Agencies of Urban Recovery
In this evening we are joined by four organisations that work in urban recovery and embody the perspectives of urbanism and humanitarian practice. From the field of urbanism and architecture, Play the City and Ro3kvit explore new methods of collaborative and future-oriented city-making. From the humanitarian sector, Civic and Areac represent practices rooted in immediate relief, participatory change and community empowerment. Together, they aim to explore what forms of knowledge and practice truly matter in processes of recovery. How do these two traditions, humanitarian action and urbanism, interact in the field of recovery? One operates under conditions of urgency, seeking immediate stabilisation of lives and livelihoods; the other addresses longer temporalities of spatial, social and regulatory transformation. But what happens when urgency and long-term orientation collide? Where do their respective blind spots lie? Does humanitarian practice risk overlooking permanence and inclusion, while urbanism risks paralysis in the face of crisis? And could their complementary strengths, if aligned, support models of recovery that are not delivered to communities from the outside, but negotiated and owned by them?
Together with Ekim Tan Director of ‘Games for Cities’, founder of ‘Play the City’ Jonathan Robinson Cofounder of Impact Hub and Civic Nadiya Makushynska Project Manager at NGO "AREAC" Lilet Breddels Director at Archis, member of Urban Coalition for UkraineIn conversation with
Jonathan Robinson is the founder of Impact Hub a global community of impact driven entrepreneurs with physical spaces in over 100 world cities. He also helped found Civic that works to unlock the power of communities in places as diverse as Ukraine, Syria and The Sahel. Jonathan has launched ventures with partners ranging from the UK Cabinet Office, British Council and Tate Modern to The Guardian, Unicef and peace entrepreneurs in Afghanistan.
Ekim Tan is an architect from Istanbul based in Amsterdam. She obtained her doctoral degree at the Delft University of Technology with a focus on ‘ City gaming ‘, a method that refers to the specific implementation of serious games to city development questions. Later she published her book, Play the City: Games Informing Urban Development (2017) to provide a deeper understanding of our values, experiences, and intellectual attitude. In 2010, she founded Play the City , an Amsterdam and Istanbul-based city gaming practice that helps governments and market parties effectively collaborate with stakeholders. Ekim has also co-founded Games for Cities , an umbrella organization of game[like] practices worldwide. Play the City leads the way in applying games to complex, multiplayer city challenges.
Nadiya Makushynska is a project manager at the NGO AREAC from Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Before the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, she created and worked in educational initiatives, cross-border cooperation projects, and also has experience in journalism. Since 2022, she has been working in humanitarian projects to support the war-affected population, assist local communities through the active involvement of initiative groups and the development of civic activism, and in projects of psychological support and integration of internally displaced persons using advanced European approaches and tools.
Read more about the partner organisations
Play the City is a global practice that leads the way in applying games to complex, multiplayer city challenges. As our cities and country sides witness a high pace of technical advancement, social and economic change, the search for a truly collaborative city-making process continues. Serious gaming provides a systemic approach to city making that helps the collaborative, integral and iterative approach, cities are looking for. ‘City gaming’ is the method that refers to the specific implementation of serious games to city development questions.
Ro3kvit is a coalition of over 100 professionals from Ukraine and beyond who unite to create knowledge and methodologies for rebuilding Ukraine’s urban and rural areas and infrastructure. Through design and research, we address urgent needs and connect them to future strategies. Fueled by studies on other (postwar) countries, we are developing future-oriented urban design methods, co-creative organisation and sustainable development.
Civic is an activator. We unlock the power of communities. By believing in people, their ideas. Finding what works. Investing. Sharing. Scaling. We work in places ranging from Kabul to Kyiv, Damascus to East London. Working alongside ‘civic entrepreneurs’ to take leaps of faith and imagination – transforming what is into the most ambitious version of what can be.
NGO AREACfrom the Chernivtsi region of Ukraine, which has sheltered one of the largest numbers of refugees from military actions since the beginning of the war, focuses its activities on helping IDPs not only meet their basic needs, but also integrate into a new community and transform from victims into driving forces of society. NGO implement this through volunteer and international projects, including an interactive map of public support created with the donations of the Netherlands.
