Tidal Cities - A Visualisation Game

Tidal Cities© was an interdisciplinary, transnational experiment co-developed with Dr. Johannes Herbeck an urban geographer at Uni Bremen, and two landscape architects and artists, Dr. Antonio Jose Bimbao and Divya Rathod. We aimed at co-creating a visualisation-based pedagogical tool for contemplating and teaching post-disaster inequities and erasures inherent in coastal urban placemaking, drawing on ethnographic case studies from Metro Manila. 

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 the question: “what happens after a flood?”, particularly in spaces of informality beset by tidal submergence, tenurial insecurity, and livelihood dispossession. While engaging with the poetics and politics of 2D visual representations (using modular art assets and digital collaging). 

A recent publication in the Teaching and Learning Anthropology journal (see “Tidal Cities: (Mis)adventures… “) invites us to think behind its 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.