Janette Komoda Kim
Selected Writing
This book chapter offers a critique of resilience planning for its inability to reckon with inequitable distributions of climate risk. I argue for a more empowered public process in climate adaptation planning that could create what philosopher Bruno Latour called a ‘common construction site’ for political ecology. In a detailed account of my In It Together and Bartertown games, I describe how decision-making tools can do this in two primary ways. First, they prompt empathy through agonism, using role play to make ideological differences explicit and disarm preconceived tensions. Second, they link incommensurate value systems, translating among the calculus of urban economics, narratives of urban success and the rhetoric of social justice. This chapter reveals a decision-making process that can meaningfully interrogate systemic forces behind social justice and climate change—not simply to canvas opinion but to reshape the way power is shared. Link to publication.
This book chapter assesses the legacy of “serious games” in the 1960s, including several commissioned by Lyndon Johnson’s Model Cities program. This program informed a foundational text for participatory design by Sherry Arnstein, the program’s chief advisor of citizen participation. I argue that allthough these games reveal the complexity of urban systems and build empathy across diverse perspectives, their view of urban systems as optimizable and self-regulating failed to challenge zero-sum logics of competition and paternalistic power-sharing structures that prompted civil rights protests in the first place. Wary of the similarities between serious games and the rhetoric of optimization frequented by resilience planners, this chapter reflects on game mechanics in the In It Together game to suggest an alternate approach. Just as economist Elinor Ostrom seeks cooperative strategies of grassroots self-governance, In It Together invites its own players to change the rules of the game by altering “policies” about identity, geography, resource sharing, and thus interrogate the very terms of fair play in urban political ecology.
This article was the first written after the Resilient by Design process, and casts a critical eye towards the tendency of public engagement to seek “win-win” solutions. In contrast, I argue that a public deliberation process that is truly generative must daylight tensions among diverse stakeholders. This piece offers a detailed account of the creative process and impact of In It Together and Bartertown, in addition to games designed by my students that I call the Win-Win board game series. The article demonstrates how games can serve as tools for engagement that prompt agonistic debate, acknowledge differences, and navigate their negotiation. Link to publication.
This article describes an updated version of the In It Together game developed in 2020-2021,. The piece investigates a new feature that allows players to alter rules of the game, in turn revealing how community leaders, in real life, can impact political and economic systems of urban climate adaptation. Link to publication.
“Accidental Commons,” in Architecture from Public to Commons. ed. Marcelo López-Diaz. (Taylor & Francis: 2023). Link.