This paper examines how a serious game approach could support a participatory planning process by bringing stakeholders together to discuss interventions that assist the development of sustainable urban tourism. A serious policy game was designed and played in six European cities by a total of 73 participants, reflecting a diverse array of tourism stakeholders. By observing in-game experiences, a pre- and post -game survey and short interviews six months after playing the game, the process and impact of the game was investigated. While it proved difficult to evaluate the value of a serious game approach, results demonstrate that enacting real-life policymaking in a serious game setting can enable stakeholders to come together, and become more aware of the issues and complexities involved with urban tourism planning. This suggests a serious game can be used to stimulate the uptake of academic insights in a playful manner. However, it should be remembered that a game is a tool and does not, in itself, lead to inclusive participatory policymaking and more sustainable urban tourism planning. Consequently, care needs to be taken to ensure inclusiveness and prevent marginalization or disempowerment both within game-design and the political formation of a wider participatory planning approach.
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This paper examines how a serious game approach could support a participatory planning process by bringing stakeholders together to discuss interventions that assist the development of sustainable urban tourism. A serious policy game was designed and played in six European cities by a total of 73 participants, reflecting a diverse array of tourism stakeholders. By observing in-game experiences, a pre- and post -game survey and short interviews six months after playing the game, the process and impact of the game was investigated. While it proved difficult to evaluate the value of a serious game approach, results demonstrate that enacting real-life policymaking in a serious game setting can enable stakeholders to come together, and become more aware of the issues and complexities involved with urban tourism planning. This suggests a serious game can be used to stimulate the uptake of academic insights in a playful manner. However, it should be remembered that a game is a tool and does not, in itself, lead to inclusive participatory policymaking and more sustainable urban tourism planning. Consequently, care needs to be taken to ensure inclusiveness and prevent marginalization or disempowerment both within game-design and the political formation of a wider participatory planning approach.
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Significant factors in the success or failure of energy transition arise from the spatial potential of places and their communities. Scenario planning appears to be an appropriate design instrument to enable architects to unveil, conceptualise, imagine, test and communicate this potential to stakeholders. This paper critically refelcts on the scenario as an architectural design instrument. Inscribed with political intentions, scenario planning may be a far from neutral design instrument. Instead of triggering communities to explore local energy potential, a scenario may have a normative effect on a community's imagination. The paper aims to define guidelines for the deployment of scenarios in an open, participatory planning process. To mediate in a local participatory planning process, we argue, scenarios should be situational, dynamic and open-ended, allowing or even triggering communities to (re)define the issues relevant to a place during the ongoing process of energy-transition. How, when and where should scenarios be deployed in order to enable communities to understand and develop their local energy potential?
DISTENDER will provide integrated strategies by building a methodological framework that guide the integration of climate change(CC) adaptation and mitigation strategies through participatory approaches in ways that respond to the impacts and risks of climatechange (CC), supported by quantitative and qualitative analysis that facilitates the understanding of interactions, synergies and tradeoffs.Holistic approaches to mitigation and adaptation must be tailored to the context-specific situation and this requires a flexibleand participatory planning process to ensure legitimate and salient action, carried out by all important stakeholders. DISTENDER willdevelop a set of multi-driver qualitative and quantitative socio-economic-climate scenarios through a facilitated participatory processthat integrates bottom-up knowledge and locally-relevant drivers with top-down information from the global European SharedSocioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and downscaled Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) from IPCC. A cross-sectorial andmulti-scale impact assessment modelling toolkit will be developed to analyse the complex interactions over multiple sectors,including an economic evaluation framework. The economic impact of the different efforts will be analyse, including damage claimsettlement and how do sectoral activity patterns change under various scenarios considering indirect and cascading effects. It is aninnovative project combining three key concepts: cross-scale, integration/harmonization and robustness checking. DISTENDER willfollow a pragmatic approach applying methodologies and toolkits across a range of European case studies (six core case studies andfive followers) that reflect a cross-section of the challenges posed by CC adaptation and mitigation. The knowledge generated byDISTENDER will be offered by a Decision Support System (DSS) which will include guidelines, manuals, easy-to-use tools andexperiences from the application of the cases studies.
