Gaming Exercise for Rights-Conversion-Type Urban Redevelopment Project in International Cooperation Context

Background. The rights conversion is an emerging approach on international cooperation that aims to solve the urban renewal problems in the 21st century. Previous research centred on the development of a rights-conversion-type urban redevelopment project game (URPG) for rights holders considering a project in Japan. Here, we focus on the application of URPG into Kabul City in Afghanistan, being presented with an opportunity for transfer by interuniversity collaboration. We introduce a gaming exercise herein as part of an action research to solve Kabul’s current urban renewal problems. Aim. Our paper is especially focused on the international transfer of the URPG. The content includes the background, process and formalisation of the rights conversion and reports on the outline of the two versions of URPG and a play content analysis of the Kabul version. It also mentions the implications of international differences in social systems highlighted from the episodes of the debriefing. Method. Our action research is evolved from the soft system approach by adding the gaming exercise, which is regarded as its main component. Results. The implications of the action research are summarised as follows: (1) URPG is a game that deals with the core mechanism of the rights conversion. Herein, we confirmed the basic performance of the Kabul version for undergraduate education in specialised courses. (2) Through a debriefing discussion, we revealed the cultural differences for rights notions on lands, which were subsequently taken into the legislative preparation of the rights conversion by the Afghanistan government. (3) Moreover, we revealed that URPG can deal with a project implementation problem in a given case, although the institutional design of the legislative project framework is a significant problem. Thus, a new gaming exercise based on these two-layered formulations is required.