Reappropriating, Reconfiguring and Augmenting the Smart City Through Play

Abstract

This chapter examines the growing intersection of digital games and the ‘smart city’ model. It explores the various ways that games and playful practices can alternately support, challenge, or counter the push to instrumentalise, optimise, and ‘program’ the city through ubiquitous smart technologies and ‘sentient’ infrastructure. I begin with a brief overview of the smart city model and how digital games figure into its economic and cultural policies. I then examine current debates around how games and play might more broadly contribute to and counteract the smart city approach, through an analysis of different groups and movements that propose themselves as playful ‘alternatives’ to the smart city. I outline three broad conceptual categories into which these alternatives fit, which alternately propose to reappropriate, reconfigure, and augment the smart city. In doing so, I connecting each of these approaches not only to contemporary discourses around urban policy, but also historical and present visions of play in urban space.