Neighborhood Making - Hey! Imaginable Guidelines: Community Game Cards

Designed by Alexis Şanal (ŞANALarc) as a guide for everyone to participate in the design process of their own neighborhood, Neighborhood Making - HEY! Imaginable Guidelines: Community card deck was published by YEM Publications.

Neighborhood Making - HEY! Imaginable Guidelines: Community aims to enable everyone to explore their neighborhoods and participate in the design processes of public spaces by addressing 72 urban design concepts with definitions, design principles and guidelines. This special deck of cards provides an opportunity to imagine, explore, discuss and share not only for designers and urban planners, but also for all the community who want to live in livable, loveable and walkable neighborhoods:

IMAGINE — Imagine your city, your way. Hey! Imaginable Guidelines is a card game that will help you discover how cities are designed. Why? So you can make it better.
EXPLORE — Explore your neighborhood, like you haven`t done before. Find out about methods for looking at the city as a participant as well as a resident.
DISCUSS — Discuss your surroundings with your neighbors. One person’s trash could be another`s treasure! You can’t find out unless you talk to them.
SHARE — Share your city with everyone. You live here but also other people, birds, cars lots of
other stuff too. Sharing the city is more fun if everyone respects each other’s priorities.

Neighborhood Making card deck is a card game that allows users to explore how their neighborhood is designed. As a design guide as well as a base of knowledge that brings neighborhood residents together to make collective decisions, these cards propose a self-organized neighborhood design that emphasizes vibrant public life and community engagement.

The cards, prepared with the contributions of more than 100 participants, aim to explain concepts such as crosswalks, paving, bioswales, energy harvesting, waste management, maintenance, waiting, parklets, playgrounds, etc. to the ‘neighborhood community’ in a fun and instructive way.

BENEFITS — An urban design tool to discover, learn, and practice how neighborhoods are designed. A reference guide to cultivate a new civic imagination for livable and lovable neighborhoods with actionable ideas.
CONSIDERATIONS — Design guidelines for everyone to imagine a city through the diverse influences that shape decisions in city-making. With a base of knowledge and ideas to act on, give your voice agency in the public participation of your neighborhood. Get involved and participate in decisions for the improvements, needs and public life of your community.
IDEAS — Make thematic guidelines for place making like streets as public space, public square, new developments, recreational places and the places that make up the public realm.

Prepared as a dictionary specifically for everyday people to co-design with experts, design activists, NGOs and professionals, the deck brought together the analytical, practical and creative minds necessary for meaningful and timeless urban design to flourish. The card game approach offers each participant a dynamic path to neighborhood design. Through writing, discussing and reflecting, players reorganize the cards according to their own urban design priorities and aspirations, creating a new design guideline. At the same time, the `deck of cards` as an object and the concept of `play` represent a social learning dimension that can be used in the workshops.