BY MADELINE BODIN
The video game Minecraft has become a new tool for community engagement.
FROM THE MARCH 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
In Anaheim, California, the children couldn?t wait to show Pamela Galera, ASLA, the zip lines and tree houses in their parks. As she visited their creations, Galera, a landscape architect and planner for the City of Anaheim, saw the road on one side of the site and the river on the other, just as they are in real life. The landscapes, created by the kids using the video game Minecraft, were blocky by nature, but three dimensional, and from their laptops, they could explore the park designs from all directions.
Galera had no experience with Minecraft until recently, when Mojang, the company that created Minecraft, asked the City of Anaheim to use the game to help design a park. The design project would be featured at a Minecraft convention held in the city. ?I am not a video game player,? she says, ?so I had my concerns.? Mojang (now owned by Microsoft) had worlds of experience. In 2012, Mojang partnered with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) to launch an initiative called Block by Block, which employs Minecraft to help communities reconceive public spaces. Block by Block?s first project was a playground in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2012. ?Young people are a big part of the population in much of the world,? says Pontus Westerberg, the program officer for UN-Habitat?s urban planning and design branch. Yet i...