USA: These board games play out how climate change will reshape our cities

By Adele Peters

Jeanette Kim started designing board games about climate change after working on scenario planning with her architecture students at Colombia University–and seeing that the typical process, which architects and many cities use to make decisions, was fairly boring. Board games brought the scenarios to life. “They’re great at mixing together a lot of complexity and making that visible,” says Kim, who now teaches at California College of the Arts and leads the Urban Works Agency, a research lab at the school that looks at the use of architectural design on social justice issues, sustainability, and economic resilience in cities. A series of the games developed by Kim and her students, called Win-Win, is now in an exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

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Games like this can be used both for planning and to help people think differently about the complexity of climate action, she says. “I think a lot of times when we talk about climate change, we have a tendency to talk about it as a question of should we act because we care enough about it, or should we keep about our daily lives?” she says. “What I really enjoy about the both the competitive and cooperative nature of games is that it recognizes that people just come from different perspectives and they have many different reasons for either thinking short-term or long-term, or valuing landscape or profit or property or equity–there are so many different value systems that are really enmeshed within climate change.”