Developing Machizukuri Design Conference Tools for Community Development A Case Study of Nihonmatsu City

Abstract

Our group developed a town-reconstruction design game (the Machizukuri design game) and used it to create designs for Takeda-Nezaki, a district of a small castle town in Fukushima Prefecture. This paper reports our efforts to develop conference tools to aid community development by identifying and analyzing the spatial images generated by the Machizukuru design game. Our major findings and accomplishments include the following: 1. Some of the 39 spatial images developed using the reconstruction game were commonly shared by different game participants and were strongly related with each other. 2. We developed several image types to represent these commonly shared and strongly interrelated spatial images as conference tools for community design. 3. When these image types were used at a mock community design conference, almost all of the conference participants rated them as useful. © 2007, Architectural Institute of Japan. All rights reserved.