Meet the Team
Michigan Central is embarking on a generational mobility project in a historic Detroit neighborhood.
Traditionally, city planning decisions are made by professionals behind closed doors. Minecraft at Michigan Central flips that model by inviting residents of all ages and abilities to help co-author the future of their city.
What if you could help design Detroit’s next transportation hub — using Minecraft?
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Minecraft at Michigan Central is a creative civic design project where community members explore real city challenges by building their ideas in a shared Minecraft world.
Participants will:
Learn how cities are designed
Explore transportation and public space
Work in teams to design future ideas
Present their creations to planners and designers
This is based on the real project where residents build speculative designs in Minecraft as part of a community engagement process.
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Learn the Basics
Participants learn about:
urban design
mobility and transportation
public spaces
Minecraft building tools
Explore the Minecraft Detroit World
A 1:1 digital build of the Michigan Central site has been created in Minecraft.
Participants explore the site and understand how cities function.
Design the Future
Teams will receive design challenges such as:
Design the commuter hub of the future
Create healthy public spaces
Imagine Detroit’s future mobility systems
These example missions come directly from the project framework.
Share Their Ideas
Teams present their builds and ideas.
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Participants explore:
architecture
urban design
sustainability
transportation systems
technology and digital design
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Minecraft as a Creative Design Tool: Minecraft turns imagination into real design ideas.
Used Around the World: Cities across the globe have used Minecraft to design parks, streets, and public spaces.
Examples from the United Nations Block by Block initiative:
Youth redesigned a plaza in Haiti that was later built.
Women in Nairobi redesigned unsafe pedestrian routes.
Youth in Mexico City helped design new public spaces.
These examples come from the UN Block by Block initiative.
A Platform Young People Already Love: Minecraft has hundreds of millions of players and is one of the most widely used creative platforms in the world—why not tap into an existing, beloved platform to engage our community?
Envisioning the Multimodal Facility
Why Detroit?
Michigan Central is part of a major effort to rethink how people move around Detroit — including trains, buses, bikes, and new forms of transportation.
Detroit has a culture of co-creation—and residents want to be included in ideating what the future of the city looks like.
As the only UNESCO City of Design, Detroit is a design-forward city—and utilizing equity, access, and creativity as design foundations in partnership with lived-experience can position Detroit as a national mode for inclusive, creative engagement. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?