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Introduction to Smart Cities in Transition: Challenges of Participation in Urban Environments

The continued development of smart cities is a recurring feature of urban living and does not appear to be slowing down. Today, our lives are both mediated and monitored by a range of digital technologies. Some of these technologies are now so established they are mundane and pervasive, like smartphones. Others are nascent or continually being reinvented, such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR). In a similar vein, a range of digital media are increasingly embedded in the urban fabric. This intermingling of the physical and digital is commonly positioned as empowering, providing a more granular grasp of the myriad flows of daily life. Yet, these technologies do not simply monitor or reproduce urban rhythms, they are also instrumental in reshaping, reimaging and regulating the rhythms, interactions and practices of everyday life, as Kitchin and Dodge (2011) pointedly unpack in their book Code/Space. Nonetheless, smart cities – as both technological infrastructure and a conceptual framework – can be leveraged for change. Their production and reproduction of data does not only predict patterns of consumption, movement, and engagement, but also reshapes mobilities and meanings through tools, apps, and games that encourage play and participation in the urban environment and its planning processes. They are moderating and influencing our behaviors and how we interact and experience the city and each other. At the same time, issues surrounding access, engagement, sustainability, the environment, and the inclusion and marginalization of certain groups persist as lenses for understanding what our future cities should be like and what actions we can take in the present to address these concerns. This special issue contends that the idea of smart cities should be updated to account for a broader range of emerging and nascent technologies that are increasingly adopted in t daily life through play and participation. The articles in this issue, therefore, focus on citizens and explore how games can support participatory dialogs between different social groups and individuals. Further still, the focus of this special issue is on games and play – from locative gaming apps to participatory urban planning games – that both fulfil the smart city’s imperative to be participatory and respond to the need to become more equitable. The dual global crises of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic continue to demonstrate that cities both can and must be radically redesigned to privilege green public spaces and inclusive design over the status quo. Technologies like AR, VR, and MR can help reimagine urban futures through speculative design and facilitate new, playful forms of social interaction by reappropriating the smart city’s technological infrastructure (Nijholt, 2019). In the process, games, apps and interactive installations can move beyond the common usage of these technologies and respond to criticisms about the techno-determinism of smart city visions, as organizations like the Playable City (n.d.) have shown. Equally, these assemblages can overcome shallow attempts at what Shannon Mattern (2020) calls “engagement theatre” by using play to foster meaningful participation and encourage community building as part of transition initiatives – although this is far from automatic. The articles in this special issue, then, demonstrate that games and play provide more than simply a theoretical lens for examining the phenomenology of place in smart cities. Perhaps more importantly, the case studies and discussion throughout the issue can be called upon to provide a range of recommendations for how smart cities might be reimagined to tackle the various social issues that are only being exacerbated in a time of upheaval. They show that playful experiences of the city might point to new understandings of space and place that are not just smart but also empathetic, social, and inclusive. And they move beyond “smart city 2.0” visions (Trencher, 2019) that merely gesture toward participation and inclusiveness, instead illustrating through gameful interfaces that these elements are an inherent and vital part of the lived experience of cities. The first article, “Changing the Rules of Play in Long Beach, California: Smart Cities, Infrastructure, and the WellPlayed Game” by John S. Seberger and Gwen Shaffer, adopts a novel approach to smart city design. Drawing on rich interview data centered around Long Beach, California’s Smart City Strategic Initiative, the authors explore how Bernard De Koven’s theory of the “well-played game” might be used to counter citizen’s “weary passivity” and skepticism about the fairness and efficacy of smart city planning. Rather than engaging citizens with the smart city through “infrastructural” lenses, they show that De Koven’s focus on “the process by which the rules of existing games might be communally and collaboratively changed” can be used to inform and challenge smart city initiatives. In “Towards a Collaborative Smart City: A Play-based Urban Living Laboratory in Boston,” Eric Gordon reports on a range of play-based prototypes developed to “institution” ‘collaborative smart city governance in the city of Boston. More precisely, the project establishes geographically demarcated “Exploration Zones” governed by both local residents and business owners. Here, Zone Advisory Group members were utilised to agree what technologies were to be implemented in the public realm, why they https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2021.2012385