She built a real-life SimCity to better engage citizens in public park planning.

Mention “SimCity” to millennials of a certain age, and you’re sure to get a response. The computer game was nearly ubiquitous in the 1990s and early 2000s—kids rushed home from school to boot up the family computer and get to work designing their own homes, neighborhoods, and cities.

Playing as the mayor, users get a blank map and a budget. The objective? Make the most robust, beautiful city you can, within the fiscal constraints of the game. The more users play, the more their city matures, the more tax revenue it brings in, the more amenities open up to them. (Maybe you had to be there.) 

“I was a big SimCity kid,” says Hayley Oleksiak, laughing. “Anyone who’s in urban planning was a SimCity kid. I’d build cities, get them to the point of being economically self-sustaining, and then start a new one, based on a different industry. As a kid, that’s what I loved.”

It’s what she loves now, too. Oleksiak studied public policy administration and urban planning at Northeastern University before getting her graduate degree in urban, community, and regional planning. Now, she’s a senior analyst at James Lima Planning + Development, an urban planning and economic consulting firm, where she helps agencies figure out how to generate revenue for programming in public parks.

And in her spare time, Oleksiak created Open Space Sandbox, an accessible, gamified public design program that empowers citizens to build out their own vision for green spaces in their communities.

Open Space Sandbox is meant for urban designers and for the people whose communities those designs will live. A data-informed design interface pulls in census data and social infrastructure maps to give municipalities, community groups, and agency groups critical information about the place for which they’re designing. Another interface, meanwhile, features an intuitive drag-and-drop tool that makes it easy for the people living in those communities to design their own version of the space—providing critical information back to the designers, in the process. A third layer offers an informed analysis of the final design, ensuring its compatibility with the community design and the revenue capability of the space.

Imagine sitting in a park with friends. You could scan a QR code that would open up an animated version of that very park, with features you can drag and drop anywhere around you. You could build your ideal park—and then submit it as feedback to the organization undertaking its revitalization.

One might use Open Space Sandbox to re-energize underutilized spaces around town, or to design a crowd-pleasing temporary pop-up event in a public square. If it sounds like a real-life application of SimCity, well, it kind of is.

“I just think that video games, and gaming in general, is such a great avenue to get people involved and break down some of the barriers that might otherwise stand in the way,” Oleksiak says.

And there are barriers. Public planning and zoning meetings, during which designers solicit public input on their plans, are often held in the middle of the week, at hours that are difficult to make for anyone working or caring for children. Although public notice for these meetings run in local newspapers, the heads up is easy to miss. It can be a byzantine process, largely inaccessible for many people.

Oleksiak isn’t the only one who thinks that a change is necessary. Over the summer, she was chosen to be part of the 2024–25 Emerging City Champion cohort, a fellowship organized by the nonprofit grantmaking organization, Knight Foundation.

Oleksiak was also recognized among this year’s Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding. For her park, Oleksiak received honors among the undergraduate alumnae award winners, and took third place in the “powering social impact award” category.

“Hayley’s driver in creating Open Space Sandbox was to fill a vital need in planning and design: How can we find innovative, creative, and buildable solutions inside the confines of everyday practice?” says Pamela Robinson, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, who is among Oleksiak’s mentors. “Communities across North America have parks and open spaces that could use some TLC. But budgets are tight, time is limited, and yet we still need to think bigger and better about ‘what if …?’. Open Space Sandbox can help plant seeds of possibility.”

Oleksiak was also driven by memories of her own childhood. Growing up near the beaches in Toronto, Oleksiak and her siblings did much more than play SimCity. They splashed into the water, rode their bikes, and played hockey at the local rink.

“When we disinvest in community parks and open spaces, you really limit the ability of not only kids, but people of all ages, to have that shared experience of serendipity—that experience of going outside and meeting someone new,” Oleksiak says. “Public parks and open spaces—places you can relax, or decompress, or explore new interests—are just so crucial to our society.”

In late summer, Oleksiak launched a pilot version of Open Space Sandbox, with plans to take it to market before the year is out. She and her small team, which included a Northeastern student working with Scout, are lining up clients and partnerships, and soon may begin to develop an augmented reality capability for the program.

Oleksiak has global ambitions for Open Space Sandbox, with a vision to deploy it in Europe and beyond. But she also sees a role for the program in smaller settings, “an opportunity for communities or governments that don’t have the budget for large-scale park planning initiatives.”