EquiCity Game: A mathematical serious game for participatory design of spatial configurations

TL;DR

The paper introduces EquiCity Game, a mathematical social-choice platform for participatory urban design that uses algebraic computation and open data to facilitate fair, inclusive decision-making in city planning and architecture.

Contribution

It presents a novel gamified decision-making process integrating algebraic, fuzzy logic, and geospatial tools for equitable urban spatial configuration.

Findings

Supports transparent, inclusive decision-making processes.

Balances diverse stakeholder interests mathematically.

Utilizes open-source tools and data for urban design simulation.

Abstract

We propose mechanisms for a mathematical social-choice game that is designed to mediate decision-making processes for city planning, urban area redevelopment, and architectural design (massing) of urban housing complexes. The proposed game is effectively a multi-player generative configurator equipped with automated appraisal/scoring mechanisms for revealing the aggregate impact of alternatives; featuring a participatory digital process to support transparent and inclusive decision-making processes in spatial design for ensuring an equitable balance of sustainable development goals. As such, the game effectively empowers a group of decision-makers to reach a fair consensus by mathematically simulating many rounds of trade-offs between their decisions, with different levels of interest or control over various types of investments. Our proposed gamified design process encompasses decision-making about the most idiosyncratic aspects of a site related to its heritage status and cultural significance to the physical aspects such as balancing access to sunlight and the right to sunlight of the neighbours of the site, ensuring coherence of the entire configuration with regards to a network of desired closeness ratings, the satisfaction of a programme of requirements, and intricately balancing individual development goals in conjunction with communal goals and environmental design codes. The game is developed fully based on an algebraic computational process on our own digital twinning platform, using open geospatial data and open-source computational tools such as NumPy. The mathematical process consists of a Markovian design machine for balancing the decisions of actors, a massing configurator equipped with Fuzzy Logic and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, algebraic graph-theoretical accessibility evaluators, and automated solar-climatic evaluators using geospatial computational geometry.