Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City (Routledge Research in Sustainable Urbanism)

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

Dale Leorke is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies at Tampere University, Finland. His research focuses on the role of games and play within the cultural and economic development of cities. His other research interests include mobile and location-based media, participatory planning and civic engagement, and the intersection of cultural institutions and urban policy. He is the author of Location-based Gaming: Play in Public Space (Palgrave, 2018) and coauthor (with Danielle Wyatt) of Public Libraries in the Smart City (Palgrave, 2018).

Marcus Owens is an architect and founder of CAMO Design, a landscape design firm focused on public space and urban nature. He is a lecturer at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed a PhD in landscape architecture and environmental planning with a designated emphasis on science and technology studies.