Special Interest Group Playful Cities: Towards playful urban futuring (focus area Game Research)

Under the label of “playful city” an emerging interdisciplinary field is currently addressing playful citizen creativity and engagement in future city policies. Various UU researchers currently work on these issues and wish to consolidate their efforts. On May 1 2019, a delegation from different UU departments met to discuss shared interests and collaborations. We unanimously agreed that collaboration thrives around tangible activities and outcomes. Our proposal makes this concrete by focussing on the theme of “playful urban futuring”.

As our planet is rapidly urbanizing, “smart city” visions gain considerable traction. In the wake of “creative city” policies, smart city agendas aim to improve services and livability through ICTs and supporting infrastructures. A key challenge in those visions and policies is how to involve people living in these cities in meaningful ways in co-shaping the future of their city. To address this, the notion of a “playful city” has been proposed as a research and design agenda aiming to deploy play and games to harness citizen creativity in city-making (similar terms include “playable city”, “gameful city”, “ludic city”). The SIG The Playful City promotes a people-centric view of the smart city in which citizens themselves learn, negotiate and create innovations through play and games. As Maarten Hajer (Urban Futures Studio) argues, shaping our urban future is a challenge of the imagination rather than a technological challenge. To be serious about our planetary urban future, we need imaginative gameful tools and playful interventions for “playful urban futuring”. How can games and play be used to foster a smarter civic engagement towards a resilient urban future? How can we design gameful tools and playful interventions to accomplish this, and how can we stage these in such a way that they effectively invite participation?
SIG chair: Michiel de Lange 

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