Play has long been recognised for its capacity to open new possibilities for reimagining what has become static, settled or entrenched, whether conceptually, socially, or culturally. Historically, urban play carries a subversive potential, which can be traced back to the Situationist movement, even though in the contemporary context it is often reduced to “mere entertainment and distraction from the urban conditions dulled by routine,”1David Pinder, “Transforming Cities: On the Passage of Situationist Dérive,” Performance Research 23, no. 7 (2018): 18–28. or an apparatus of “positive (bio) power.”2Brian Massumi “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens,” Inflexions 1, no. 1 (2008), 1–40. It is this tension between the subversion and co-optation of play which prompts the question: how can urban play re-introduce critical and imaginative potential into our engagement with places, especially those that are less known, less visible, and often neglected?
We ask this question from our position of working within the neighbourhood of Amsterdam Southeast (Zuidoost) for more than a decade. Our research focuses on under-represented places where the pace of urban transformation is much faster which makes them greatly charged with symbolic and creative potential. We emphasise the importance of situated knowledge in this process. As Katherine van den Bogert argues, rather than brief visits and reports, it is long-term immersion, active participation and observation that allows researchers in these areas to become entangled with communal daily life, build trust, and access complex lived experiences that are often invisible to outsiders or anyone who is not engaged with the community in a more meaningful way.3Katherine van den Bogert, “‘If You Can Play Football, You Just Play!’ The Spatial Politics of Community Football and Urban Equality in the Netherlands,” Leisure Studies 43, no. 2 (2022): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2022.2123547. Collaborating from within (with local partners, communities, artists and activists), we have been mapping (literally putting on the map) emblematic places (we call them “anchor points”) that concentrate and converge identities and values, and carry the potential for renewal and regeneration. As a methodological approach, mapping imaginaries therefore makes visible the material and symbolic dimensions of places, the images and narratives through which they are represented, and their reputations, values, and identities in a glocalized context.4Núria Arbonés Aran, Simeona Petkova, and Lily Moodey, “An IMAGE Case Compilation: Researching the City: Mapping Imaginaries,” (2023), 1–42, https://cityimaginaries.com/teaching-case/.
What follows is our proposal for how one can re-engage with urban places through play /games that combine affect with the concept of ostranénie (the art of making the familiar strange, estrangement, defamiliarization, deautomatization, distanciation, de-habituation).5Holger Pötzsch, “Playing Games with Shklovsky, Brecht, and Boal: Ostranenie, V-effect, and Spect-Actors as Analytical Tools for Game Studies,” Game Studies 17, no. 2 (2017), https://gamestudies.org/1702/articles/potzsch. We present three affective modalities through which ostranénie can be activated: glitch, affective dis/re-orientation, and sensory (re-)engagement. Each modality is explored through an art project situated at the intersection of play and urban space. Together, they demonstrate how one can intervene in and disrupt habitual and automated modes of sensing and moving through the city, opening new ways of engaging with place. In line with what Nigel Thrift describes as “the poetics of the spaces of dreams and improvisations”, these modalities not only capture what established discourses cannot but also “re-world” them with new imaginaries and potentialities.6Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (Routledge, 2008). In this sense, we respond to Thrift’s call for explorative and experimental research practices that allow for continuous and evolving reimaging of places and our relationships with them.
On Imaginaries and Urban Play/Games
Play is essential for the activation of imagination. For Bernard De Koven and Holly Gramazio, imagining is primordial to the very act of play,7Bernard De Koven and Holly Gramazio, The Infinite Playground: A Player Guide to Imagination (MIT Press, 2022). whereas for Troy Innocent urban play allows “alternate social imaginaries” to come to the forefront.8Troy Innocent, “Reworlding: Urban Play as Method for Exploring Alternate Social Imaginaries,” Space and Culture 27, no. 2 (2024): 227–41, https://digraa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/DiGRAA24-39-Harwood-Innocent-Leorke-Wyatt.pdf. Similarly, Michiel De Lange sees the playful city as potentially fostering civic engagement that generates an alternative imaginary to “utilitarian smart city agendas”.9Michiel de Lange, “The Playful City: Citizens Making the Smart City,” in The Playful Citizen: Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture, ed. René Glas, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Raessens Joost and Imar de Vries (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 349, https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048535200-002. The transformative power of play has long been noted by scholars such as Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman10Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (The MIT Press, 2004)., Jonathan Belman and Mary Flanagan11Jonathan Belman and Mary Flanagan, “Designing Games to Foster Empathy,” International Journal of Cognitive Technology 15, no. 1 (2010): 11. together with the critique of the pervasiveness of games in our daily routines and the increasingly prescribed movement in datafied cities. Moreover, for Brian Massumi, the interactivity of participatory digital technologies in the (smart) city, including games, is never ideologically neutral.12Brian Massumi “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens,” Inflexions 1, no. 1 (2008), 1–40. Under this regime, participation is not a choice, but a form of governance. Through the compulsive self-expression demanded by interactive installations, “behavioural nudging,” and seamless gamification, smart cities shape and configure spaces and how we “orient” and move in them. The city’s “responsive” infrastructure “operationalizes” biopower and produces “optimized citizens” under the guise of play and ludic “freedom.”13Brian Massumi “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens,” Inflexions 1, no. 1 (2008), 1–40. For Eunice Castro Seixas, co-creation, participation, critical play, playful citizenship, hacking, and reclaiming the ownership of urban technologies might help counter these issues but they also fall short in addressing the controversial, open-ended and unpredictable nature of urban transformation.14Eunice Castro Seixas, “Urban (Digital) Play and Right to the City: A Critical Perspective,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.636111.
We encountered the aforementioned tension firsthand while mapping the imaginaries of five rapidly changing European cities’ neighbourhoods — Zuidoost (Amsterdam); El Raval (Barcelona); Carnide (Lisbon); La Defènse (Paris); and St. Marx (Vienna) — together with more than 500 international students and various local partners. As part of the project, we asked our students to activate these mappings through a “plan of action.” Working in their inter-city teams, many responded with proposals for urban games, predominantly centred on the genre of the “quest” (a treasure hunt, a photo booth challenge, a scavenger adventure for local hidden gems to make visible and interact with). We were not surprised that the activation took place through “play” or “games” — after all, play and games are deeply interwoven in the fabric of the (smart) city. However, while mapping the imaginaries produced open ended, multi-layered (counter) maps, using embedded and embodied knowledge, these activations were based on preconceived notions of urban play. Students drew on their own “habitual perceptions” of a place, reducing play to an opportunity for value extraction (for fun, entertainment, promotion) rather than (re)engagement with the histories, memories and lived experiences already embedded in these neighbourhoods. To unsettle this and reclaim the imaginative and critical potential of urban play, we turn to ostranénie to prompt new affective encounters.
On Prompting Affective Encounters
How can city play be used to prompt encounters for affective potentialities, and help us become attuned to them? Our point of departure in this proposal is affect, understood as a “way of thinking” and “embodied intelligence about the world”, that cannot be captured by rationalist, linguistic or representational discourses.15Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (Routledge, 2008). In this sense, defamiliarization is an embodied activation — a re-attunement to the vitality of a place where encounters can regain their intensity. In Brian Massumi’s words: “In art, we see life dynamics “with and through” the actual form … It is the technique of making vitality affect felt, of making an explicit experience of what otherwise slips behind the flow of action and is only implicitly felt.”16Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (MIT Press, 2011).Affect directs and shapes our relation to space, defining how bodies inhabit the world and how they might reorient themselves towards it. Thus, to “make strange” through play is also to reorient affectively, to inhabit the city differently.
Furthermore, in the context of gaming theory, Holger Pötzsch understands ostranénie as simultaneously directing us outwards, “with the objective of renewing individuals’ habitualized and automated manner of perception” of the world, and inwards by inviting us to slow down and immerse ourselves in the process of artistic reception.17Holger Pötzsch, “Playing Games with Shklovsky, Brecht, and Boal: Ostranenie, V-effect, and Spect-Actors as Analytical Tools for Game Studies,” Game Studies 17, no. 2 (2017), https://gamestudies.org/1702/articles/potzsch. Pötzsch invites us to critically address the devices that complicate our reception of both the narrative and the (medium specific) interactions within the game’s system, mechanics, and features. In this way ostranénie becomes both a function and a device to prompt affective responses.
Glitch, Affective Dis/reorientations, and Sensory (re-)engagement as Ludic Interventions
Our proposal to reimagine urban play through ostranénie is inspired by Vinicius Marquet’s workshops on the “Human Algorithm.”18Marquet is a Mexican born designer, artist, and researcher. Participants are set as ‘bodies in motion and guided by a list of randomized prompts to reposition their perceptions and break with the habitual experience of the urban area through body and senses, envisioning a poetic, “human” algorithm. The prompts expose the participants to random chances, synchronicities and “failures” (errors) that are intended to disrupt the repetitive and prescribed interactions with place. “Errors” serve to trigger defamiliarization. For example, “glitch” refers to an unexpected (visual, sound) disruption which, in affective terms, can be described as a ‘rupture in perception’ that compels the player to experience the game differently.
The “Human Algorithm” functions as a counter-algorithm, a ludic script that ‘inserts’ randomness into the predictable algorithmic patterns of interactions in the (smart) city. Movement, interactions, and desires are increasingly mediated by surveillance and data flows, creating “smooth” and “deterritorialized” flows.19Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–25. In contrast, the “Human Algorithm” introduces a set of poetic instructions, such as “If you see a person in red boots, talk to them…” Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker argue that glitches are considered “productive” because they render the conditions of the system visible.20Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, vol. 21 (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Following Pötzsch, this shows how ostranénie can simultaneously expose the normativity of the game and rewrite it, redirecting us to how it feels in the body to break away from the established and predictable game or play conventions. In the case of the “Human Algorithm,” the play enforces affective and poetic actions, rather than algorithmically optimized trajectories by embracing randomness, chance, improvisation, strange and spontaneous encounters, disruptions, frictions, errors, and serendipities that unsettle the familiar, the predictable, and the expected. Here, glitch aesthetics is adopted as both a metaphor and a method for city play through affect.
While the “Human Algorithm” builds upon glitch as a modality of ostranénie, a different disruption is created by Benedetto Bufalino’s interactive installation Laby-Foot, exhibited at the Central Park, Kirchberg, Luxemburg (June 26–September 5, 2021). We call this modality affective dis/re-orientation, a technique exposing and questioning the normative logic of a game. By situating the conventional football ground in Casino Luxembourg Garden’s labyrinth, it displaces and disrupts the game’s flow. The white lines that structure the game are now fragmented, misaligned, discontinued, distorted and only visible from an aerial view. As bodies lose their usual trajectories and are defamiliarized, they must adjust to a new playground that operates through the rules of a labyrinth (friction) and to each other. While displacing the conventional football script, it opens the space for reimagining football as ludic and improvisational. It also brings to the forefront the question of who can play. Conventionally, the city is seen as a “playground” that harbours spontaneous play and street football is often given as an example of this. Yet, as Katherine van den Bogert shows, as a researcher embedded in the communities of Schilderswijk (The Hague), who can play street football is governed by invisible rules, conventions, and understandings that are often deeply interwoven in the fabric of the neighbourhood. Laby-Foot, even if not explicitly political, can thus act as an orientation device pointing to hidden power imbalances.
Lastly, a third modality is exemplified in Tiny Games, which was developed by Hand Eye Society as a part of the “Play Path” at The Bentway, Toronto Canada (June – September, 2021). In Secret Landscape, Diana Andrea Guzman Valencia invites the players to practice what we call sensory re/engagement: “Explore natural and urban elements: leaves, flowers, grass, soil, concrete, wood, metal, etc. Close your eyes and ‘see them’ by touching and listening: breathe deeply and imagine the taste with your sense of smell. Exchange your senses to appreciate in a deeper dimension.”21Diana Andrea Guzman Valencia. “The Bentway: Secret Landscape” (2022), https://play.thebentway.ca/experience/secret-landscape/, accessed November 5, 2025. In these meditation games, bodies expand outwards, breathing and seeing through leaves, grass, and concrete. Players slow down. The body senses are “summoned” through gesture, words, shapes, sound. The poetics of space is called in through touch, breath, visual metaphors, and colour-emotion associations. The senses are augmented akin to a synesthetic exploration. Secret Landscape invites us to renew and restore our sensory capacity to be present, connect and feel the place, thus reducing the desensitization of the (routinized) urban.
Conclusion
Being in the world is a dynamic state with ever unfolding, virtual possibilities, trajectories and futures.22Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (MIT Press, 2011). Our proposal for city play with affect though ostranénie aims to reinvigorate the urban place with arrays of imaginaries, visions, and possibilities. This is urgent for areas that are less visible and prosperous since the process of urban transformation there is more complex and fast paced, control (through automation) is greater, and stigmatisation is often internalised.23Amber Wutich, Alissa Ruth, Alexandra Brewis, and Christopher Boone, “Stigmatized Neighborhoods, Social Bonding, and Health,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2014): 556–577. On the other hand, these urban areas are increasingly seen as sites of resilience, dynamism and emancipation that unsettle established ways of knowing. We see the activation of affect through ostranénie as appropriate there since tapping on the intensity of the social and political energies, less visible and prosperous urban places have the ability and the unique position to reimagine the city fabric from within.
City play with affect through ostranénie enables experimental inquiry that disrupts the habitual and opens new ways of being in urban places. We identified three modalities to do so. In “Human Algorithm” city play enables affective and poetic engagement through chance, improvisation, random encounters, frictions, rupture, and errors that obstruct the seamless and controlled ways of interaction. Glitch then becomes friction, resistance, “non-compliance,” and re-routing.24Stefano Gualeni, “On the De-Familiarizing and Re-Ontologizing Effects of Glitches and Glitch-Alikes,” paper presented at DiGRA 2019 – The Digital Games Research Organization Conference, Kyoto, Japan, 2019. In Laby-Foot the body is defamiliarized by displacing the usual setting of a football game triggering affective dis/re- orientations. Bodies, movement and playground are re-imagined and redefined through spatial repositioning and rupture in the perception. Secret Landscape allows for sensory re/engagement, the reactivation of our capacity to sense through touch, smell, sound. This has the potential to re-sensitize our encounter with urban places transforming them from sites of standardised (“smart city”) interactions into humane living spaces.
Finally, we invite students to use city play with affect though ostranénie and the respective modalities as a critical intervention to strategically “estrange” their proposals for urban play (its mechanics, interactions, expectations), and allow for more compelling urban imaginaries and visions to emerge.
Notes
| ↑1 | David Pinder, “Transforming Cities: On the Passage of Situationist Dérive,” Performance Research 23, no. 7 (2018): 18–28. |
|---|---|
| ↑2, ↑12 | Brian Massumi “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens,” Inflexions 1, no. 1 (2008), 1–40. |
| ↑3 | Katherine van den Bogert, “‘If You Can Play Football, You Just Play!’ The Spatial Politics of Community Football and Urban Equality in the Netherlands,” Leisure Studies 43, no. 2 (2022): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2022.2123547. |
| ↑4 | Núria Arbonés Aran, Simeona Petkova, and Lily Moodey, “An IMAGE Case Compilation: Researching the City: Mapping Imaginaries,” (2023), 1–42, https://cityimaginaries.com/teaching-case/. |
| ↑5, ↑17 | Holger Pötzsch, “Playing Games with Shklovsky, Brecht, and Boal: Ostranenie, V-effect, and Spect-Actors as Analytical Tools for Game Studies,” Game Studies 17, no. 2 (2017), https://gamestudies.org/1702/articles/potzsch. |
| ↑6 | Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (Routledge, 2008). |
| ↑7 | Bernard De Koven and Holly Gramazio, The Infinite Playground: A Player Guide to Imagination (MIT Press, 2022). |
| ↑8 | Troy Innocent, “Reworlding: Urban Play as Method for Exploring Alternate Social Imaginaries,” Space and Culture 27, no. 2 (2024): 227–41, https://digraa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/DiGRAA24-39-Harwood-Innocent-Leorke-Wyatt.pdf. |
| ↑9 | Michiel de Lange, “The Playful City: Citizens Making the Smart City,” in The Playful Citizen: Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture, ed. René Glas, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Raessens Joost and Imar de Vries (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 349, https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048535200-002. |
| ↑10 | Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (The MIT Press, 2004). |
| ↑11 | Jonathan Belman and Mary Flanagan, “Designing Games to Foster Empathy,” International Journal of Cognitive Technology 15, no. 1 (2010): 11. |
| ↑13 | Brian Massumi “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens,” Inflexions 1, no. 1 (2008), 1–40. |
| ↑14 | Eunice Castro Seixas, “Urban (Digital) Play and Right to the City: A Critical Perspective,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.636111. |
| ↑15 | Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (Routledge, 2008). |
| ↑16, ↑22 | Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (MIT Press, 2011). |
| ↑18 | Marquet is a Mexican born designer, artist, and researcher. |
| ↑19 | Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–25. |
| ↑20 | Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, vol. 21 (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). |
| ↑21 | Diana Andrea Guzman Valencia. “The Bentway: Secret Landscape” (2022), https://play.thebentway.ca/experience/secret-landscape/, accessed November 5, 2025. |
| ↑23 | Amber Wutich, Alissa Ruth, Alexandra Brewis, and Christopher Boone, “Stigmatized Neighborhoods, Social Bonding, and Health,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2014): 556–577. |
| ↑24 | Stefano Gualeni, “On the De-Familiarizing and Re-Ontologizing Effects of Glitches and Glitch-Alikes,” paper presented at DiGRA 2019 – The Digital Games Research Organization Conference, Kyoto, Japan, 2019. |
Radmila Radojevic teaches media and communication at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. With a background in multimedia design, she has collaborated with cultural organizations including Eyesteelfilm and Studio XX (now Ada X) in Montreal. Her artistic projects—Monument du Vide (archived at Rhizome), d_verse, and Maids in Cyberspace—explore technology, identity, and digital aesthetics, bridging digital culture, creative practice, and critical research methods.
Simeona Petkova is a lecturer-researcher at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences/ Hogeschool Van Amsterdam. She currently researches online platforms (from a web epistemological perspective) and typologies of digital brand engagement. In her PhD dissertation with the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam, she develops and tests a framework for studying the dynamics of remembering and forgetting across social media platforms with historical (timestamped) data, considering the specificity of the platforms’ materiality. She has presented her research at MIT7, WPAC 2012, ECAH 2013, GOR 2015, International Forum RABE 2017, Social Movements and Parties in a Fractured Landscape, Cosmos, 2019, LAC 2022, and more.
Dr. Núria Arbonés Aran, PhD, is a programme leader at the research group Cities & Visitors, which is hosted at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Hogeschool Van Amsterdam, and the Amsterdam School of International Business. Born and raised in Barcelona, she has lived and worked in several places before settling in the Netherlands. Núria has a Master in Catalan Philology from the University of Barcelona, and a Master of Arts and a PhD in Urban Studies from the University of Amsterdam (UvA). At the AUAS/HvA she found a context to initiate and develop longstanding programmes on international and intercity research and education. Since 2015, she has been particularly focused on research in Amsterdam Zuidoost. With projects such as ‘Moving Amsterdam Zuidoost’ and ‘Researching the Cities: Mapping Imaginaries’, she has co-authored research on places, images, identities and reputations.
