Urban Play in Practice: Seven Lenses Exploring the Sociocultural Value of Playable Cities

Cities are complex, layered, messy and contested spaces. While smart cities seek to assimilate and control these spaces, urban play engages with the energy and life of cities in different ways: as a creative and generative force, an assemblage of code and place, as an ecosystem that emerges through interactions between people, place, materials and infrastructure. Each view of the city – and there are many – presents a different civic identity, way of being, or interdisciplinary approach. Urban play in practice is challenging as it is both situated in the complexity of the street and traverses multiple disciplines – and by extension different value systems. Drawing upon forty-three interviews with practitioners in the field, this problematic space is explored through reflection on urban play in practice. Seven lenses are established that look for points both of difference and connection in urban play: creative producer, city planner, gamer, technologist, citizen, First Peoples, and artist gamemakers. By looking through these lenses, the social and cultural value of urban play is articulated then tested through analysis of several case studies that reflect on the differing values – and therefore definitions of urban play – of those working in this space. As a result, the role of urban play communities is explored in relation to the sociocultural value of playable cities, including strategies for a way forward through not only recognition of the value of urban play itself but also its inherent diversity.