Playable Cities: Creative technologies and social frameworks that connect people and place

As the popularity of smart cities has risen over the past decade, alternatives and counterpoints have emerged to challenge its focus on function and utility at the expense of human needs and experiences. As a result, playable cities emerged in opposition to early technology-driven approaches to smart cities to focus instead on people and place, often making urban environments and infrastructure literally 'playable'. While governments and corporations were installing sensors, trackers and cameras on every street corner, a mix of creative technologists, public artists and game designers took to the streets to experiment with alternative strategies for public engagement and participation in cities around the world. This research report explores strategies that connect people and place, developed by creatives working with playable cities who advocate for the democratic use of technology and data driven by the needs of citizens. Play sets up conditions sympathetic to participation and co-creation and starts conversations around what the city-as-it-could-be rather than the city-as-it-is. Playable cities appropriate urban infrastructure, such as a Melbourne tram, and reframe its meaning and relationship to people and the city. While playable cities is not a new concept, a key finding of this research is the shift in relationship between smart and playable cities, which no longer operate strictly in opposition to one another. Smart cities have evolved to a second and third generations; second generation smart cities are technology enabled but led by the city, and third generation adopt citizen co-creation strategies - similar in their intent to the goals of the playable city in their placement of people as central to urban design and development. In this third generation, play emerges as being instrumental to citizen participation and to the reimagination of cities themselves. This has opened up the potential for playable cities initiatives that operate at a larger scale or are more embedded in the technological fabric of the city in which visitors, residents and workers may become part of the conversation around city development through community and ownership, with play revealing a wider range of possibilities obscured by more traditional approaches to urban planning.