Abstract
Cities are becoming increasingly complex, both in terms of their social and cultural context, and in the technological solutions that are necessary to make them function. In parallel, we are observing a growing attention toward the public dimension of design, addressing societal challenges and opportunities at an urban scale. Conceptualizing, ideating, and framing design problems at a larger scale may still prove challenging, even as cities are becoming more and more relevant for all branches of design. In this chapter, we address the use of game mechanics to produce strong concepts for better understanding complex problems in city-making and communal participation, capitalizing on the necessity to shift the attention from smart cities to smart citizens. Through several examples we will show that games and play have a special quality of social bonding, providing context and motivational aspects that can be used to improve the dynamics and solutions within city-making.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
https://www.waag.org/nl/project/making-sense. Carried out by a consortium consisting of Waag Society (Lead partner—Netherlands), University of Dundee (UK), Peer Educators Network and Science for Change (Kosovo), Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia—IAAC (Spain), and the EU Joint Research Centre (Belgium).
- 3.
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Including the authors of this chapter.
- 5.
Karel Millenaar is a practicing game designer and educator based in the Netherlands. He was involved with Hackable City throughout the whole process, and provided his expertise in making, testing, and discussing the ad hoc games produced as part of the inquiry. He did not have previous experiences of academic research in the field of urban studies and urban planning, thus making his “clean-slate” approach to this problem space qualitatively representative. The designer interview presented in this paragraph was conducted by the other authors of this chapter.
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Schouten, B., Ferri, G., de Lange, M., Millenaar, K. (2017). Games as Strong Concepts for City-Making. In: Nijholt, A. (eds) Playable Cities. Gaming Media and Social Effects. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1962-3_2
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