Reworlding Together: Learning with Place through Cli-Fi Urban Role-Play

Reworlding Together: Learning with Place Through Urban Play

As cities grapple with the realities of climate change, new approaches are needed to help people understand, engage with and respond to complex urban futures. Reworlding Together explores how urban play and live-action role-play (LARP) can create shared, experiential ways of learning about climate, place and collective futures.

At its core, the work builds on the concept of reworlding — a relational and cyclical way of understanding the world, grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems and ecological thinking. Rather than viewing the future as linear or predetermined, reworlding invites people to engage with the city as something that is constantly evolving through interconnected relationships between people, place and environment.

Learning Through Experience, Not Abstraction

The paper centres on a large-scale, immersive urban role-play set in a near-future Melbourne (2050), where participants collectively navigate the impacts of climate change, from extreme heat to flooding, while working together to shape a neighbourhood.

Rather than simply imagining the future, participants experience it. Through embodied play, they make decisions, negotiate trade-offs and collaborate on solutions, creating a deeper and more memorable understanding of urban challenges.

This approach shifts climate education from abstract knowledge to lived, place-based learning, where emotional connection and collective action become central.

From Individual Action to Collective Futures

A key insight from the work is the importance of “doing it together” (DIT). Unlike individualised approaches to problem-solving, the role-play format encourages collaboration, shared responsibility and collective imagination.

Participants move between roles, perspectives and strategies, learning not only about systems and environments, but also about how to work with others in uncertain and changing conditions.

Reconnecting People, Place and Systems

The project also highlights the importance of place-based learning. By situating play directly within the city, participants engage with real environments while imagining alternative futures layered over them.

This creates a powerful connection between:

• current conditions

• future possibilities

• and the decisions needed to bridge the two

In doing so, urban play becomes a way to reveal hidden systems, challenge dominant narratives and open up new ways of thinking about how cities function.

A New Model for Climate Engagement

Reworlding Together positions urban play as a valuable tool for environmental education, civic engagement and urban innovation. By combining speculative fiction (Cli-Fi), creative practice and real-world interaction, it enables people to explore complex futures in ways that are collaborative, inclusive and grounded in place.

Ultimately, the work suggests that responding to climate challenges is not only a technical or policy task, but a collective cultural process, one that requires new ways of imagining, experiencing and shaping the world together.