The Card/Board Community Resilience Game
The Vision
Thriving communities depend on residents’ ability to make decisions about, and even co-produce the spaces where we live, work, and play. Development decisions are often made behind closed doors or opaque procedures, without the consent or even input of residents.
What if, instead of waiting for policy-makers’ priorities to align with those of the community, we had the power to stop gentrification, environmental racism, displacement? What if we had the power to decide what to build? There’s a name for this power: the right to the city.
RIGHT TO THE CITY: The Card/Board Community Resilience Game simulates battles between developers, government agencies, and community groups in an accessible, low-stakes format. The game is one of several tools developed by KERMIT O to bring community together to imagine, plan, and organize for a better world. Through a cooperative process, residents map local land use and their corresponding assets and burdens, identify who is impacted and how, name the decision-makers, and work to reshape governance over land use through place-based organizing.
Where we have this “right to the city”, we would see more deeply affordable housing, more locally grown enterprises, more parks, playgrounds, recreation centers, more gardens, farms, other community-stewarded commons. We would see a city that better represents our diverse interests, shared concerns, and collective brilliance.
Such a right is not enshrined in law or the city charter, and in light of countless instances of city officials and developers disregarding the will of the people, all pathways toward direct democracy and community require deep organizing.
In Philly, as in many other cities, there are clear patterns: rises and falls in public discontent over one contested land use or the other, but there has been no sustained movement for people-centered development. In the absence of any institutional mechanism for democratic decision-making, it falls to us to self-organize, not just against developments we oppose, but for the neighborhoods we deserve.
Because large-scale systemic transformation is not imminent, small-scale experimentation, as in block-scale or neighborhood-level planning, is more feasible. Governance — who decides what and how decisions are made — is critical.
In Philadelphia, there is a large gap between policy-making and the social and material needs of communities, keenly expressed through tensions around land use. This gap is implicated in people’s lack of agency when it comes to how their neighborhoods develop, and not trusting city officials to carry forward their interests, especially where they conflict those of private development.
This project aims to cultivate possibilities for direct democracy at the hyper-local scale, bringing community members together, within neighborhoods, even block-by-block, to build relationships, to create and share knowledge. The goal is ultimately to see residents collectively planning and organizing for the neighborhoods in which they truly want to live.