18. The playful city: Citizens making the smart city

This chapter about playful urban planning argues that play and games can help foster smart citizenship. In recent years, many cities have embarked on what is termed smart-city policies, deploying ICT to optimize a variety of urban processes. Various authors have noted that these smart-city policies often leave little room for civic action and agency. This contribution proposes the notion of the ‘playful city’ as an alternative vision for leveraging the smartness of people in creating more livable and lively cities. Play, it is argued, should not be positioned as offering solutions to urban problems. Instead, play offers alternative narratives about the potential futures of city-making, and reinserts the ‘political’ into smart city-making.