Block by Block has residents design real public spaces in Minecraft — then builds them

In 2012, UN-Habitat, Microsoft and Mojang — the maker of Minecraft — teamed up on Block by Block, a venture that improves marginalised areas by putting community members inside the design process for public projects. The format is simple: residents build the public space they want in Minecraft's blocks, and the design gets made into concrete reality — parks, beaches, even streets. By 2020 the UN counted more than 17,000 participants in around 100 countries, with hundreds of thousands of lives improved.

One experiment ran in Gaza. In 2018, Somia Hamdan, then 23, had never played a video game; she lived in Az-Zawayda, a town that often had barely four hours of electricity a day. The Aisha Association for Women and Child Protection selected her and 42 others — young women, mostly — to design a community garden for the town, a site that was 'only sand, ruins, and unlit roads'. Split into groups of four, most of them first-time gamers, they found the tool 'surprisingly user-friendly'; Fatma Zoqlam, 18, arrived sceptical the barren lot could work and didn't want to stop once she got going.

UN-Habitat frames public space as infrastructure: program officer Christelle Lahoud told Rest of World that safe, accessible, welcoming spaces drive civic cohesion, biodiversity, livelihood and economic growth, while their absence tracks crime, pollution and social disparity. The Gaza design was aimed at exactly that — a modest town-centre garden that residents had authored themselves, down to the placement of every block.

Let residents — including women who had never played a game — design real public spaces in Minecraft, then build the winning design in concrete.

Traditional consultation needs literacy in drawings, plans and jargon; Minecraft replaced all three with blocks anyone can learn in an afternoon.

The game made participation intrinsically rewarding — participants kept playing after the workshop ended, which no planning hearing achieves.

Choosing young women as participants doubled the intervention: a public space designed by a group usually excluded from both planning and public life.

The virtual-to-real pipeline kept the promise credible: residents designed knowing UN-Habitat would actually build the result.

Meet people in the tool they can already use: when expertise is the barrier, lend a familiar medium instead of asking residents to learn the professionals' language.

By 2020 Block by Block had run projects in about 100 countries, including three in Gaza, and the UN credited it with improving hundreds of thousands of lives. Hamdan still visits and looks after the space on Sundays — 'Since I created the space, I like to take care of it.'