Co-Creating Sustainable Future Cities: An Innovative Participatory Planning Approach Using LEGO® Serious Play® in a Secondary City of Thailand
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Abstract
Secondary cities in the Global South, which are home to over half of the world’s urban dwellers, face governance gaps that hinder their sustainable progress. To address this gap, we evaluated an embodied, model-based participatory approach—LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) combined with an Imaginary Future Generations (IFG) protocol—to improve clarity, inclusiveness, and long-term orientation in planning. This study unveils the power of LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP), complemented by Imaginary Future Generations (IFG), to inspire intergenerational perspectives in reimagining urban futures in Mae Hia Municipality, Thailand, a peri-urban secondary city in rapid flux. Using a mixed-methods design spanning 11 months, 40 diverse stakeholders joined structured workshops to co-create 20-year urban visions through three-dimensional model-building. The results revealed notable gains: 84% improvement in participation quality, 93% increase in creativity, and 79% flattening of the hierarchy (β=0.78, p<0.001). Thematic coding identified “embodied futuring” as the key mechanism for translating abstract sustainability concepts into tangible spatial plans. While outputs earned municipal praise and aligned with adaptation priorities, formal adoption lagged due to bureaucratic constraints. The innovative Participatory Planning Cycle bridges the vision-implementation divide, positioning secondary cities as vibrant innovation laboratories. This replicable framework advances sustainability science by democratizing complex planning through embodied cognition and by urging scholars to explore how secondary cities can advance sustainable urban governance worldwide.
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