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Design Your Own Green Space: A Participatory Video Game to Study Resident’s Preferences for Green Spaces
Sarah Chamberland-Fontaine, Ella Noyes, Jia Rui Li, Christopher Gibbs, Carly Ziter
Urban green spaces provide an important habitat for biodiversity within cities and benefit people’s lives by offering a wide range of values. However, these benefits are unevenly distributed within cities due to socio-economic disparities shaping public greenery investment. Moreover, some dimensions of people’s preferences for urban green spaces are insufficiently understood, such as how they overlap with biodiversity metrics such as species richness and functional diversity. Capturing these preferences and how they are distributed in the city is critical to generating interest in urban nature and ensuring that green spaces reflect the needs and voices of all community members.
In response to these challenges, we developed Design Your Own Green Space, a participatory video game for participants to design their ideal green space. We invited participants from three Montreal neighborhoods that span a gradient of greenery, wealth, education, and immigration to participatory sessions where participants play the game individually, fill out a questionnaire to explain their preferences, and debrief as a group. Through this, we examine how neighborhoods influence residents’ design of urban green spaces. The resulting green space designs will be analyzed along two dimensions: (1) social: how preferences vary across neighborhoods; and (2) ecological: how preferences are aligned with vegetation structural complexity and species richness, as well as tree functional group diversity. This approach allows us to understand the plurality of preferences on green space design, whether these preferences benefit biodiversity, and the importance of fostering equitable access to green space across neighborhoods.
