The Living Laboratory: Vliegenbos

At the heart of the project is the century-old Vliegenbos, a unique urban forest established in 1912 as a "forest for workers". Today, it hosts a highly engaged community of volunteers, ecologists, and local residents, alongside more than 1,200 recorded species—including rare discoveries like the glowworm in 2022 and a brand-new arthropod species (polypauropus duboscqi) spotted in 2025.

While traditional planning procedures and political decision-making still dominate, cities are rapidly pouring hundreds of billions into data-driven digital twins. Play Vliegenbos experiments with how communities, ecosystems, and digital technologies might actually collaborate in these future workflows.

Giving a Voice to More-Than-Human Agents

A core innovation of Play Vliegenbos is that the game includes both human and non-human actors. We are working on an interface where the forest itself can "listen" to live game sessions. Through advanced digital infrastructure that translates real-time ecological conditions, scientific models, and open datasets, the forest literally gains a voice. This allows more-than-human agents to step out of the background and actively join the game dialogue alongside human participants.

The Methodology: Data, Play, and Community

Rather than opposing digital twins, we are investigating how local communities can organize themselves as Citizen Data Collectives. By contributing ecological observations, seasonal and spatial experiences, memories, care and well-being of Vliegenbos, citizens can directly influence the questions, assumptions, and scenarios that guide urban development. We aim to transform Vliegenbos from a passive object of planning into an active participant through a combination of:

Conversational Biodiversity Software: gAIa’s map-based interface using the Green Urban Scenarios framework where visitors can "converse" with trees, accessing data on carbon sequestration and cooling effects, while contributing their own memories and observations.

City Gaming & Collective Negotiation: Gaming sessions bring human, non-human and a number of AI agents together to collectively negotiate formal and informal spatial decisions on forest care and use.

Community-Generated Data: Formatting local ecological knowledge so it can be integrated into municipal planning workflows.

As the Municipality of Amsterdam advances its digital infrastructure—and navigates the clear civic demand for deeper collaboration following recent green infrastructure referendums—Vliegenbos offers a living laboratory for a more democratic, ecological, and transparent model of citymaking.

In Play Vliegenbos, visitors will not only learn about the forest—they will interact with it, contribute knowledge to it, and collectively negotiate its future.

We are excited to begin this journey and look forward to sharing more about the project, upcoming public dialogue sessions, and opportunities to participate.

We, Play the City, are proud to share that the Stimulation Fund Creative Industries' Architecture program has selected Play Vliegenbos with gAIa for a grant, enabling this vital design experiment to come to life. Partnering with Lucidminds, Stichting Vliegenbos and Pakhuis de Zwijger we are developing an initiative in Amsterdam Noord where biodiversity, local knowledge, and community stewardship become active ingredients in spatial decision-making.