Mapping the Network Before Building It: Le Grand Jeu as a Design Tool in Genova’s Historic Centre
How a collaborative mapping game helped twelve very different organisations find a shared language — before any code was written.
In October 2025, twelve organisations gathered in the Maddalena neighbourhood of Genova’s historic centre. They included a social cooperative that runs a second-hand clothing shop, a circular fashion laboratory using near-infrared spectroscopy to certify fibre composition, a community space that lends professional clothes to people preparing for job interviews, an upholstery workshop run by the African community, a children’s second-hand goods store, and several others — each with a different relationship to the city’s textile waste stream.
They had been loosely connected for years, exchanging material, sharing volunteers, referring clients to each other. But the relationships were informal, invisible, and fragile. The project — funded through the ZAC (Zena Active Citizens) programme under PN Metro Plus 2021-2027 — set out to make those connections explicit, durable and measurable: through a community token on the TON blockchain, a network of Telegram bots for environmental accounting, and a public real-time graph of the flows between nodes.
Before any of that infrastructure could be designed, though, there was a more fundamental question: did these twelve actors actually understand themselves as a network? Did they see the flows between them? Could they articulate what they gave and what they received?
That is where Le Grand Jeu came in.
The Map on the Table
In the first two workshops — held in October and November 2025 — we did not open a laptop. Instead, we spread a large cloth across the table and handed out markers.
The premise was simple: draw yourselves, draw what moves between you, draw what you need and what you offer. The cloth became a collaborative map — not a diagram produced by a researcher after the fact, but something the participants built together, in real time, negotiating whose node went where, which arrows made sense, what was missing.
The choice of format was deliberate. A physical, horizontal surface changes the dynamics of a room. Nobody is presenting to anybody else. There is no front of the room, no slide deck, no expert position. Everyone is standing around the same object, reaching across each other, correcting and extending what the previous person drew. The map belongs to whoever is drawing it.
What emerged over those two sessions was something that no stakeholder analysis conducted from the outside could have produced: the actors’ own understanding of their interdependencies, in their own categories. The sorting flows, the transport dependencies, the seasonal rhythms of donation and redistribution, the informal relationships that were already there but had never been named — all of it appeared on the cloth, drawn by the people who lived it.
From Map to System
The collaborative map did three things that proved essential for the design work that followed.
It made the network legible to itself. Several participants were surprised to discover connections they had not been aware of — that the scraps from one node’s production were already informally feeding another node’s workshop, for instance, or that two actors were serving the same community through different channels. The map made visible what had previously been tacit.
It surfaced the logic of the flows. As participants drew arrows and debated their direction, they were also articulating — often for the first time — the criteria by which material moved: fibre type, condition, the distinction between sellable and repairable and only-good-for-donation. These categories became the basis for the environmental accounting model built into the bots later.
It created a shared foundation for governance conversations. The hardest question in designing a community currency is not technical — it is political: who decides how much a contribution is worth? Who counts as a contributor? What happens when someone disagrees? These questions are easier to approach when there is already a shared object — a map, a drawing, a thing everyone has touched — that represents the collective understanding of the system. The map gave the governance conversations a material anchor.
What the Game Is Good At
Le Grand Jeu, used this way, is not a tool for generating data. The map produced in those sessions was not a deliverable — it was a process. Its value was in the making, not in the output.
What the game is particularly good at is creating conditions for honesty. When you are drawing on a shared surface with people you work with, it is harder to perform. The informality of the format — the physicality, the standing, the markers and the cloth — lowers the stakes enough that people say what they actually think, rather than what they imagine they are supposed to say in a project meeting.
In our case, that meant acknowledging flows that were outside the formal economy, naming actors that had no institutional status, drawing arrows that pointed toward the city’s African community networks or the informal “Wall of Kindness” where clothing is left for anyone to take — things that would have been difficult to raise in a more formal design workshop but that turned out to be essential to understanding how the actual system worked.
A Note on Scale
The twelve organisations in the room ranged from a legally constituted social cooperative with employees and institutional funders to individuals working informally from a small workshop. The game format accommodated that range. Nobody needed credentials to pick up a marker and draw.
This matters when designing for commons — for systems that are supposed to be governed by their participants rather than administered by experts. The governance model we eventually adopted (lazy consensus, flat admin rights, monthly in-person meetings) was consistent with what the map sessions had already established as a norm: that everyone’s perspective was equally valid, that decisions should be visible and contestable, and that the slowest and most deliberative process was the monthly meeting rather than the default.
The game, in other words, did not just help us understand the network. It began to enact the kind of network we were trying to build.
The Rete Abiti in Circolazione network is currently in its pilot phase. The real-time graph of active nodes and token transactions is publicly accessible at retepalanche.it/rete. The project is funded under ZAC – Zena Active Citizens, PN Metro Plus e Città Medie Sud 2021-2027, CUP B36D23000280006.
Text by Federico Bonelli — April 2026
