Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging Forms of Playfulness

This book explores how smart cities enable new and playful ways for citizens to experience, inhabit and socialise within urban environments.

It examines how the functionality of digital technologies within municipal settings can extend beyond environmental pragmatism and socio-economic concerns, to include playful approaches to urban spaces that co-constitute and reinvigorate the experience of place through location-based applications and games. Chapters highlight the varied ways the city, as both a conceptual and lived space, is changing because of this confluence of technologies. The book also considers the extent to which these transformations form an armature upon which more playful approaches to the urban domain are emerging, while exploring what effect these ludic formations might have on related understandings of sociability.

Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging Forms of Playfulness will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of information technology, urban planning and design, games and interactive media, human-centred and user-centred design, human centred interaction, digital geography and sociology. This book was originally published as a special issue of Behaviour & Information Technology.

Prof. Papangelis is an Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA, specializing in interactive games and media. He directs the Niantic X RIT Geo Games and Media Lab, focusing on locative media, extended/hybrid reality, and the metaverse. He has published extensively in renowned journals and conference proceedings.

Dr. Saker is a Senior Lecturer at City, University of London. He is co-author of From Microverse to Metaverse (2022); Intergenerational Locative Play (2021); and Location-Based Social Media, Space, Time and Identity (2017); and co-editor of The Changing Face of VR (2022).

Dr. Jones is an Assistant Professor in Digital Human Geographies in the Faculty of Human, Education and Social Sciences at the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg.