Abstract: Urban resilience is a critical concern in the face of climate change, yet citizen engagement in resilience efforts remains disappointingly low.
This paper introduces the HALO System as a platform for urban resilience, transforming citizen engagement into a competitive and rewarding game in which a city’s resilience status is presented as a dynamic and colorful signal (a circular band of light) that citizens try to alter through individual and collective actions
By visualizing real-time effects of actions toward city resilience goals, this system fosters a proactive community involved in tangible, collaborative and competitive scenarios that enhance urban environments, while providing urban climate leaders with a direct communications channel to citizens.
Introduction: Resilience narratives in urban settings often fail to engage citizens effectively, presenting climate challenges as distant or insurmountable without demonstrating the direct value, and impact, of local micro-actions.
Unlike in personal health or consumption, where immediate feedback systems (like health apps and smart meters) significantly influence behaviors, current urban climate apps and platforms lack a feedback mechanism that connects to the daily lives of city-dwellers. To counter this, we propose a gamified model using the HALO System to invigorate city-wide participation through an interactive, competitive, and materially rewarding framework.
The Challenge: Urban residents are often unaware of the direct impact their actions can have on their city’s resilience. Conventional communication methods have not sufficed to mobilize collective action towards sustainability goals, leading to low engagement and minimal perceptible impact.
Moreover, and more fundamentally, climate data is often presented in complex and categorical frameworks that fail to present holistic pictures of a city’s resilience status. Hence, we state the problem:
Proposed Solution: HALOs for Cities: The HALO System for Cities introduces a novel approach to building an intuitive and dopamine-driving interface for city resilience. By adopting the HALO technology, cities can implement a localized, dynamic feedback system that illustrates the impact of collective and individual actions on urban resilience goals. Deployed as a city-wide game, HALOs become a signal of citizen and organizational actions that respond to resilience directives.
Here are a couple of slides that explain how the HALO system operates, and how it can be applied to signaling the resilience status of a city.
Here is a breakdown of how the HALO can be configured to signal climate resilience:
Now that you have a basic understanding of the HALO, here is how it can be deployed as a game for city’s to unify citizens around critical resilience objectives:
Game Mechanics:
Centralized City Resilience HALO:
Acts as the game’s scoreboard, dynamically reflecting the city's resilience through colors, brightness, and movement based on real-time data and citizen actions.
Updated in real time to show the immediate effects of player actions, encouraging continuous engagement.
Individual and Neighborhood HALOs:
Players (citizens) have personal HALOs that track their contributions to city resilience.
HALOs represent individual, neighborhood, and organizational status based on verified climate-actions.
Neighborhoods compete against each other, with each area displaying its collective HALO score, fostering a sense of community and rivalry.
Intelligent Directive System:
The HALO not only visualizes data but also suggests actionable steps for improvement based on real-time conditions.
Functions as a recommendation engine, providing scalable solutions from recycling initiatives to policy participation.
Missions and Rewards:
Players complete sustainability-related tasks (e.g., reducing energy consumption, increasing recycling rates) to improve their personal and neighborhood HALOs.
Achievements unlock rewards such as city credits, discounts on services, or real cash incentives.
Precision Messaging and Neighborhood HALOs:
Once deployed, the HALO system acts as a precision messaging tool, facilitating targeted communication between city officials and citizens based on neighborhood and activity metrics.
Neighborhoods can have their own HALOs, displaying collective actions and regional uptake of resilience measures, further incentivizing community participation through visible progress and rewards.
Implementation Strategy:
Integration of Data: Leverages environmental, infrastructural, and social data to fuel the game mechanics, ensuring that each player's actions are accurately reflected in the resilience scores.
Community and Competition: Builds community through local leaderboards, neighborhood teams, and city-wide challenges that make resilience efforts visible and competitive.
Example Application - Houston:
Houston residents could participate in seasonal challenges to lower their carbon footprint. Success would brighten their personal and neighborhood HALOs, contributing to the city’s overall resilience.
Neighborhoods could compete in annual "Greenest Neighborhood" contests, with winners receiving grants for community projects or reductions in municipal fees.
The state of the CITY HALO influences individual, household, neighborhood, and institutional (corporate and organizational) behaviors, which in turn affect the CITY HALO.
This feedback loop can drive changes in behavior and policy, aiming for a more sustainable and resilient planet.
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Conclusion: The City Resilience game harnesses the HALO System to transform how citizens interact with urban resilience initiatives. By gamifying the process of improving city resilience, this approach promises to significantly boost public engagement, making sustainability both a personal and collective achievement. Through competition, rewards, and real-time feedback, urban residents are not just informed but are actively involved in shaping their city’s future, turning every individual into a key player in the game of urban sustainability.
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