Co-creating games for wellbeing and justice in two Colombian cities
The project engages with community organisations, social leaders and schoolteachers through close co-creation workshops, and with families and urban policymakers through city and neighbourhood events to foreground bottom-up conceptions of wellbeing grounded in visions of justice.
Colombia consistently ranks among the happiest countries in global wellbeing indices despite persisting insecurity, deep inequalities, and human rights violations. This divergence between reported life satisfaction and structural injustice motivates this project, which asks communities to define what wellbeing and justice means on their own terms. To do so, the project co-creates sports games and physical activities that embody local conceptions of wellbeing and justice with diverse stakeholders in Bogota and Medellín, Colombia – piloting a novel engagement approach, underexplored compared to board games and arts-based methods.
The project aims to:
- Pilot games and physical activities as a tool for critical pedagogy.
- Support a more equitable model of the city, one that places community-based concepts of well-being and justice and the centre of dialogue among residents, civil society, and local governments.
- Strength community and educational organisations' capacities in games-based methodologies and support the systematisation of their experiences.
The project will produce a toolkit of games and accompanying communication materials – blogs and short videos - and a community-owned digital exchange platform to inform novel participatory approaches. An impact framework and evaluation tools will be co-developed to capture the tangible and intangible impacts of play-based group work, serving as a resource for future projects and the sports for development sector more broadly.
Research from the Gender Justice & Wellbeing Economy (GJ&WE) programme at the International Inequalities Institute (III) led by Professor Naila Kabeer and Dr. Ania Plomien points to a need for exploratory, contextualised approaches that capture what matters to people in their own terms and connect subjective experiences to structural injustices and collective action.
Latin America has been at the forefront of centring care and wellbeing in economic and urban planning, amid growing pressures to rethink economic systems that are deepening inequality. In Colombia, inclusive urban policies, citizen participation mechanisms, and high levels of subjective wellbeing contrast with persisting violence and inequity. The project aims to support more equitable and responsive urban planning in Colombia. The city events and participatory spaces will open dialogue between communities, policymakers and urban planners around shared challenges like care provision, insecurity, and displacement, building synergies across academic, institutional, and community sectors.
- Dr Sophie Legros, ESRC Post-doctoral Fellow, LSE Department of Methodology (Project Lead and Principal Investigator)
- Jose Collazos, Graphic designer and teacher at IE Municipal Jorge Villamil Cordovez
- Cristian Córdoba Mosquera, Universidad Autonoma Latinoamericana, Medellin
- Ledys Muñoz, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellin
- Karen Lizeth Sicua Bogotá, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá
LSE Engagement & Partnership Fund Award. £12,505.