Playable Cities: An Introduction

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. Closely connected to urban history and (re)conceptualizations of the public sphere, the presence of playgrounds across different cities highlights both how play is positioned in the city – but also how play is shaped in and through spatial design. As a delineated, and often gated, space, the playground comes with specific rules that typically highlight what types of play are desired and allowed. No bikes. No drinking. No adults. This dossier draws on the theme of “playable cities” to explore how play is increasingly leaving its designated spaces and extending into other parts of urban environments. While this can undoubtedly be linked to an absence of public investments and infrastructures centered around play, thinking about play beyond the playground offers new ways of living, moving and researching in the city. In this dossier, we propose that a wider definition of play as both a concept and practice – as a mode of urban engagement – opens up new conceptualizations of the city.

From the use of simulation games in city planning¹Sybille Lammes, “Spatial Regimes of the Digital Playground: Cultural Functions of Spatial Practices in Computer Games,” Space and Culture 11, no. 3 (2008): 260–72, https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331208319150. 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. If playing is a form of “understanding what surrounds us,” as Miguel Sicart puts it, thinking about the intersections between play and the city also points to larger questions of access, belonging and ownership of spaces.²Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (The MIT Press, 2017), 1. “Playfulness” is often positioned as an alternative to a more constraining and utilitarian form of “smart” urbanism, one that emphasizes contingency and freedom and the potential for exploration.³Michiel De Lange, “The Playful City: Using Play and Games to Foster Citizen Participation,” in Social Technologies and Collective Intelligence, edited by Aelita Skaržauskienė (Mykolas Romeris University, 2015), 426–34; Eric Gordon and Stephen Walter, “Meaningful Inefficiencies : Resisting the Logic of Technological Efficiency in the Design of Civic Systems,” in The Playful Citizen, ed. René Glas et al. (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048535200-019. But – as some contributions to this dossier highlight – cities can also use “play-washing” to promote a particular vision of creative-yet-gentrifying urbanism. In this broader context of push and pull, we are also interested in how urban play – both physically and virtually – can be a way to “resist the givenness of the place,” as Camilo Boano and Giorgio Talocci put it.⁴Camilo Boano and Giorgio Talocci, “The Politics of Play in Urban Design: Agamben’s Profanation as a Recalibrating Approach to Urban Design Research,” Dossier Central, Bitácora Urbano Territorial (Bogota, Colombia) 1, no. 24 (2014): 105–18, 112. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1676564345/abstract/F96BEA9F1F8B4C37PQ/1?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals. Playful interventions in the urban, from yarn bombing to guerilla gardening, have fostered both public and academic discussions about urban rules of engagement. The ways in which skateboarders, breakdancers and graffiti artists creatively and playfully (re)claim spaces have been a recurring source of spatial conflict⁵See Veith Kilberth, “Spaces for Skateboarding in the City–New Spatial Concepts beyond Skateparks,” Frontiers in Sports and Active Living 6 (February 2025), https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2024.1457427. – but they also open up an exploration of how the city could be different.

Play, as both an individual and shared practice, is always balancing a fine line between establishing and breaking rules, between leisure and activism, and between fixed spaces and open exploration.⁶ Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Zone Books, 1995). We can also trace such dynamics in other contexts, and for a broader set of urban inhabitants. For instance, urban swimming has seen a recent resurgence in popularity – and with it, the reclaiming of urban rivers and waterways as shared, public and free spaces of leisure. Initiatives like Swimmable Cities, a grassroots movement launched after the Paris 2024 Olympics and now connecting 83 cities around the world, highlight how the right to play and the right to the city are interconnected.⁷See David Harvey, “The Right to the City”, New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40; Edward Soja, “The City and Spatial Justice,” Justice spatiale/Spatial Justice 1, no. 1 (2009): 1-5. At the same time, play – and playful resistance to the urban status quo – has also been (re)appropriated by corporate “players”: From the emphasis on playful design as a shortcut for liveability in urban planning⁸See Linda Kopitz, “Model/City: Architectural Models and the Aesthetics of Playfulness,” Amsterdam Museum Journal 2, no. 1 (2024): 18–39, https://doi.org/10.61299/b_i922b4. to the integration of playful spaces – including table tennis and indoor basketball courts – in office complexes, play becomes entangled with neoliberal ideas of productivity and performance. Evangelized in myriad TED talks and the works of Richard Florida on the creative class, play is thus also a driver of the contemporary pursuit of (self-)optimization.⁹Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books, 2002). With such examples of urban swimming and corporate play, it becomes visible how play shapes how we perceive the spaces around us. Exploring how urban spaces are made more playful (or made to seem so) points us to the complex connections between imagination and practice in making cities more “livable” as well.

This dossier developed in parallel to an interdisciplinary seminar series at the University of Amsterdam, where several of the authors also presented their contributions as work-in-progress. If “play provides possibilities for reimagining the city and nurtures creative connections between people, things, buildings, and places,”¹⁰Hugh Davies et al., “Cities as Playgrounds/Playgrounds as Cities: Rethinking Urban Play, Civic Engagement, and Socio-Spatiality,” Space and Culture 27, no. 2 (2024): 135, https://doi.org/10.1177/12063312231159228. as Hugh Davies, Larissa Hjorth and Sybille Lammes have argued, it also brings together different academic disciplines and standpoints. The contributions in this dossier come from media scholars, anthropologists, urban cultural geographers, designers and architects, urban historians and artistic researchers. In many ways, that play matters¹¹See Sicart, Play Matters. appears to be something that we can agree on beyond disciplinary and methodological boundaries. At the same time, making space for play, literally and metaphorically, also becomes a challenge to our own research practices: How can doing research differently, and maybe more playfully, expand what we know, think and feel about the city? Across three thematic sections, the thirteen contributions in this dossier explore how cities are built, how cities are navigated and how cities are resisted with and through play.

Building: Playful Planning and Urban ‘Plays’

How has play been shared, positioned, invited, organized, and located? Or put another way: how has play been grounded in the city? Such questions attune us to the specific domains and practices in which play, and playfulness, take form, and raise the question of the potential for building a city around play.¹²David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky, Cities Made Differently (MIT Press, 2025), 24. For instance, in response to the given “rules of engagement,” articulated by planning, zoning or other tactics of local government or similar entities. Yet public play has also flourished in the virtual playgrounds of Minecraft, Animal Crossing, and Roblox, and city-building games such as Sim City. As architectural historian Rodrigo Pérez de Arce urges in City of Play, by paying attention to play we can trace the history of the city itself, thereby revealing how the “ludic imagination” has been a crucial factor in the formation of modern urban environments.¹³Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, City of Play: An Architectural and Urban History of Recreation and Leisure (Bloomsbury, 2018). In line with this suggestion, the contributions in this section focus on urban planning and construction in relation to questions of play, from real estate investment strategies in Dutch cities and limits to children’s play in the UK through to municipal strategies in Turkey and the potential of skateboarding for learning to “spot” playgrounds in cities. Across these contributions we can observe a teasing out of the tensions between private and public spaces of and for play.

How are urban spaces played with as financial games, and how do such games manifest themselves to others? This question marks the departure point for “Urban Investors’ Play with Time: Stakes of the Game and Waiting as Playful Strategy” by Anthony T. Albright and Frans-Willem Korsten. Focusing on a group of residential dwellings in the Dutch city of Utrecht, Albright and Korsten critically reflect on how the owner has allowed these empty, residentially zoned buildings to deteriorate, treating them merely as an investment object while waiting for a possible future opportunity to develop a supermarket on the site. They identify this waiting as a “playful urban strategy” in which the owner/developer tries to exploit the site not only in terms of space, but also in time. In contrast to this strategy, they examine the playful appropriation of one of the Utrecht buildings by the squatter’s group Collective Pluk. In the group’s activities, Albright and Korsten identify a playing in and with space that can be seen as an effort to recapture urban environments from the profit-oriented waiting of real estate investors.

In “When Cities Aren’t Playable: Placing Children’s Play in Urban Environments,” Alison Stenning draws attention to the process by which cities have become less amenable to children’s play. Noting a recent trend towards “public playability” in high-profile public art projects, Stenning points to a tendency to undermine “everyday playability” in ordinary urban spaces. Taking these contrasting visions of urban playability, Stenning critically observes a multitude of factors contributing to the increasing loss of play in urban space in the UK, particularly in the wake of austerity cuts to public spending, which she posits as a question of social and spatial justice. Drawing on recent ethnographic research with children in the medium-sized town of Jarrow (near Newcastle upon Tyne), Stenning identifies the various affordances for and limitations to children’s play, asserting the need for a greater commitment of local authorities to ensure the playability of everyday environments within their visions of the city.

“What happens to a city when its children can no longer claim the streets as their own?” This question is the starting question to “Come Out and Play: A Historical Exploration of Street Play and Urbanization in the Etiler Neighborhood in Istanbul” by Aylin Kartal. Grounded in the history of one particular neighborhood, Kartal weaves together her own experiences with archival photographs and oral histories to document how memories of play persist – even if the “spaces” of play disappear as a result of urbanization and shifting urban planning priorities. In doing so, this contribution not only extends Alison Stenning’s discussion of everyday playability to another geographic context but also adds a temporal dimension that underlines that urban play and urban planning are historically connected.

The question of how politics and political decision-making (attempt to) influence the city, and how play can nonetheless persist, also resonates in the final contribution in this section. In “Seeing like a Skater: Skateboarding as Poetic Technology,” Alia ElKattan reflects on her own experience of skateboarding on Cairo’s Tahrir Square before and after the 2011 Egyptian Revolution as an entry way into imagining public spaces differently. Skateboarding, as a form of urban play, becomes a way to both learn and “unlearn” urban space: On the one hand, skating functions as a form of playful commuting that offers alternative routes through dense urban centers. On the other hand, “seeing like a skater” offers a new way to approach urban landscapes and to see “playgrounds” where non-skaters might not. Ending this section of the dossier with a discussion of skate parks also underlines how building spaces for play is both a formal and an informal process, a concern of urban planning and a practice of urban communities.

While different in scope and location, all the contributions in this section explore how specific parts of cities give rise to various – often conflicting – “plays”, and how residents experience them. Within this dossier, these four contributions set the scene to explore how cities – playfully built and built for play – are navigated through media.

Navigating: Media in/of the Playful City

In Roger Silverstone’s book Why Study the Media?, play is referenced as one of the core dimensions of media experiences: “In play we investigate culture, but we also create it.”¹⁴Roger Silverstone, Why Study the Media? (Sage, 1999), 64, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446219461. Playing media and mediating play become an interconnected loop in this section, highlighting the ways in which cities are “playfully” navigated with and through media. Focusing on the overarching theme of “navigation” highlights not just how we move through the city, but also how both play – and the promise of and potential for playful encounters – and media shape our wayfaring habits. The contributions in this section engage with the “playful” spaces that emerge at the intersection between (social) media and the city, moving from Hong Kong’s “Rainbow Estate” to the hip neighborhoods of Dutch cities and the city of London. If “play provides possibilities for reimagining the city,” these contributions show how urban images and urban imaginaries become interconnected.¹⁵Davies et al., “Cities as Playgrounds/Playgrounds as Cities,” 135.

In “Colourful Play in Hong Kong’s Rainbow Estate”, Paul O’Connor, Julian Mcallister Groves, Yingxin Du and Tina Sze Nga Ho reflect on their ethnographic visits to the Choi Hung Public Housing Estate in Hong Kong – often referred to as the “Rainbow Estate” – to explore the inherent potential of public spaces for play and playfulness. Through the lens of “chromatic leisure”, the authors tease out how the estate is imagined, framed and experienced differently by developers, tourists and tour guides, and the actual residents. In doing so, this contribution also expands from the previous section’s emphasis on building playful spaces to mediating playful spaces: the estate’s particular color scheme, and its “instagrammable” quality, opens up an exploration of how (social) media both contribute to and challenge an understanding of public spaces as playful.

In “Babyccinos and Reel Making: Who Is Really Playing?,” Laura Vermeeren draws on her own experience of trying to find a “kids proof” café as the starting point for an alternative mapping of play in the city. Turning to Instagram and the digital evaluation and curation of spaces for children (and, by extension, parents) by bloggers and influencers under the hashtag #kidsproof raises questions about both the visibility and desirability of different forms of play. While social media might function as a practical tool for exhausted parents in the city, what places are presented as “kids proof” – and based on what criteria – draws play back into complicated cycles of production and consumption. What Vermeeren calls the “chaotic, messy and creative” reality of play often seems at odds with both the affordances of urban architecture and the expectations of other urban inhabitants.

Conor Moloney’s contribution, “Beyond Nice: Mediating Urban Life through Play and Counter-play,” begins from a similar starting point: Focused on London, this article explores how play is “grounded” – and how the promise of playability and interactivity more often than not contrasts both the surrounding space and its actual uses. What makes play “dangerous” is as much its affordance for counter-cultural reimagining of space as its potential for being reappropriated into a vehicle for urban renewal and gentrification. In positioning play and counterplay in relation to public and counterpublic, and culture and counterculture, Moloney underlines how “play” evokes different ideas and for different people. These tensions inherent in discussions of play, then, become the starting point for a (re)conceptualization of the analytical toolkit of urban research – a focus that resonates throughout this dossier.

Focusing on one particular group of urban inhabitants, Photini Vrikki and Giota Alevizou explore how international students use smartphone photography to playfully navigate the city in “Framing London: Vernacular Photography and the Playable City in Student Life.” In contrast to the social media(ted) images discussed in the contributions by Paul O’Connor et al. and Laura Vermeeren, photography here not only functions as a way to frame spaces as playful – but as a playful practice in itself. In their analysis, based on a workshop with students, Vrikki and Alevizou underline how vernacular photography functions as a way to “get to know” urban environments, to both understand the city and in turn to shape narratives of the city. Grounded in London, a city mediated in images, film and television by both residents and visitors, the photographic practice foregrounds the difference between the city as seen and the city as experienced, while raising central questions about participation and belonging.

In centering media images and media practices, these four contributions also engage with an emerging interest in the everyday “embeddedness” of play in the city, and highlight how imagining the city and imaging the city are interconnected processes that shape how we navigate the urban.

Resisting: Art and Technology between Play and Intervention

During the early 2010s, Google became a major player in urban space, not least through the omnipresence of its Maps platform. In particular, users’ abilities to contribute to the mapping of their surroundings and to generate “mashups” of different datasets allowed, for the first time, an easy display of geocoded information on a map. Craig Dalton’s ethnographic exploration of the community of app developers that arose around Google Maps highlights how many operated for “fun and profit.”¹⁶Craig M. Dalton, “For Fun and Profit: The Limits and Possibilities of Google-Maps-based Geoweb Applications.” Environment and Planning A 47, no. 5 (2015): 1029–1046. The enjoyment of tinkering with a new and exciting technology combines with self-conceptualization as entrepreneurs who try to get rich via the new platform (while also making tech giants richer in the process). Here, the discussion of power in the previous sections takes on additional meaning: It is also about the boundaries set by technologies, and the corporations behind them, what is allowed and what is not, in playful engagements with urban space. The contributions in this section take up this tension to show how playful artistic interventions can make play a tool of resistance against totalising technological visions of cities.

In “Too Rich City: A Sinofuturist Playground,” Hsin Hsieh unpacks an ongoing multimedia work of the Hong Kong artist Huang Heshan, titled “Too Rich City”, which encompasses a physical multimedia component alongside a blockchain-based property “game” where participants bid and own pieces of increasingly expensive real estate. Hsieh examines play through the lens of sinofuturism, showing how it “foregrounds the contradictions between hyper-modern spectacle, lingering tradition, and everyday negotiation of urban density.” And, by doing so, she offers another mode of critique that acknowledges play’s ability to both be – and not be – the thing it purports to engage with.

In “Defamiliarizing the City: Play, Affect, and the Activation of ‘Imaginaries’”, Radmila Radojevic, Simeona Petkova and Núria Arbonés Aran add an additional dimension to spatial encounters by drawing together urban imaginaries and embodied experiences. Play, in their view, holds the potential to prompt new affective encounters in and with neighborhoods undergoing transformation. Using the conceptual lens of ostranénie (defamiliarization), Radojevic et al. argue for a shift of attention away from preconceived ideas about the city towards affective engagements in place. Through mapping – literally ‘putting on the map’ – emblematic places, defamiliarization becomes a playful way to disrupt, to expose and to engage. As both aesthetic and affective disruptions, urban art, interactive installations and sensory interventions take on a particular role in encounters with and of the city, a thematic that is taken up in the following contribution.

In “Playful Resistance: The Politics of Sensor Counter-Practices in Urban Technospheres,” Christoph Borbach and Max Kanderske expand this idea of playful encounters from human to “other” participants, analysing the use of “coning” by the activist group Safe Street Rebel in San Francisco. Their resistant act consists of placing traffic cones on the hoods of robotaxis (automated self-driving cars) to paralyse them. To be effective, “[m]eaningful ludic resistance necessitates engagement from within the operational logics of the sensor regime.” More than just a disruption, these forms of counterplay probe the limits of sensing systems and generate knowledge about urban technologies. Borbach and Kanderske argue that in doing so, sensor counter-practices function as a tactic for reclaiming the city from increasingly automated systems and corporate players managing urban flows.

In “Game Space Odyssey: Notes on the Procedural Transformation of Athens,” Connor Cook pushes this one step further by positioning the video game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey as a gamic counterpart to the city of Athens. Through the concept of gamespace, this article explores how architecture and games are not only built – literally and metaphorically – on similar design principles but are connected through procedural logics. Rather than comparing the specific video game to the city, or vice versa, this contribution emphasizes how “gamic ideologies” have entered all domains of public life – including economics, finance and urban planning. Resonating with other discussions of real estate throughout the dossier, this contribution underlines how the “games” played in urban politics at the same time also break the rules, enabling us to imagine, mediate and embrace alternative forms of living.

Bringing together discussions of technological systems and urban structures, Sam Hind’s “Playing Domains: Codes, Cities, and Cultures in the Viral World of Machine Learning” considers how competitive play can easily become a tool for encouraging the development of new urban technocultures. Tracing the emergence of automated systems, especially autonomous vehicles, in a series of competitions or “challenges,” Hind turns the focus back onto public datasets as benchmarking tools for computer scientists to develop better ways for cars to “see” and “understand” cities. This contribution highlights the complicated interrelations between corporate and collective engagements with urban space.

In turning their gaze towards the more disruptive, antagonistic and oppositional aspects of play, the authors in this section highlight the inherent tensions of play.¹⁷See the notion of Agon in Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (University of Illinois Press, 2001). Understanding who defines the rules of urban play, and testing out how to break them, becomes both a critical imperative and a practical challenge.

Conclusion

Here, we return to our initial question: Is the city a playground? In many ways, the answer is yes – and arguably even more so if we adapt a wider conceptualization of play. At the same time, this dossier also explores the benefits and limits of playability as an urban metaphor. What is lost or gained when cities are compared to, represented through – or even built upon – games, toys, playgrounds, performance spaces and the like? As the contributions in this dossier underline, play can both make socio-political issues in the city more visible and distract from them. This becomes even more complex when connecting the ‘playful’ ways that mobile apps, social networks and interactive platforms gather urban data and “gamify” urban environments¹⁸Davies et al., “Cities as Playgrounds/Playgrounds as Cities”, 133. to larger questions of ownership and access in the contemporary city. If, as Roger Silverstone argued, “play enables the exploration of that tissue boundary between fantasy and reality, between the real and the images, between the self and the other,” the theme of playable cities also underlines how play can be a way to resist, reimagine and recalibrate urban life.¹⁹Silverstone, Why Study the Media?, 64. Throughout this dossier, play functions as both a concept and a method in analysing the urban – and arguably deserves to be taken more seriously.

Carolyn Birdsall

Carolyn Birdsall is Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. Her publications include Nazi Soundscapes (AUP, 2012) and Radiophilia (Bloomsbury, 2023), as well as “Listening to the Archive” (2019, co-ed. Viktoria Tkaczyk) and “Historical Traces of European Radio Archives” (2022, co-ed. Erica Harrison). She recently completed the funded project TRACE – Tracking Radio Archival Collections in Europe, 1930–1960 (www.trace.humanities.uva.nl).

Linda Kopitz

Linda Kopitz connects her professional experience as a Creative Director with her interdisciplinary academic work to explore the role of technology in everyday meaning-making. She is currently working as a Lecturer in Cross-Media Culture in the Netherlands, where her main research interest lies in the intersection of media and space as a negotiation of the past, present and future. Bringing together her academic and editorial work, she is also an assistant editor for the European Journal of Cultural Studies and member of the steering committee of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). Since 2026, she is one of the co-managing editors of Mediapolis, together with Adam Ochonicky and Cortland Rankin.

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Alex Gekker

Alex Gekker is Assistant Professor in Digital Research Methods at Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. His research develops critical theoretical frameworks for understanding digital media infrastructures, with particular focus on cartographic interfaces, platform epistemologies, and the politics of everyday digital objects. Using technographic and interfacial approaches, his work examines how platforms, maps, autonomous vehicles, and gaming ecosystems operate as sites of power and knowledge production. He has co-edited two collected volumes on digital mapping and his monograph Maps as Media will be published by Polity in 2026.

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