Open Classes - Natalie Osborne - RPGs for radical, participatory urban planning

Natalie Osbourne outlines her contribution to Griffith's Celebrating Learning & Teaching Week 2019.

Her learning activity, developed in collaboration with planning students at Griffith University over the past two years, uses role-playing game techniques and the principles of active, embodied, and collaborative learning to imagine a more-than-human participatory planning workshop.

Participants role play as different, non-human urban inhabitants, and consider their values, perspectives, and modes of living in cities. Whilst we cannot perhaps ever really know for sure what it’s like to be, say, a bee, participants report that this activity ruptures traditional and dominant assumptions in participatory planning, offers them new perspectives on how human lives are entangled with more-than-human lives in cities.