Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City

Dale Leorke, Marcus Owens, Dale Leorke, Marcus Owens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000217780
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book explores what games and play can tell us about contemporary processes of urbanization and examines how the dynamics of gaming can help us understand the interurban competition that underpins the entrepreneurialism of the smart and creative city.

Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City is a collection of chapters written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from game studies, media studies, play studies, architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. It situates the historical evolution of play and games in the urban landscape and outlines the scope of the various ways games and play contribute to the city's economy, cultural life and environmental concerns. In connecting games and play more concretely to urban discourses and design strategies, this book urges scholars to consider their growing contribution to three overarching sets of discourses that dominate urban planning and policy today: the creative and cultural economies of cities; the smart and playable city; and ecological cities.

This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students and scholars of game studies, play studies, landscape architecture (and allied design fields), urban geography, and art history.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003007760

1Introduction

Connecting games, play and urban discourse

Dale Leorke and Marcus Owens

This collection explores the intersections between game studies, play studies, media studies, urban studies, urban geography, the design disciplines and other related fields. It examines how games and play can connect with, extend or challenge contemporary urban policy discourses that often ignore or overlook them. We focus on three overarching sets of urban discourses and agendas:

1. 1The creative and cultural economies of cities;
2. 2The smart city and its counterpoint, the playable city;
3. 3The ecological city, which encompasses themes of sustainability and resilience in urban planning and design.

Rather than provide a comprehensive analysis of these three discourses of urbanism and the city, the aim of this book is to highlight and critically dissect how games and play emerge within and between them.

The smart city has become one of the most dominant approaches to urban governance around the world. It has spurred cities into investment in networked technologies and infrastructure – sensors, location-aware trackers and the Internet of Things devices – as well as big data analytics tools to crunch the data that these technologies generate in real time. In some ways, the smart city grew out of the creative city model for post-industrial urban accumulation, which aims to attract workers from the creative and cultural sectors through urban renewal and beatification strategies – in the process often contributing to gentrification, marginalisation and uneven economic growth.

Both the smart city–influenced and the preceding creative city–influenced discourses aim to ‘brand’ the city in a particular way – as a creative, smart, fun and liveable place. In this milieu, games and play frame the experience of urban space and contribute to the cultural and economic life of cities – through game production; game festivals and playful activities; and artistic interventions into urban space that reappropriate or reconfigure smart city technologies to make the city more playful and playable. Meanwhile, games and play can also serve as strategies for grassroots campaigns and civic engagement that form a crucial aspect of urban sustainability and resilience initiatives.

Although the field of game studies has examined the way games take form in urban spaces, it generally is not concerned with the relationship between games and the production of space that occupy urban theory. Similarly, urban planning and policy discussions, we contend, often overlook the more intangible, diffuse and nuanced ways that digital, nondigital and hybrid forms of games and play contribute to the everyday experience of urban life across a variety of domains. Although research in these fields is growing, few interdisciplinary approaches to these issues exist. Most discussions tend to be siloed within their respective field, whether it is the humanities or social sciences, or tethered to either theoretical or design-oriented approaches. Despite clear intersections between these fields and approaches and the value of engaging in cross-disciplinary dialogue, the nature of academic journal publishing makes a truly interdisciplinary approach challenging. Furthermore, discussions around this topic centre largely on a single policy approach or issue – most prominently, the smart city vs playable city debate, which understands games and play as an alternative to the top-down, instrumental, efficiency-driven agenda of the smart city. While these discussions are fruitful, the broader scope of this proposed collection creates the potential for comparisons, contrasts and deeper analyses on diverse urban policy and discourse problems.

In this light, contributions to this collection include comparative case studies, such as those that examine how specific games and playful projects complicate, contradict or complement visions of the near-future city as seamless, responsive and adaptable to the challenges of urban life and infrastructural management. Other contributions include broader theoretical and historical discussions that unpack the entanglement of games and play in smart, creative and sustainability/resilience discourses. Lastly, contributions include provocative yet cogent and critical examinations of play and playfulness in the city more broadly: how play as a concept, practice and discourse itself might disrupt or reinforce existing uses of urban space. Through these contributions, we seek to address the following overarching key questions:

• What is the historical relationship between games, play and urban discourses surrounding ecological cities, creative and cultural economies and ‘smartness’?
• How are games and play both assimilated in urban governance – through investment in game development and start-ups, civic games and outdoor public play – and mobilised as a counter to it?
• How are urban games unfolding in the broader transformations of the city in the digital era, and how can game and play studies contribute to a better understanding of contemporary processes of urbanisation?

In addressing these questions, this book seeks to provide an empirical basis for producing a theory of games and play linking developments in the creative and cultural economies of cities; the technological optimisation envisioned by the ‘smart city’; and the various strategies of the ‘ecological city’. In the process, it broadens the debate around games, play and urban discourse – something of growing importance to a wide range of stakeholders as games continue to grow in mainstream recognition – and paves the way for future comparative, policy-oriented scholarly approaches.

Our approach in this book has been to simultaneously provide a broad context for discussing games and play – one that is not tied down in semantic definitions of either – and narrow this discussion to centre on the three specific sets of discourses mentioned earlier. In choosing to include both games and play in this book’s title, we acknowledge that these terms come with their own discursive histories and definitional dilemmas (see Henricks, 2015; Lütticken, 2010; Nagel, 2002). The aim of this collection is not to rehash these long-running debates but to acknowledge them and open them up even further by putting them in dialogue with discourses around the ‘urban’ – which is itself of course also a contested term (see Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Robinson, 2002; Ruddick et al., 2018). We acknowledge that the majority of the case studies and examples discussed in this collection are games – which we understand as both structured, rule-bound texts/artefacts and, particularly given the urban, public context, also dynamic events or ‘processes’ (Malaby, 2007). But discussions of play figure into some of these discussions as well, especially concerning urban public play as an ‘interface’ or ‘mode of engagement’ with the people and environment around us (see Sicart, 2016; Stevens, 2007, 2012, 2017). In adopting this broad and conceptually diffuse approach, we also acknowledge the multifarious and complex nature of games, play and the urban, viewing them as in constant flux rather than as fixed and static.

The novelty of this book primarily stems from its focus on the three sets of urban discourses described earlier. Our intention is to foster a dialogue between these discourses among scholars and practitioners of urban games and play. There is, of course, already a wealth of literature on the practical and theoretical intersections between games, play and urbanism. This includes a number of prominent and valuable books, both established and recent, that examine these intersections from many perspectives:

• Location-based and pervasive games and play (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2009; Farman, 2014; Leorke, 2018; Montola et al., 2009; von Borries et al., 2007);
• Civic engagement and participatory planning (Glas et al., 2019; Gordon & Mugar, 2020; Lerner, 2014; Stokes, 2020);
• Urban design, planning and mapping (Lammes et al., 2018; Stevens, 2007; Wilmott et al., 2016);
• Smart and playable cities (de Lange & de Waal, 2019; de Waal, 2014; Nijholt, 2019, 2017; Tan, 2017);
• The funding frameworks and spatial distribution of game production (Kerr, 2006, 2017).

This is not intended to be a definitive list of books on these topics. Rather, we highlight particular books that we think have strong synergies with our own approach. This is also to say nothing of the continuously growing number of individual journal articles, book chapters and scholarly and mainstream essays on these and related topics. But this is the first book to explicitly address how games and play contribute to studies of urbanism, urban discourse and urbanisation from a range of disciplinary and policy perspectives – encompassing creative/cultural, technological and ecological debates. With this in mind, we aim to provide a clear scholarly contribution to all these disparate fields of research and (at least partially) help erode the silos within which they so often take place.

The remainder of this chapter outlines the structure of the book. We devote a considerable amount of discussion to summarising, synthesising and critically examining the three discursive fields that we have selected as the focus of this book. The three discourses that we highlight are by no means exhaustive of this topic, and we acknowledge that many alternate and related approaches deserve equal attention. But these are the discourses that we consider most clearly and explicitly linked to the field of games and play that also dominate scholarly, policy and mainstream debates during the particular window of time we pursued this book. They also encompass at least some of the crucial challenges confronting urban policymakers today: managing post-industrial economic growth in an inclusive and equally distributed manner; dealing with the consequences of ubiquitous networks in the urban environment; and covering the imperative for cities to be sustainable and resilient. In the process, they connect with numerous broader discussions: the societal and cultural value of games; games production and creative labour; the right to the city and urban public space; anxieties and imaginaries around new technologies; making urban planning more inclusive and participatory; and the implications of anthropogenic climate change.

In the process of focusing on these discourses, however, we overlook the potential to explicitly engage with other crucial issues in the urban context that games and play also contribute to: the role of gender, class and race in urban policy and the everyday life of cities; differing cultural understandings of games and play; and configuring cities for animals and other nonhuman play. As we discuss at the end of this introduction, although some of the chapters touch on some of these issues, we recognise the need for a deeper engagement with them and others both in future research in this area and in potential future iterations of this collection. The following three sections outline the three sets of discourses identified earlier and then summarise and situate each of the individual chapters in them. We begin with the creative and cultural economies of cities, followed by smart and playable cities, before concluding with ecological cities.

Part I: The creative and cultural economies of cities

Cities and games have long been associated with notions of creativity and innovation (Jacobs, 1984; Lütticken, 2010). Like contemporary ideas of sustainability and digital computation, the second half of the 20th century saw the emergence of an academic discourse that articulated the importance of industries and practices deemed creative in the social and economic development of cities. This literature spans scholarly and p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: connecting games, play and urban discourse
• Part I The creative and cultural economies of cities
• Part II Smart and playable cities
• Part III Ecological cities: sustainability and resilience
• Index