ADB City Builders Challenge: Reimagining Urban Futures
ADB City Builders Challenge: Reimagining Urban Futures
Join the challenge and turn real urban problems into bold, visual solutions—use interactive digital tools to reimagine city spaces and help shape the sustainable, livable cities of tomorrow!
ADB City Builders Challenge 2025 Results Showcase
Celebrating outstanding creativity, resilience, and city-building innovation.
The first challenge of its kind, bringing city-building games into real-world urban planning, officially concluded on 24 October 2025. This inaugural run gathered over 83 participants across 21 countries to reimagine a real-world city using any city-building game. Winners were selected through a combination of expert evaluation, community votes, and special recognitions.
This showcase highlights creative and resilient visions for the future of cities, forming the first-ever collection of city-building works tackling real urban challenges.
ABOUT THE SPECIAL AWARDS
- Thematic “Best In…” Awards
These awards recognize entries that demonstrate exceptional performance across key urban resilience focus areas. Categories include: inclusion and accessibility; mobility and transport; green and open spaces; waste and water management; and technology and innovation.
- ADB Choice Award
Determined through a combination of community popularity and internal review, this award honors the entry that most strongly resonated with the ADB community, independent of the formal evaluation criteria.
- Paradox Pick
Selected by Paradox Interactive, this award highlights the entry that the game publisher identified as particularly compelling and noteworthy.
Special Awardees
SIMillion
Every year, the Ciliwung River flooding causes great economical and physical losses. Our team model a dual-strategy solution to break it: - Centralized Wastewater Management Infrastructure - Ciliwung River Restoration as Primary Water Source
Award: Best in Waste and Water
WeavAir
WeavAir reimagines Manila as a resilient, data-driven city using a digital twin that integrates satellite, IoT, and AI insights to predict floods, optimize mobility, and enhance inclusion
Award: Best in Technology and Innovation
How Teams Tackled Urban Challenges
Fresh Ideas and Strategies
Explored innovative ways to address urban challenges without relying on simulations, offering creative solutions that could inspire future city design and policy decisions.
Example: (Re)Active Banks
Testing Solutions in Action
Used city-building games like Cities: Skylines to experiment with interventions such as traffic flows and layouts, testing how ideas might work in practice.
Example: Visionary Challengers
Visualizing Inclusive, Resilient Cities
Created interactive city models to show how cities can be designed for everyone, using visuals to communicate proposed solutions effectively.
Example: InclusiCity
Why These Entries Matter
Generating Insights for Real-World Planning
The entries show how game-based tools can clarify complex systems, test ideas safely, and inspire innovative solutions, providing insights for ADB’s future urban simulations and helping planners make informed decisions for resilient, sustainable cities.
Exploring Different Approaches
Participants addressed urban challenges in diverse ways, demonstrating the versatility of city-building games for conceptual exploration, simulation, and visualization.
Highlighting Innovation and Impact
Together, these submissions show the power of collaboration and game-based modeling to bridge creativity with practical urban planning solutions.
Shaping the Cities of Tomorrow
The ADB City Builders Challenge demonstrates how gaming, technology, and strategic partnerships can come together to design resilient and livable cities. By combining immersive simulations, collective creativity, and community engagement, we are unlocking new possibilities for urban life.
Evaluation Process
- Preliminary screening – All submissions were first checked for eligibility and completeness, ensuring entries met the challenge requirements.
- Jury scoring - Specialists and invited industry partners reviewed each entry based on five key criteria: Creativity & Originality, Relevance to Theme, Technical Excellence, Clarity & Communication, and Feasibility. Each criterion was scored on a 1-to-10 scale, highlighting bold ideas, clear presentation, and practical solutions to real urban challenges.
- Executive Deliberation and Special Awards– The final winners and special recognitions were selected by an ADB panel comprising Satoshi Ishii and Sunghoon Kris Moon, the Water and Urban Development Strategy and Partnerships team, and Madeleine Jonsson representing Paradox Interactive.
Jury
- Kr Pueblos - Design Strategist and Urban Development Consultant
- Byron Datinguinoo - Landscape Architect, Planner, City Building Gamer
- Marione Comboy - Landscape Architect & Environmental Planner in Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD)
Other brand names and logos appear throughout the Challenge materials and web pages and are owned by third parties. Use of these trademark(s) is without permission and does not imply endorsement by ADB.
SimCity™ is a trademark, registered trademark or service mark of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.
Cities: Skylines™ is a trademark of Paradox Interactive AB in Europe, the U.S., and other countries.
Steam™ is a trademark of Valve Corporation.