A Multidisciplinary European Team Develops a Serious Game to Bring International Sustainability Standards into Everyday Urban Planning

PROBONO developed a card-based workshop tool, the Placemaking Maptivity, to translate the ISO 37101 sustainability framework into a practical, collaborative planning experience for cities. Developed across four European countries with support from three EU-funded projects, it has now been prepared in a peer-reviewed submission.

The team, from industry and academia, across four European countries has developed a new methodology to help cities turn sustainability goals into coordinated action. Called the Placemaking Maptivity, the card-based serious game transforms the internationally recognised ISO 37101 framework into a practical workshop that city officials, practitioners, community organisations and citizens can use together. It helps cities break down silos, build a shared understanding of priorities, and identify actions that can deliver environmental, social and economic benefits at the same time. The methodology is presented in a paper submitted to an open-access journal.

Addressing a well-known barrier to sustainable cities

European cities face sustainability challenges that cut across environmental, social and economic dimensions and rarely respect departmental boundaries. Yet, transport, housing, energy and social services are typically managed separately, and the different stakeholders involved (municipalities, businesses, community organisations, academic institutions and citizen) often use different vocabularies, work to different timescales, and measure success differently. These misalignments make coordinated action difficult and can lead to duplicated effort or conflicting investments. The Placemaking Maptivity is designed to give these varied actors a shared language and a common analytical framework, without requiring specialist technical expertise from every participant.

Built on recognised standards and a rigorous design method

The team built Placemaking Maptivity on a recognised international framework so that it could do more than spark discussion. The workshop is based on ISO 37101, a standard that helps communities think about sustainability across issues such as wellbeing, resilience, environmental protection and social cohesion, as well as areas of action like governance, mobility and biodiversity. Using this framework as the workshop structure means the results can connect more easily with the formal planning processes used by cities.

The tool was developed in a structured way, with each part of the workshop designed to support learning and collaboration. It also draws inspiration from Climate Fresk, but reshapes that approach to suit cities better, showing how urban challenges are interconnected rather than linear.

Tested through four iterations, including an EU-project setting

The Placemaking Maptivity was refined through four rounds of beta testing conducted online, in person and in a mixed international configuration. Use cases were drawn from four EU-funded projects (REEFLEX, BeFlexible, PROBONO and eFORT) allowing the methodology to be explored in energy-system and broader sustainability contexts. A session held during the ENLIT Europe conference deployed the tool simultaneously with online and in-person groups of mixed stakeholders working within a shared fictional-city scenario.

Each iteration informed concrete improvements: participants were given a more active role in constructing the framework, the workshop was streamlined to sustain engagement, and the team openly documented a methodological caveat, e.g. that the choice of example projects can influence perceived coverage across the matrix, as guidance for future deployments.

Relevance for practitioners and public authorities

The methodology is designed to complement, not replace, existing planning processes, supporting pre-planning coordination, implementation and monitoring. Because its outputs map onto recognised assessment frameworks, it lowers the friction between participatory workshops and the formal documentation that public authorities require. Early feedback indicates that participants gained a clearer understanding of how a single project can serve several sustainability purposes at once, and that mixed-sector sessions functioned as valuable boundary-spanning exercises.

We are really at the formative stage of the evaluation, with small sample sizes, informal feedback instruments, and facilitation by the design team, and have to set out a more rigorous evaluation protocol, facilitator training, and a digital delivery platform as the next steps toward wider adoption. Subject to such validation, the methodology is positioned to support integrated, cross-sector sustainability planning at the neighbourhood scale across diverse European contexts.

Cities are facing growing pressure to respond to climate, social and economic challenges in a more integrated way. Serious games such as Placemaking Maptivity can help make sustainability planning more practical, inclusive and effective, and can give public authorities, practitioners and citizens a way to explore priorities together and connect local actions to wider sustainability goals. The work points to a promising approach for helping cities move from fragmented planning towards more coordinated decision-making – even if further testing is still welcome. Would you want to be part of these tests?

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