SPINlab, Geodan and GeoFort recently published their first scientific outcomes on the use of Minecraft as a particpation tool to involve (young) people of the place to critically assess the development of their home environments into smart cities. This paper provides a discussion of the creation of GeoCraft, a virtual replica of The Netherlands on a scale of 1 by 1 in Minecraft. The study researchers provide an overview of the technical infrastructure of GeoCraft, and explain the conversion and implementation of heterogeneous GIS data in order to reconstruct the contemporary Dutch landscape in one billion Minecraft building blocks. Through the discussion of multiple pilot studies, this study sets out the affordances of GeoCraft as an innovative geospatial tool for stimulating civic engagement and learning on smart city development in the twenty first-century.
A digital copy of the article can be found on the publishers website.