LEGO-cities

LEGO-cities: Interactive instant urban climate modelling with AI and LEGO-cities

Type: Hyrbid analog and digital

Theme: Urban heat

Creator: Vrije Universiteit Brussel – Andrei Covaci

Due to climate change, extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, are becoming more frequent. During the summer, this can lead to increased temperatures in cities compared to the countryside (urban heat island effect). This rise in temperature and heat stress can lead to health issues and excess mortality. The major challenge today is to adapt cities to counteract the increased heat stress, for example, by planning more green spaces (climate adaptation). In this game/workshop, participants can explore the impact of the land cover in the city on its temperature in an interactive way using LEGO bricks. Participants build a miniature city with LEGO, where they are provided a color code for the land cover, with green meaning vegetation, blue meaning water, and black/meaning impervious material such as roads and buildings. Subsequently, a photo of the LEGO city is taken and converted into a heatmap of the temperature across the city using Artificial Intelligence.

The participant can choose between three different game modes. The first option is to recreate a given city blueprint and then adjust it to lower the average temperature. The second game mode is to recreate a piece of the map of Brussels and investigate how the temperature behaves during different weather conditions. For the final option, the participant can do a free build and vary the scale and weather conditions to investigate the temperature of their self-designed LEGO city.

This game is associated with this presentation from the Games for Geoscience session.