let's play rosettenville

Let’s Play Rosettenville - a boardgame to facilitate engagement between professionals and communities in participatory projects

with Fred Swart and SA Khumalo (photos of Wits event)
exibited at the 15th Venice Biennale
The School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand wanted to celebrate the end of a three year research project in Rosettenville.

The staff member who commissioned me to assist her with the organisation of the event was proud of the intentions of the project but skeptical of the quality of the engagement with the community. This was primarily due to the methods employed by the company charged with liaising with the community and its sole practitioner’s attitude…The methods were the same as those used a decade earlier by the Global Studio for a very different neighbourhood and the sole practitioner’s assumption that the community is obliged to share information with her. Part of my challenge with the staff member who commissioned me became devising techniques to mitigate the impacts of the community liaising company’s dated, inappropriate and entitled approach and to identify instances where there was some form of community participation in the School’s outreach attempts.

My client pointed out that when food was offered, different members from the community did show up and waited around atleast until they consumed the food - they did not just collect and go. She also pointed out that we (the professionals) need to structure any event in a way where there is some form of equality between the community participants and the professionals such that there is not a one way information extraction or lecture.

To meet these objectives, we decided to create a dinner with locals from Rosettenville, academics and other stakeholders; while everyone ate, we proposed they all play a boardgame we created. It was a way to be less self congratulatory and a platform where all groups can learn from the other at best or everyone feels equally silly but atleast full from a good meal at worst.

The boardgame
We based the boardgame on ‘Citadels’. Citadels was selected because it is a German style boardgame, so:

• it is family friendly,

• it lasts an hour,

• it has simple rules,

• player progress is marked on a board, etc,

• time between turns is quick (so others players do not become bored and distracted) and

• sub-games / indirect competition can take place while the main game is going.

It was also selected because the mechanics of its game-play are similar to the complexities of urban development - the winner is the one who is able to compromise best, often making strategic deals with unexpected individuals.

The game’s characters and building types were substituted with local quivalents where the characters became cards that described their special powers and the building types became origami pop-up cards. The board transformed to be an abstracted street so that participants could see the effects of their game play on their suburb.