Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Sustainable Playable City: Making Way for the Playful Citizen

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Making Smart Cities More Playable

Part of the book series: Gaming Media and Social Effects ((GMSE))

Abstract

To play is a legitimate need of urban citizens, and it is therefore important to enable play in cities and to plan for making cities playable. The playable city is not dependent on the digital technologies offered by the smart city. The playable city “happens” when a city offers suitable (playful) affordances and citizens engage in and make use of them. This ultimately implies that also ‘non-smart’ cities can be playable (and may indeed already be so). In this chapter we explore the intersection of playable and sustainable cities. We argue that the playable city can be placed within the realm of what the sustainable city should be and should aim for. The issue of whether this is achieved by applying digital technologies thus becomes decentred, even though digital technologies at the same time could open up for new and exciting possibilities. Key is to ensure that the playable city is a sustainable city and we should therefore aim for designing and building sustainable playable cities.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 139.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 179.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 179.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    www.playablecity.com.

  2. 2.

    The answer to such a question would in effect always be “no”.

  3. 3.

    www.hellolamppost.co.uk.

References

  1. Albino V, Berardi U, Dangelico RM (2015) Smart cities: definitions, dimensions, performance, and initiatives. J Urban Technol 22(1):3–21

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Aldred R, Woodcock J (2008) Transport: challenging disabling environments. Local Environ 13(6):485–496

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Arcadis (2018) Sustainable cities index 2018: Citizen Centric Cities

    Google Scholar 

  4. Back J et al (2016) Designing for children’s outdoor play. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM conference on designing interactive systems. ACM, pp 28–38

    Google Scholar 

  5. Banister D (2008) The sustainable mobility paradigm. Transp Policy 15(2):73–80

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Bell G, Blythe M, Sengers P (2005) Making by making strange: defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologies. ACM Trans Computer-Human Interact (TOCHI) 12(2):149–173

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Bibri SE, Krogstie J (2017) Smart sustainable cities of the future: an extensive interdisciplinary literature review. Sustain Cities Soc 31:183–212

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Batty M, Axhausen KW, Giannotti F, Pozdnoukhov A, Bazzani A, Wachowicz M, Portugali Y et al (2012) Smart cities of the future. Eur Phys J Special Topics 214(1):481–518

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Berrone P, Ricart JE (2018) IESE cities in motion index 2018. https://dx.doi.org/10.15581/018.ST-471

  10. Brundtland G (1987) Our common future. The World Commission on Environment and Development, New York

    Google Scholar 

  11. Caillois R (1961) Man, play and games. University of Illinois Press, Urbana

    Google Scholar 

  12. Carroll P, Calder-Dawe O, Witten K, Asiasiga L (2018) A prefigurative politics of play in public places: children claim their democratic right to the city through play. Space Cult

    Google Scholar 

  13. Colley A, Thebault-Spieker J, Lin AY, Degraen D, Fischman B, Häkkilä J, Kuehl K, Nisi V, Nunes NJ, Wenig N, Wenig D, Hecht B, Schöning J (2017) The geography of Pokémon GO: beneficial and problematic effects on places and movement. In: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, pp 1179–1192

    Google Scholar 

  14. Coulton P, Huck J, Gradinar A, Salinas L (2017) Mapping the beach beneath the street: digital cartography for the playable city. In: Nijholt A (ed) Playable cities. Gaming media and social effects. Springer, Singapore, pp 137–162

    Google Scholar 

  15. Cramer BW (2012) Man’s need or man’s greed: the human rights ramifications of green ICTs. Telematics Inform 29(4):337–347

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Davies H, Innocent T (2017) The space between Debord and Pikachu. In: Proceedings of the 2017 DIGRA international conference, vol 14, no 1

    Google Scholar 

  17. Donoff G, Bridgman R (2017) The playful city: constructing a typology for urban design interventions. Int J Play 6(3):294–307

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Dourish P (2010) HCI and environmental sustainability: the politics of design and the design of politics. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on designing interactive systems. ACM, pp 1–10

    Google Scholar 

  19. Elkington J (1998) Partnerships from cannibals with forks: the triple bottom line of 21st-century business. Environ Qual Manage 8(1):37–51

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Ferguson A (2019) Playing out: a grassroots street play revolution. Cities Health 1–9

    Google Scholar 

  21. Fitzpatrick C, Olivetti E, Miller TR, Roth R, Kirchain R (2014) Conflict minerals in the compute sector: estimating extent of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold use in ICT products. Environ Sci Technol 49(2):974–981

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Gehl J (2011) Life between buildings: using public space. Van Nostrand Reinhold Company Inc., New York

    Google Scholar 

  23. Giffinger R, Pichler-Milanović N (2007) Smart cities: ranking of European medium-sized cities. Centre of Regional Science, Vienna University of Technology

    Google Scholar 

  24. Greenfield A (2013) Against the smart city (The city is here for you to use Book 1)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Grossi G, Pianezzi D (2017) Smart cities: Utopia or neoliberal ideology? Cities 69:79–85

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Habitat UN (2015) The city prosperity initiative: 2015 global city report

    Google Scholar 

  27. Hasselqvist H, Hesselgren M, Bogdan C (2016) Challenging the car norm: opportunities for ICT to support sustainable transportation practices. In: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, pp 1300–1311

    Google Scholar 

  28. Heinberg R (2010) What is sustainability? In: Heinberg R, Lerch D (eds) The post carbon reader: managing the 21st century’s sustainability crises. Watershed Media, Plymouth

    Google Scholar 

  29. Heitlinger S, Bryan-Kimms N, Comber R (forthcoming) The right to the sustainable smart city. In 2019 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems proceedings (CHI 2019), 4–9 May 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. ACM, New York. Paper 287, 13 pages

    Google Scholar 

  30. Huizinga J (1955) Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. Beacon press, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  31. Höjer M, Wangel J (2015). Smart sustainable cities: definition and challenges. In ICT innovations for sustainability. Springer, Cham, pp 333–349

    Google Scholar 

  32. Jacobs M (1999) Sustainable development as a contested concept. In: Dobson A (ed) Fairness and futurity: essays on environmental sustainability and social justice. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  33. Jameson NJ, Song X, Pecht M (2016) Conflict minerals in electronic systems: an overview and critique of legal initiatives. Sci Eng Ethics 22(5):1375–1389

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Kitchin R, Cardullo P, di Feliciantonio C (2018) Citizenship, social justice and the right to the smart city. Programmable City Working Paper 41. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/b8aq5

  35. Lefebvre H (1968) Staden som rättighet. Bokomotiv Förlags AB, Stockholm, Sweden

    Google Scholar 

  36. Marques L, Borba C (2017) Co-creating the city: digital technology and creative tourism. In: Tourism management perspectives, vol 24, pp 86–93. ISSN 2211-9736. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tmp.2017.07.007

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Mayer H, Knox PL (2006) Slow cities: sustainable places in a fast world. J Urban Aff 28(4):321–334

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Nijholt A (2017) Towards playful and playable cities. In: Playable cities. Springer, Singapore, pp 1–20

    Google Scholar 

  39. Nijholt A (2019) Playable cities for children?. In: Fukuda S (eds) Advances in affective and pleasurable design. In: AHFE 2018. Advances in intelligent systems and computing, vol 774. Springer, Cham, pp 14–20

    Google Scholar 

  40. Paasovaara S, Jarusriboonchai P, Olsson T (2017) Understanding collocated social interaction between Pokémon GO players. In: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia. ACM, pp 151–163

    Google Scholar 

  41. Pargman D, Wallsten B (2017) Resource scarcity and socially just internet access over time and space. In: Proceedings of the 2017 workshop on computing within limits. ACM, pp 29–36

    Google Scholar 

  42. Phillis YA, Kouikoglou VS (2017) Urban sustainability assessment and ranking of cities. Comput Environ Urban Syst 64:254–265

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Purcell M (2014) Possible worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the right to the city. J Urban Aff 36(1):141–154

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Pyyry N, Tani S (2017) More-than-human playful politics in young people’s practices of dwelling with the city. Soc Cult Geogr, 1–15

    Google Scholar 

  45. Raghavan B, Hasan S (2016) Macroscopically sustainable networking: on internet quines. In: Proceedings of the second workshop on computing within limits. ACM, p 11

    Google Scholar 

  46. Raworth K (2012) A safe and just space for humanity: can we live within the doughnut. Oxfam Policy Pract Climate Change Resilience 8(1):1–26

    Google Scholar 

  47. Raworth K (2017) What on Earth is the doughnut? (Webpage). Available online: https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/

  48. Raworth K (2017) A doughnut for the anthropocene: humanity’s compass in the 21st century. Lancet Planet Health 1(2):e48–e49

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Rees W, Wackernagel M (2008) Urban ecological footprints: why cities cannot be sustainable—and why they are a key to sustainability. Urban ecology. Springer, Boston, MA, pp 537–555

    Book  Google Scholar 

  50. Rieber LP (1996) Seriously considering play: designing interactive learning environments based on the blending of microworlds, simulations, and games. Educ Technol Res Dev 44(2):43–58

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. Ringenson T, Eriksson E, Börjesson Rivera M, Wangel J (2017) The limits of the smart sustainable city. In: Proceedings of the 2017 workshop on computing within limits (LIMITS ’17). ACM, New York, pp 3–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3080556.3080559

  52. Rockström J, Steffen W, Noone K, Persson Å, Chapin FS, Lambin EF, Lenton TM, Scheffer M, Folke C, Schellnhuber HJ, Nykvist B, de Wit CA, Hughes T, Rodhe H, Sörlin S, Snyder PK, Costanza R, Svedin U, Falkenmark M, Karlberg L, Corell RW, Fabry VJ, Hansen J, Walker B, Liverman D, Richardson K, Crutzen P, Foley JA (2009) A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461(7263):472–475

    Article  Google Scholar 

  53. Rockström J, Gaffney O, Rogelj J, Meinshausen M, Nakicenovic N, Schellnhuber HJ (2017) A roadmap for rapid decarbonization. Science 355(6331):1269–1271

    Article  Google Scholar 

  54. Sheller M, Urry J (2000) The city and the car. Int J Urban Reg Res 24:737–757

    Article  Google Scholar 

  55. Sobel K, Bhattacharya A, Hiniker A, Lee JH, Kientz JA, Yip JC (2017) It wasn’t really about the Pokémon: parents’ perspectives on a location-based mobile game. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, pp 1483–1496

    Google Scholar 

  56. Song H, Srinivasan R, Sookoor T, Jeschke S (eds) (2017) Smart cities: foundations, principles, and applications. Wiley, Hoboken

    Google Scholar 

  57. Steffen W et al (2015) Sustainability. planetary boundaries: guiding human development on a changing planet. Science 347(6223):1259855-1259855 (New York, NY)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. Stevens Q (2006) The shape of urban experience: a reevaluation of Lynch’s five elements. Environ Plann B Plann Design 33(6):803–823

    Article  Google Scholar 

  59. Sutton-Smith B (1997) The ambiguity of play: rhetorics of fate. The performance studies reader. Routledge, New York

    Google Scholar 

  60. Söderström O, Paasche T, Klauser F (2014) Smart cities as corporate storytelling. City 18(3):307–320

    Article  Google Scholar 

  61. Vanolo A (2014) Smartmentality: the smart city as disciplinary strategy. Urban Stud 51(5):883–898

    Article  Google Scholar 

  62. Wenner M (2009) The serious need for play. Sci Am Mind 20(1):22–29

    Article  Google Scholar 

  63. West GB (2017) Scale: the universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in organisms, cities, economies, and companies. Penguin

    Google Scholar 

  64. Wolff A et al (2017) Engaging with the smart city through urban data games. In: Nijholt A (ed) Playable cities. Gaming media and social effects. Springer, Singapore, pp 47–66

    Google Scholar 

  65. Woodyer T (2012) Ludic geographies: not merely child’s play. Geogr Compass 6(6):313–326

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Media Technology and Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Miriam Börjesson Rivera & Daniel Pargman

  2. Strategic Sustainability Studies, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Tina Ringenson

Authors
  1. Miriam Börjesson Rivera
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Tina Ringenson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Daniel Pargman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Miriam Börjesson Rivera .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Anton Nijholt

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Börjesson Rivera, M., Ringenson, T., Pargman, D. (2020). The Sustainable Playable City: Making Way for the Playful Citizen. In: Nijholt, A. (eds) Making Smart Cities More Playable. Gaming Media and Social Effects. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_5

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation