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Globally, cities and their infrastructures, people, and ecology systems are experiencing unprecedented changes due to environmental change and anthropogenic pressures. To create the most sustainable approaches for mitigating and adapting to environmental changes, urban designs require a radical rethink that accounts for the needs of local citizens and stakeholders. Decision support systems (DSS) can be utilized to engage with members of the public to elicit their opinions on proposed designs. To better engage citizens, DSSs have started to include the use of virtual reality and augmented reality to demonstrate designs, however, these systems are often only applied to smaller stakeholder engagement events. Here, we created a theory-informed augmented reality application for collaborative crowdsourcing of urban designs. The designed system allows users to manipulate a two-dimensional map with targets representing different objects (e. g., trees, lakes, infrastructure). The changes made to the 2D map are then visualized through a mobile application that displays a 3D AR visualization of the changes the user makes in real time. The resulting application can be used to engage a diversity of participants in a range of urban and environmental planning contexts. 

Urban residents are often unevenly vulnerable to extreme weather and climate events due to socio-economic factors and insufficient greenspace. This can be amplified if citizens are not meaningfully consulted in the planning and design decisions, with changes to greenspace having detrimental impacts on local communities, e.g., through green gentrification. These deficiencies can be addressed through inclusive landscape-level collaborative planning and design processes, where residents are fully engaged in the co-creation of urban greenspaces. A promising way to support co-creation efforts is gamifying technology-based interactive decision support systems (DSSs). Gamification, the incorporation of video game elements or play into non-game contexts, has previously been used for DSSs in urban planning and to inform the public about the impacts of climate change. However, this has yet to combine informational goals with design-play functionality in the redesign of urban greenspaces. We conducted a review of state-of-the-art video game DSSs used for urban planning engagement and climate education. Here, we propose that gamified DSSs should incorporate educational elements about climate change alongside the interactive and engaging elements of urban planning games, particularly for real-world scenarios. This cross-disciplinary approach can facilitate improved community engagement in greenspace planning, informing design and management strategies to ensure multiple benefits for people and the environment in climate-vulnerable cities. 

It is increasingly acknowledged that urban and landscape planning processes need to incorporate stakeholder input and feedback. To this end, decision-makers have been implementing a range of decision support systems (DSSs), such as using geographic information systems (GIS) or 3D renderings of designs to help better explain the advantages and disadvantages of proposed designs. In addition, urban and landscape planning DSSs have also incorporated gamification (the use of game features and mechanics in non-game environments) to provide interactivity whilst providing an engaging experience. In these contexts, using 3D renderings of real-world environments can be a powerful tool for aiding in the democratisation of planning decisions. However, the creation of large-scale 3D models representing real cities or landscapes is limited by time-intensive manual methods. This is compounded by the fact that under our current rapidly changing environment, landscapes and urban areas are likely to alter in appearance within short periods of time. It is therefore imperative that 3D renderings of real-world environments can adapt to these changes. Here, we propose methods of using GIS datasets to automatically generate in-game worlds reflective of the real-world and how these 3D models can be used to engage citizens in planning decisions. 

Increasing population and rural to urban migration are accelerating urbanization globally, permanently transforming natural systems over large extents. Modelling landscape change over large regions, however, presents particular challenges due to local-scale variations in social and environmental factors that drive land change. We simulated urban development across the South Atlantic States (SAS), a region experiencing rapid population growth and urbanization, using FUTURES—an open source land change model that uses demand for development, local development suitability factors, and a stochastic patch growing algorithm for projecting alternative futures of urban form and landscape change. New advances to the FUTURES modelling framework allow for high resolution projections over large spatial extents by leveraging parallel computing. We simulated the adoption of different urban growth strategies that encourage settlement densification in the SAS as alternatives to the region’s increasing sprawl. Evaluation of projected patterns indicate a 15% increase in urban lands by 2050 given a status quo development scenario compared to a 14.8% increase for the Infill strategy. Status quo development resulted in a 3.72% loss of total forests, 2.97% loss of highly suitable agricultural land, and 3.69% loss of ecologically significant lands. An alternative Infill scenario resulted in similar losses of total forest (3.62%) and ecologically significant lands (3.63%) yet consumed less agricultural lands (1.23% loss). Moreover, infill development patterns differed qualitatively from the status quo and resulted in less fragmentation of the landscape.