Lego: can this most analogue of toys really be a modern urban planning tool?

Copenhagen residents take part in one of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliassons Lego town planning projects. Photograph: Keld Navntoft/AFP

One September day in 2005, the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson set up a few tables in a bustling downtown square in Tirana and unloaded three tonnes of Lego bricks. The Copenhagen-born, Berlin-based artist, known for his enormous, immersive installations he once installed a gigantic, glowing sun at Tate Modern included simple instructions: residents of the crumbling Albanian capital, which was recovering from the end of communist rule in 1990, were to construct their visions for the citys future out of Lego. Building a stable society, Eliasson said, is only possible with the involvement and co-operation of each individual. As the days passed, everyone from kids to adults, passers-by to committed users, gradually turned the plastic rubble into a glistening white Lego metropolis.

Part art installation, part crowdsourced sculpture, part urban intervention, the success of the Collectivity Project was a sign, perhaps, of our desire to become more involved in imagining the possibilities for our cities, even if our bricks-and-plastic creations will eventually be taken apart and packed up in a box. But it also signals the Lego Groups desire for its products to be thought of as more than a childs building blocks. In little more than a decade, the Danish company has gone from a $300m loss to overtake Mattel, the makers of Barbie, as the worlds largest toy-maker. It has achieved this through a canny mixture of movie franchising (The Hobbit, Star Wars, Harry Potter and, of course, The Lego Movie), an ever-expanding universe of video games (including Lego City for Nintendo) and even a forthcoming CBeebies TV show in 2016 based on its long-running Lego City line featuring sets such as Lego City Museum Break-In and Lego City Prisoner Transport.

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But Lego has also made an effort for the bricks to travel from the playroom to the boardroom, with the company appealing to artists, architects and other creative professionals to use their product as the building blocks for innovation. The Lego City video game may be just that, a game; but the company also donated 1m bricks to Dutch architect Winy Maas, who created 676 scale-model skyscrapers for the 2012 Venice Biennale. (They also gave Eliasson those three tonnes of bricks.) This October, the Lego Group held a workshop in Copenhagen, ahead of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that tasked close to 700 children with building ideas for a sustainable future out of their products. Then theres the recently released Lego Architecture Studio, a 149 instruction-free kit of white blocks that lets AFOLs (adult fans of Lego) play Frank Gehry and create their own architectural masterpieces. Lego even sponsors an urban planning project at MIT in the hopes that city planners, like architects before them, might use the bricks as tools to solve issues such as transportation and walkability.

Its at this point that one could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow. Urban areas are bigger, denser, more complex and more reliant on technology than ever before. Can this most analogue of toys dreamed up by an entrepreneurial carpenter in Billund in 1932 really teach us how to build better cities? Or is this just a smart extension of the Lego brand, to persuade well-heeled parents that an expensive Lego City Monster Truck is a serious educational toy? Surely urban planners themselves, laden with degrees and sophisticated insights into the ebb and flow of urban life, arent actually plotting our cities using Lego City Train Station?

The answer might be found in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where MITs CityScope has created what managing director Ryan Chin calls an urban observatory. Its a 30x60in Lego model of the citys Kendall Square, on to which research scientists project digital data. For example, geolocated Twitter feeds from people working and studying in the real Kendall Square are mapped on to buildings; traffic information is projected on the brick roads. The idea, explains Chin, is to get a sense of how people live and work in the city. We can look at flows of traffic, goods and people, and flows of energy, he says. What are the passive solar gains on a building? What are the shadows cast from a building on to a roadway? Details about household sizes, population numbers and walkability can be programmed to provide, as he puts it, a finely grained geospatial view of where things are happening in cities.

In fact, software like this already exists: Autodesk or Esri CityEngine allow planners to map all kinds of data on to virtual 3D models of buildings and cities. Urban areas are intricate, shapeshifting ecosystems that presumably cant be clicked together in an afternoon. Common sense suggests that a plastic city is too pixellated and limited to help planners design resilient cities that can adapt to climate change or find solutions to demographic changes and land use.

Chin argues, however, that it is precisely a lack of refinement that makes Lego useful as a design tool. Hes a fan of the malleability, interactivity and three-dimensional properties of the Lego model at CityScope. A former architect who has worked in automobile design, Chin sees flaws in traditional photorealistic renderings, which are often Photoshopped to death, he says. You can hire the best photographer to make a house look beautiful, and you can hire the best 3D-renderers to make a model look beautiful.

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Lego: can this most analogue of toys really be a modern urban planning tool?