Tidal Cities - A Visualisation Game

Tidal Cities© was an interdisciplinary, transnational experiment that brought together an environmental anthropologist (Rapti Siriwardane), an urban geographer (Johannes Herbeck), and two landscape architects/artists, Antonio Jose Bimbao and Divya Rathod. We aimed at co-creating a visualisation-based pedagogical tool for contemplating and teaching manifold relations between the city and the sea, drawing on ethnographic material from Metro Manila and Jakarta. While the project was designed during the COVID-19 pandemic, its digital format integrated a game-based role play component to spark further debate among tertiary students keen on critically reflecting and engaging with trajectories and contestations around coastal planning and urban placemaking, particularly in spaces of informality beset by recurrent flooding, tenurial insecurity and dispossession. While engaging with the poetics and politics of 2D visual representation, we reflect on the thinking behind the game´s pedagogical co-design and a number of paradoxes that arose from two test runs with departmental students, researchers, and teaching faculty in Bremen, Germany.

The project was generously funded by our DFG-SPP 1889 grant. Click here for more.