se confirmó, al menos de forma anecdótica, en un curso de una semana organizado por el Instituto Lincoln en Guatemala a principios de 2019. El curso se centró en el uso de herramientas como juegos y tribunales, crucigramas y videos para enseñar temas de políticas y mercado territorial a planificadores urbanos (ver lateral). Como parte del proceso de inscripción, los solicitantes (de los cuales algunos habían ido a cursos anteriores del Instituto Lincoln) tuvieron que describir una herramienta que ya estuvieran usando en las aulas. De los 78 inscritos que recibió el Instituto, 34 indicaron que usaban algún tipo de juego en sus cursos, y otros citaron el uso de análisis de casos, simulaciones, videos y ejercicios teatrales.

“Notamos mucho más interés del que pensábamos”, dijo Enrique Silva, director de Iniciativas Internacionales e Institucionales del Instituto Lincoln. “En Guatemala, vimos que hay público y disposición [para las herramientas de aprendizaje activo] y, lo que es más importante, demanda. Daba la sensación de que a las personas les encantaría involucrarse más”.

Aprendizaje activo en Lincoln 

Ge Vue, director asociado de Diseño Educativo en el Instituto Lincoln, dijo que alienta a quienes enseñan a pensar sobre aprendizaje activo, independientemente de la herramienta que usen: “Se pueden incluir instancias de aprendizaje activo en una simple puesta en situación en PowerPoint [tanto como] en un juego más elaborado que lleva varios días”. Además de los juegos como los que se describen en el artículo, el Instituto Lincoln utiliza varias herramientas de aprendizaje activo participativas y centradas en los estudiantes; por ejemplo:

Análisis de casos

Uno de los enfoques más nuevos en el aprendizaje activo es usar análisis de casos en el salón de clase. Por ejemplo, durante el último año, el Instituto Lincoln rediseñó una conferencia convencional sobre asociaciones públicas y privadas, y la convirtió en un análisis de caso que enseña sobre la financiación del parque Millennium de Chicago. Luego, el análisis de caso, que promueve el pensamiento crítico y la interacción, se usó en un curso educativo para ejecutivos sobre finanzas municipales, en colaboración con la Escuela Harris de Políticas Públicas de la Universidad de Chicago.

Tribunales/debates

Durante una sesión del tribunal del Instituto Lincoln, los participantes reciben una propuesta particular; la mitad del grupo debe realizar una investigación y argumentar a favor de la propuesta, y la otra mitad en contra. La actividad culmina con presentaciones, preguntas de otros alumnos del curso y el veredicto final de un “juez” designado previamente.

Producciones teatrales/videos

Palo Alto, un sistema económico es una sátira dramática sobre la economía política adaptada al contexto latinoamericano. Se basa en la producción teatral de 1934 The Shovelcrats: A Satire on the Illusional Theory of Political Economy (La palacracia: una sátira sobre la teoría ilusionista de la economía política), de la Fundación Schalkenbach, producida por el Teatro Vreve, con base en Colombia, para usar en los cursos del Instituto Lincoln. En los últimos años, los profesores entregaron a los estudiantes una nueva versión del guion que excluye la última escena, y les pidieron que escriban un final.

Dibujos animados

José K. Tastro y las directrices para el catastro territorial multifinalitario, producido por el Instituto Lincoln y el Ministerio de Ciudades de Brasil, representa situaciones comunes a las que se enfrentan los empleados del catastro municipal al implementar los sistemas de información territorial para suplir las necesidades de los sectores público y privado. Un segundo dibujo animado, Jacinto Bené Fício and the Property Tax (Jacinto Bené Fício y el tributo inmobiliario), cuenta la historia de dos ciudades: una con un sistema de tributos inmobiliarios bien desarrollado, y la otra con un sistema deficiente.

Crucigramas

El crucigrama se usa para ayudar a los estudiantes a repasar vocabulario y conceptos, y ofrece una alternativa menos intimidante a las técnicas de revisión basadas en simulacros. El nuevo crucigrama del Instituto Lincoln sobre mercados informales pide a los lectores que piensen en palabras basándose en pistas, como “quién carga con el peso de un cargo por valor territorial”.

Con vistas al futuro

El éxito de GIROS y otros juegos en América Latina abrió el camino para que el Instituto Lincoln piense con mayor estrategia y amplitud en su enfoque pedagógico. “Comenzamos con la idea de que, si la gente adquiere conocimientos y habilidades acerca de desafíos y temas globales urgentes, y cómo afrontarlos mediante las políticas de suelo, podrían tomar buenas decisiones, implementar buenos proyectos y usar mejor los recursos limitados para mejorar la calidad de vida de la comunidad”, explicó Vue. “Con los juegos, nos hicimos más explícitos acerca de las habilidades de pensamiento crítico como resolución de problemas, habilidades sociales como el trabajo en equipo y la colaboración, y conductas éticas de los distintos grupos de interés que son esenciales para sortear los desafíos locales y globales en el mundo real”.

Con vistas al futuro, Vue espera introducir enfoques de aprendizaje activo con mayor constancia en otras regiones en las que el Instituto Lincoln ofrece cursos, y alentar a los profesores a repensar el diseño de cursos, lecciones y presentaciones convencionales. El programa de Diseño Educativo del Instituto Lincoln está emprendiendo nuevos proyectos multimedios, como un análisis de caso sobre revitalización equitativa en Cleveland que se usará en cursos tan lejanos como Taiwán, y espera que muchas de sus herramientas estén disponibles en una plataforma de aprendizaje virtual.

“Según cómo piensa el Instituto Lincoln sobre su enfoque educativo, el futuro podría no tratarse tanto sobre qué es novedoso, sino más bien sobre cómo los instructores pueden ser más efectivos al encarar un desafío persistente de aprendizaje”, dijo Vue. “El Instituto Lincoln opera en un escenario global porque los temas como el cambio climático cruzan las fronteras políticas y geográficas y requieren cambios en el pensamiento estratégico y las conductas éticas. Gracias a las experiencias de aprendizaje bien diseñadas, que logran que las personas colaboren, conversen, enseñen y aprendan con personas distintas a ellas, estas tienden a ser más humildes sobre lo que no saben, a estar más abiertas a perspectivas diferentes y más dispuestas a inspirarse y sentir el apoyo para actuar de forma global”. Los juegos serios representan un enfoque, pero para que el Instituto Lincoln acceda a un público diverso, Vue explica que debe expandir la paleta de estrategias de enseñanza.

De cierto modo, cree que el uso de juegos en el Instituto Lincoln es un experimento sobre aprendizaje activo en sí mismo y sobre sí mismo. “Espero que podamos mejorar los diseños actuales de nuestros juegos cada vez que los usemos”, dijo. “No me refiero a hacer cambios drásticos en las reglas, sino a garantizar que una variedad de participantes pueda aprender y triunfar. Solo porque diseñamos un juego, no significa que esté terminado”.

Emma Zehner es editora de comunicaciones y publicaciones en el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Fotografía: Los participantes en un curso del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelos en Santo Domingo, República Dominicana, juegan una ronda de GIROS. Crédito: Anne Hazel.

Referencias

Abt, Clark C. 1970. Serious Games. Nueva York, NY: Viking Press.

Bereitschaft, Bradley. 2016. “Gods of the City? Reflecting on City Building Games as an Early Introduction to Urban Systems.” Journal of Geography. 115 (2): 51–60. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00221341.2015.1070366.

Play the City. Base de datos de “Games for Cities”. http://gamesforcities.com/database/.

Roy, Jessica. 2019. “From Video Game to Day Job: How ‘SimCity’ Inspired a Generation of City Planners.” Los Angeles Times. 5 de marzo. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-simcity-inspired-urban-planners-20190305-story.html.

Tóth, Eszter. 2014. “Potential of Games in the Field of Urban Planning.” En New Perspectives in Game Studies: Proceedings of the Central and Eastern European Game Studies Conference Brno 2014, ed. Tomáš Bártek, Jan Miškov, Jaroslav Švelch, 71–91. Brno, República Checa: Universidad Masaryk. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311233864_Potential_of_Games_in_the_Field_of_Urban_Planning.

Carlos Morales-Schechinger knew he was doomed. An official in Mexico’s ministry for urban development, he was slated to speak at a conference in San Luis Potosi immediately following a fully programmed morning and large lunch. With the students in front of him doing little to fight an onslaught of yawns, Morales had to get creative. 

On a whim, he decided to forgo his formal lecture on Mexico’s national urban land policy. Instead, he asked a student in the front of the room if he could buy the chair the student was sitting on, offering a bill from his pocket as payment.  

After some initial confusion, the student accepted. Morales then started auctioning off the seat. He spoke in a low voice to illustrate its locational advantage, increasing demand. Soon he had the students invested in both his presentation and that suddenly invaluable piece of furniture. By the end of the session, equipped only with standard classroom objects, he had brought to life the processes of land price determination, densification, and other phenomena related to the notoriously complex and often misrepresented topic of urban land markets.  

That was 30 years ago. Over the decades since, Morales’s spontaneous attempt to engage sleepy students has evolved into and informed a variety of educational games, including a multiday organized game called GIROS. Taking its name from the Spanish for both “transaction” and “turning around,” which captures the notion of the interdependencies of land markets, GIROS was designed by Martim Smolka, director of the program on Latin America and the Caribbean at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and enhanced in collaboration with Morales, now a member of the Lincoln Institute’s teaching faculty. GIROS has been played well over 150 times and inspired spinoffs in most of Latin America, and in the Netherlands, Taiwan, Ghana, Kenya, the Philippines, and other countries. Participants have ranged from urban planning students to high-level public officials.  

GIROS requires few props. Smolka and Morales developed a basic game board with color-coded pieces used to map the evolution of an imaginary city. Participants divide into teams, wearing hats to indicate roles like government officials, NGOs, different classes of citizens, and developers. During the first rounds, players—assigned “hidden agendas” to simulate the opaque nature of land markets—negotiate and trade plots in a market with little regulation. Halfway through play, the “government” introduces regulations such as high-density zones, altering the city’s development trajectory. When each round concludes or when a theoretically significant phenomenon occurs as the result of a transaction, the students take off their hats to discuss what happened and why.  

Depending on the decisions players make, the game can take many forms. But at least two takeaways, evident since the game’s origins, always emerge. The first is that land value is not intrinsic, but is instead shaped by factors including transportation costs, land use regulations, taxation, and other externalities. The second takeaway, which the Lincoln Institute is fully embracing as part of its current instructional design work, is that games are a seriously important part of land policy education.  

GIROS is just one of the Lincoln Institute’s growing suite of educational games and interactive tools. While these tools are primarily used in the Institute’s courses in Latin America, active learning increasingly plays a role in all its educational offerings. “In terms of broader learning design, we really want to shift the balance of our in-person courses away from presentations and lectures and toward more active learning activities,” said Ge Vue, associate director of Learning Design at the Lincoln Institute. “The game is one example of this.”  

Games are a unique and useful pedagogical tool for a number of reasons, according to Vue. They encourage action, interactivity, and innovative thinking in ways that traditional classroom approaches don’t. Vue emphasizes that games have the potential to teach not just content, but also more applicable problem-solving skills. They are a flexible tool, allowing students to provide feedback and input in real time and facilitators to contribute their own knowledge and guidance along the way.  

Giovanni Pérez Macías, a lawyer who first played GIROS in 2007 as part of a three-month Lincoln Institute land policy course in Panama, sees the ability of the instructor to change the direction GIROS takes as one of this game’s strengths. “If Carlos sees that a certain group needs to learn a specific issue in urban development or land policy, he can lead the game [in a way that teaches] that issue,” he says.  

Whatever the outcome, Morales explained in a video about the game produced by Erasmus University Rotterdam, students must understand their own influence. “If you win the game, you have to explain why,” he said. “If you aren’t able [to explain why you won], you lose points. The main point is not winning or losing, it is learning.” 

Teaching with Games 

Popular games that invite players to take on the role of developer or city planner are a familiar part of the cultural landscape. Monopoly was created in 1903 by Henry George aficionado Elizabeth Magie, then bought by the Parker Brothers in the 1930s and transformed into the capitalist game known around the world today. More modern digital games like SimCity, in which players build and manage urban areas, and Minecraft, which places players in an undeveloped landscape with the tools they need to build cities and other structures, have kept the tradition going.  

These games overlap with and influence the urban planning world—“I wouldn’t be where I am today without SimCity,” an official with the National Association of City Transportation Officials told the Los Angeles Times for a 30th anniversary article on the game (Roy 2019)—but they don’t always reflect the realities of urban development.  

In the case of Monopoly, for instance, Smolka points to the fact that land values don’t vary with the behavior of the players as an example of how the iconic board game reinforces misconceptions about land markets. Smolka explained that part of the inspiration for GIROS came from a game that had been conceived in Bogotá to teach land value capture principles but suffered from this same problem: “You lose the most important part of the conversation. The rationality of the agents must affect land use and land values.”  

Smolka is not alone in his assessment. In an article on mainstream citybuilding games, Bradley Bereitschaft, assistant professor of geography at the University of Nebraska, wrote, “the limitations and inaccuracies of these games limit their utility in understanding complex urban processes” (Bereitschaft 2016). In fact, it was that type of academic unease that led to the development of so-called “serious games” beginning in the 1960s. Clark C. Abt, a German educator and engineer, put a name to the emerging trend in his 1970 book Serious Games. Such games, he wrote, “have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement. This does not mean that serious games are not, or should not be, entertaining” (Abt 1970).  

Many of the early urban planning games were “products of local needs,” according to Eszter Tóth, a PhD student at HafenCity University Hamberg who conducts research in the field of children’s participation in urban planning (Tóth 2015). Often developed by universities at the behest of local municipalities, these games were typically played only a couple of times and never published. One game that did have a longer shelf life—and has been cited by some as the origin of simulation gaming, which imitates real-life situations—was Metropolis. Richard Duke, a professor at the University of Michigan, designed that simulation in 1966 to help the Lansing City Council work through a complex budgeting process.   

Soon after, Alan Feldt, a professor of urban and regional planning at Cornell who would later become one of Duke’s collaborators, designed an urban planning board game specifically intended for use in higher education. The Community Land Use Game (CLUG) centered around a board with 196 one-inch squares. Over the course of 20 hours, five teams made up of two or three students each from his undergraduate and graduate regional planning courses aimed to build factories, stores, and residences in relation to transportation, resources, and utilities with the goal of maximizing land value.  

A 1969 Cornell Daily Sun article on Feldt’s game, which by then had been used as a teaching aid in Mexico, Germany, Israel, and England, weighed in on the new trend: “Playing with blocks used to be considered appropriate behavior for kindergarteners, but today’s modern teaching theory is turning such former juvenile pastimes into accepted university techniques.” 

Why Play Is Good for Planners 

Paulo Sandroni, an economist and now retired professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil, who has collaborated with the Lincoln Institute and developed simulators and games of his own, believes games are particularly useful for teaching urban planners.  

“Urban planners in general are decision makers, and a game gives them the opportunity to practice and to play in an arena of trade-offs; if I want more of X, I will have less of Y,” Sandroni said. “Urban planners deal with a whole city, a very complex organism. In other professions there are limitations because they deal with more specific subjects, but games can be adapted to any situation that requires choosing different ways to solve a problem.”  

“You can face in real time, even if simplified, the same questions and same problems that the real decision makers do in their professional lives,” Pérez Macías said.  

The physical aspect of games like GIROS may be particularly useful for urban planners, who are more physical by nature of their interest in the design of the built environment, said Daphne Kenyon, resident fellow in tax policy at the Lincoln Institute. Kenyon helped facilitate the play of PLUS, a condensed spinoff of GIROS, at the national American Planning Association conference in April 2019. Over the course of the APA session, planners moved between chairs and tables that represented housing units and plots of land. At the conclusion of the first round, when a lack of government intervention had led the players who were in the role of developers to overproduce for the rich and underproduce for the poor, a group of professionally dressed real-life planners huddled together on the floor in an effort to signify their homelessness. Vue explains that students’ physical interaction with a game or the creation of new objects provides more options to represent their thinking and communicate the reasoning behind their actions. 

Role-playing games like GIROS also help students inhabit perspectives they might not otherwise, says Kenyon, who plans to use a condensed version of the game in an economics course she teaches at Brandeis University. Kenyon thinks the game might challenge some of her students’ assumptions by forcing them to see the challenges that developers, in particular, can face in city-building scenarios.  

The Lincoln Institute’s games are also part of a larger response to a persistent trend: Many urban planning master’s programs, whether in the United States or Latin America, offer limited or no instruction in urban economics and property taxation as part of their core curriculum. Instead, they focus more narrowly on urban design and the physical nature of cities. Smolka and others see games and other active learning techniques as a way to fill this gap. As Smolka explained, “GIROS is designed to teach the kind of professional who is averse to equations or formulas the fundamentals of how land prices are determined and how norms and regulations affect public revenues.”  

In the past few decades, as municipalities have increasingly rejected top-down planning processes, serious games have become an increasingly popular tool to aid public processes and help leaders think through real scenarios with real data.  

Play the City, an Amsterdam-based firm whose tagline is “serious gaming for smart and social cities,” believes gaming has the potential to replace traditional formats of civic engagement. The company designs physical games tailored to specific cities that bring stakeholders together to address issues including affordable housing, urban expansion, climate change, and participatory design. Play the City is also committed to documenting games that improve city making, and maintains a database that includes GIROS.  

The Latin America Context  

The Lincoln Institute currently uses GIROS and other games primarily in Latin America, where the majority of the organization’s courses—which focus on formal and informal urban land markets, land value capture, urban redevelopment projects, and other related topics—are offered. While some local governments in the region have embraced the role of games in the planning process, academics have traditionally been less willing to use games in university classrooms.  

Sandroni thinks that hesitancy can be attributed to a lack of time, financing, and exposure to these teaching aids. He first started experimenting with using games in his classroom in the 1990s. He noticed that students were always playing cards between classes, so he developed two card games of his own, bringing them into the formal setting of the classroom. Since 1999, he has run O Jogo da Economia Brasileira (Game of the Brazilian Economy), a national tournament in which economics students from across the country compete and gain an understanding of exchange rates, inflation, foreign debt, and other concepts. By supporting teachers and modeling the use of games in the classroom, Sandroni said, “the Lincoln Institute is really pioneering the use of games in education in Latin America.”  

Pérez Macías thinks the key to changing the cultural resistance toward games is to provide professional development opportunities so teachers can experience the games for themselves. At least that’s how it worked for him, he said. After taking his first Lincoln Institute course, where he was exposed to most of the Institute’s games that had been developed to date, Pérez Macías started taking additional courses in gamification and became a self-described gamification practitioner, incorporating spinoffs of GIROS into his own courses. He is now using a methodology called LEGO Serious Play that is generally used to facilitate meetings and communication in corporate settings, but which Pérez Macías has adapted as a tool to teach urban issues, like participatory design and negotiation and agreement building between urban stakeholders.

Gislene Pereira, a professor in architecture and urban planning at the Federal University of Paraná who first saw GIROS in 2009 in Caracas, says she appreciated that it allowed participants “to think with the logic of each agent of the city”—literally wearing many hats. She has since helped to oversee the development of a simplified version for use in courses for architecture and urbanism students and in training for city councilors on land policies, tax, and non-tax instruments.  

The appetite for games has grown in Latin America, a trend that was confirmed, at least anecdotally, by a weeklong course put on by the Lincoln Institute in Guatemala in early 2019. The course focused on using tools like games and tribunals, crosswords, and videos to teach land market and policy issues to urban planners (see sidebar). As part of the application process, applicants—some of whom had attended Lincoln Institute courses in the past—had to describe a tool they were already using in their classrooms. Of the 78 applications the Institute received, 34 said they used some type of game in their courses, with others citing the use of case studies, simulations, videos, and theater assignments.  

“We are seeing much more interest than we thought,” said Enrique Silva, director of International and Institute-Wide Initiatives at the Lincoln Institute. “In Guatemala, we saw that there is an audience and a willingness [for active learning tools], and most importantly a demand. There was a sense that people would love to be more engaged.” 

Looking Ahead  

The success of GIROS and other games in Latin America has paved the way for the Lincoln Institute to think more strategically and broadly about its pedagogical approach. “We started by thinking that if people acquired knowledge and skills about pressing global challenges and issues and how to address them through land policy, they would make good choices, implement good projects, and make the best use of limited resources to improve the quality of life in the community,” Vue explained. “With games, we’ve become more explicit about critical thinking skills like problem solving, social skills like teamwork and collaboration, and ethical behavior of the different interest groups that are crucial to navigating local and global challenges in the real world.”  

Moving forward, Vue hopes to roll out active learning approaches more consistently in the other regions where the Lincoln Institute offers courses and to encourage faculty to rethink the design of conventional courses, lectures, and presentations. The Learning Design program at the Lincoln Institute is embarking on new multimedia projects, including a case study on equitable revitalization in Cleveland that will be used in courses as far afield as Taiwan, and hopes to make many of its tools available on an e-learning platform.  

“As the Lincoln Institute thinks about its educational approach, the future may be less about what’s new, and more about how instructors can be most effective at tackling a persistent learning challenge,” Vue said. “The Lincoln Institute operates on a global stage because issues like climate change cross political and geographical boundaries and require change in strategic thinking and ethical behaviors. Through well-designed learning experiences that get people to collaborate, converse, teach, and learn with others who are different from them, people tend to be more humbled about what they don’t know, more open to different perspectives, and more likely to be inspired and feel supported to act globally.” Serious games are one approach, but to reach a diverse audience, Vue explains the Lincoln Institute needs to expand its palette of teaching strategies.  

In a sense, he believes the Lincoln Institute’s use of games is an active learning experiment in and of itself. “I am hoping that we can improve the current designs of our games each time we use them,” Vue said. “It doesn’t mean you make a dramatic change in the rules, instead [it’s] around ensuring that a range of participants can learn and succeed. Just because we design a game, doesn’t mean it’s done.”

Active Learning at Lincoln 

Ge Vue, associate director of Learning Design at the Lincoln Institute, said he encourages those who teach to think about active learning no matter what tool they’re using: “You can insert instances of active learning in a simple scenario statement in a PowerPoint [just as you might] in a more elaborate, multiday game.” In addition to games such as those described in this article, the Lincoln Institute employs a variety of student-centered, participatory active learning tools, including:  

Case Studies  

One of the Lincoln Institute’s newer active learning approaches is the use of case studies in the classroom. Over the past year, for example, the Lincoln Institute redesigned a conventional lecture on public-private partnerships into a teaching case study on the financing of Millennium Park in Chicago. The case study, which prompts critical thinking and interaction, was then used in a municipal finance executive education course in collaboration with the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.  

Tribunals/Debates  

During a Lincoln Institute tribunal session, participants are given a particular proposition, with half of the group required to conduct research and argue in favor, and the other half against. The activity culminates with presentations, questions from other students in the course, and the final verdict of a pre-assigned “judge.” 

Theater Productions/Videos  

Palo Alto: Un Sistema Economica is a dramatic satire on political economy adapted to the Latin American context. It is based on the 1934 theater production of The Shovelcrats: A Satire on the Illusional Theory of Political Economy by the Schalkenbach Foundation and produced by the Colombia-based Teatro Vreve for use in Lincoln Institute courses. In recent years, teachers have provided students with a version of the script that excludes the final scene, asking students to write an ending.

Cartoons  

Produced by the Lincoln Institute and Brazil’s Ministry of Cities, Jose K. Tastro y las Directrices para el Catastro Territorial Multifinalitario represents common situations faced by municipal cadaster employees as they implement land information systems to meet the needs of the public and private sectors. A second cartoon, Jacinto Bené Fício and the Property Tax, tells the story of two cities, one with a well developed property tax system and the other with a poorly developed system. 

Crossword Puzzles  

The crossword puzzle, un juego de palabras, is used to help students review vocabulary and concepts and offers a less intimidating alternative to drill-based review techniques. The Lincoln Institute’s new crossword puzzle on informal markets asks readers to come up with words based on clues such as “who bears the burden of a charge to land values.”

Emma Zehner is communications and publications editor at the Lincoln Institute.

Photograph: Participants in a Lincoln Institute course in Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic, play a round of GIROS. The teams wear hats to indicate their roles. Credit: Anne Hazel.

References 

Abt, Clark C. 1970. Serious Games. New York, NY: Viking Press.  

Bereitschaft, Bradley. 2016. “Gods of the City? Reflecting on City Building Games as an Early Introduction to Urban Systems.” Journal of Geography. 115 (2): 51–60. https:// www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00221341.2015.1070366.  

Play the City. “Games for Cities Database.” http://gamesforcities.com/database/.  

Roy, Jessica. 2019. “From Video Game to Day Job: How ‘SimCity’ Inspired a Generation of City Planners.” Los Angeles Times. March 5. http://gamesforcities.com/database/http://gamesforcities.com/database/.  

Tóth, Eszter. 2014. “Potential of Games in the Field of Urban Planning.” In New Perspectives in Game Studies: Proceedings of the Central and Eastern European Game Studies Conference Brno 2014, ed. Tomáš Bártek, Jan Miškov, Jaroslav Švelch, 71–91. Brno, Czech Republic: Masaryk University. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311233864_Potential_of_Games_in_the_ Field_of_Urban_Planning.