On Thursday 11.04.2024 in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania-one of the best in the world (Ivy league)-our team representing the CoAdapt project carried out another playtesting of the game ‘Estate with Climate’. This time we worked with landscape architecture students from the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. The meeting was led by Billy Fleming – director of the Ian McHarg Centre. The students played a board game in the first approach and a computer game in the second, discussing the involvement of neighbourhood communities in pro-adaptation activities in the USA where the bottom-up approach of implementing green-blue infrastructure prevails and in Europe with its characteristic top-down approach (here cooperatives and city authorities usually decide on the neighbourhood space). This cooperation is a further step in the field of landscape architecture and environmental planning, as researchers from SGGW have been working together with Prof. Frederick Steiner, dean of the institution, for over 40 years. Anna Ostrowska Steiner, a graduate of our university, has made a significant contribution to this cooperation.
On Tuesday 9.04.2024, our team representing the CoAdapt project conducted a playtesting of the game ‘Estate with Climate’ with students and staff from Urban System Lab in New York. The aim of the meeting was to exchange experiences with Urban System Lab, which, like CoAdapt, is working on a serious game for climate change adaptation – EKOS. Our new colleagues, under the guidance of Timon McPhearson, enthusiastically changed the spaces of Warsaw housing estates using the solutions of our game. We hope that this will be the beginning of a fruitful collaboration.
On the morning of Saturday 6.04.2024, our CoAdapt team in New York on Roosevelt Island participated in the planting of Microlas together with hundreds of Manhattan residents. A Microlas is a multi-species tiny forest of 100-200m2, planted using the Myawaki method on specially prepared compost: dense, multi-storey, fast-growing. Here, species native to New York were introduced, and the first tree was planted by an Indian chief representing the first inhabitants of Manhattan. We gave two interviews and planted 8 different species of trees, and we hope to plant another one on the SGGW campus.