Towards Playful and Playable Cities

Abstract

Smart cities have inspired the introduction of various viewpoints, usually concerning the introduction of digital technology by governance bodies and its use by service providers and other economic stakeholders to allow a more efficient use of resources, transportation infrastructure, and an increase in citizen safety. However, there are also other aspects of smart cities that address, for example, our daily life activities, activities that are undertaken without having any type of efficiency in mind and interactions in which we want to engage just for social, entertainment, and fun reasons. To allow for applications that go beyond the efficient handling of our environments to those that also allow affective, social, entertaining, playful, and humorous interactions, we need to employ digital smartness. Digital smartness can be implemented in sensors and actuators in domestic situations, public spaces and urban environments. This goal is what we want to achieve for playable cities, where residents have the opportunity to hack the city and use the smart city’s data and digital technology for their own purposes and applications. Where possible, the infrastructure of a smart city can be adapted to the playful applications residents have in mind, or smart city residents can take the opportunity to hack the environment and embed their own technology in an existing global network or to introduce their own local community network. In this introduction to the Playable Cities book, various viewpoints will be discussed and short introductions to the chapters will be given.