[Air-L] CfP: Mediapolis special issue on “Playable Cities" - 3K words reflections on a theme

[Alex Gekker]

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.

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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>