[Air-L] One week left for CfP: Mediapolis special issue on “Playable Cities" - 3K word reflections on a theme

[Alex Gekker]

Dear all,
this is just a reminder for our CfP, due in one week (15 October 2024).
Alex

=====

> Dear colleagues,
>
> A call for your consideration, available also here: https://t.ly/MC3OY
>
> In parallel to this year’s ASCA Cities Seminar
> <https://www.cities.humanities.uva.nl/news/2024-2025-playable-cities/>,
> Carolyn Birdsall, Linda Kopitz and Alex Gekker are co-editing a *special
> issue on “Playable Cities”* for Mediapolis – A Journal of Cities and
> Culture <https://www.mediapolisjournal.com> to be published in September
> 2025.
>
> The city is a playground. But is it really? This dossier takes this
> recurring metaphor as a starting point to explore what ‘playability’ means
> in the context of the urban environment. From the use of simulation games
> in city planning (cf. Lammes 2008) to urban installations that invite
> playfulness, from alternative cityscapes in video games to activist
> interventions for more public spaces: Play can be understood both as a way
> to imagine the city – and a way to disrupt it. It is often positioned as an
> alternative to a more constraining and utilitarian form of “smart”
> urbanism, one that emphasizes contingency and freedom (De Lange 2015;
> Gordon and Walter 2016). If playing is a form of “understanding what
> surrounds us” (Sicart 2014, 1), thinking about the intersections between
> play and the city also points to larger questions of access, belonging and
> ownership of spaces. In this context, we are also interested in how urban
> play – both physically and virtually – can be a way to “resist the
> givenness of the place” (Boano and Talocci 2014, 112). Exploring how
> playable cities are represented, designed and built points us to the
> complex connections between imagination and practice in making cities more
> ‘livable’.
>
> Some of the questions we are interested in:
>
> # What makes a city ‘playable’?
>
> # How is play rendered (in)visible in the city?
>
> # What forms of play and playing are possible/desired/designed in the city?
>
> # How is ‘playability’ operationalized in public policy and urban planning?
>
> # In what ways are urban infrastructures made ‘playable’?
>
> # How are urban environments represented in virtual games?
>
> # How can activist interventions in public space draw on or be framed
> through play?
>
> # How can we approach play both as a concept and method?
>
> The call engages with media studies, games studies, geography and
> urbanism, alongside researchers and practitioners from other relevant
> disciplines. Building on recent work in those fields, for instance, a
> recent special issue on “Cities as Playgrounds/Playgrounds as Cities”
> (Davies, Hjorth and Lammes 2024), it explores the benefits and limits of
> playability as an urban metaphor. What is lost or gained when cities are
> compared to – or even built upon – games, toys, playgrounds, performance
> spaces and the like? We invite contributions from diverse fields,
> including, but not limited to, urban studies, film/television studies, game
> and gaming studies, sociology, geography, gender studies, political
> studies, philosophy, new media theory, disconnection studies, history, and
> so on. We are especially interested in contributions exploring ‘Playable
> Cities’ from a global and interdisciplinary perspective including artistic
> research and architectural practice.
>
> Please submit an abstract of your proposed article (300 words) and a short
> bio (100 words) to Linda Kopitz (l.kopitz at uva.nl) by 15 October 2024.
> Authors will be informed of the selection within two weeks after the
> deadline. Full articles (3000 words) will be due in May 2025 and will
> subsequently go through an anonymous peer review process. The dossier is
> scheduled for the September 2025 issue.
>
> Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture is an interdisciplinary
> online journal of media and urban culture. We publish research across
> multiple academic fields — including, but not limited to, media studies,
> urban studies, geography, film, architecture, art history, visual culture,
> digital humanities, sound, and music.
>
>
> ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
>
> References:
>
> Boano, Camilo, and Giorgio Talocci. 2014. “The Politics of Play in Urban
> Design: Agamben’s Profanation as a Recalibrating Approach to Urban Design
> Research.” Bitácora Urbano Territorial 1 (24): 105–18.
>
> Davies, Hugh, Larissa Hjorth, and Sybille Lammes. 2024. ‘Introduction to
> the Special Issue: Cities as Playgrounds/Playgrounds as Cities: Rethinking
> Urban Play, Civic Engagement, and Socio-Spatiality’. Space and Culture 27
> (2): 132–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/12063312231159228.
>
> De Lange, Michie. 2015. ‘The Playful City: Using Play and Games to Foster
> Citizen Participation’. In Social Technologies and Collective Intelligence,
> edited by Aelita Skaržauskienė, 426–34. Vilnius: Mykolas Romeris University.
>
> Gordon, Eric, and Stephen Walter. 2016. ‘Meaningful Inefficiencies:
> Resisting the Logic of Technological Efficiency in the Design of Civic
> System’. In Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice, edited by Eric
> Gordon and Paul Mihailidis, 243–66. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
>
> Lammes, Sybille. 2009. ‘Spatial Regimes of the Digital Playground:
> Cultural Functions of Spatial Practices
>
> in Computer Games’, 11, no. 3: 260-72.
>
>
> https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/PlayfulMappingInTheDigitalAge.pdf
>
> Sicart, Miguel. 2017. Play Matters. First MIT Press new paperback
> edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: The MIT Press.
> ===
>
>
>
> Alex Gekker, PhD. Assistant Professor in Digital Research Methods, Media
> Studies, University of Amsterdam.
>
> Profile and publications <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6042-2086> //
> a.gekker at uva.nl // tw: @AlexGekker  <http://twitter.com/alexgekker> //
> mastodon @gekker at aoir.social <https://aoir.social/@gekker>
>
>
> Recent works include a deep dive into moving Israel “into the cloud”
> <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2343816>, a
> breakdown of QAnon as participatory play
> <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051231157300>, an analysis
> of “gamified” stock trading
> <https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/jgvw_00062_1>, and
> a post-mortem of Google Maps’ Covid-19 Layer
> <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20501579221143325>
>
>
>