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Datafied and smart cities produce some challenges for inclusive, resilient, and sustainable urban futures. How can creative methods contribute to thinking and designing ways to imagine and co-create datafied cities with and for participatory citizenship and values for inclusion and sustainability? This question is central to the agenda of the research group [urban interfaces] and their collaboration in interdicisplinary and transdisciplinary partnerships. Working with and around the concepts of participation, criticality and imagination, the group brings cultural inquiry into datafied cities together with a methodological inquiry into creative urban methods. In the following, we sketch this agenda and approach and some recent examples of what such creative methods may yield.

In this chapter, we discuss a speculative and participatory “media architecture” installation that engages people with the potential impacts of data through speculative future images of the datafied city. The installation was originally conceived as a physical combination of digital media technologies and architectural form—a “media architecture”—that was to be situated in a particular urban setting. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it was produced and tested for an online workshop. It is centered on “design frictions” (Forlano and Mathew, 2014) and processes of controversing (Baibarac-Duignan and de Lange, 2021). Instead of smoothing out tensions through “neutral” data visualizations, controversing centers on opening avenues for meaningful participation around frictions and controversies that arise from the datafication of urban life. The installation represents an instance of how processes of controversing may unfold through digital interfaces. Here, we explore its performative potential to “interface” abstract dimensions of datafication, “translate” them into collective issues of concern, and spark imagination around (un)desirable datafied urban futures.

Although civic participation is an inseparable part of contemporary urban planning, the civic skills needed for meaningful engagement in the planning process and the way citizens learn them are still controversial issues. Digital transformations establish thematic connections between hitherto separated disciplines like media and communication studies and urban planning around citizen participation. Using playful digital media as participatory tools is a recent development. The learning and engagement affordances of games suggest there is potential to enhance civic skills and build a deeper form of civic engagement. Building on theories of urban planning, media and communication studies, and game design, this study proposes an analytical framework for investigating game affordances to enhance and expand civic skills. The model enables us to recognise how different aspects of a game -mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics- can increase civic knowledge, expand expression and communication skills, establish new ways to join publics, and provide new spaces for taking civic action. This study analyses the case of a civic game, developed as a participatory urban planning tool in the Dutch context, and proposes the notion of ‘playful citizenship’ as a new civic engagement style in urban planning.

The current datafication of cities raises questions about what Lefebvre and many after him have called “the right to the city.” In this contribution, I investigate how the use of data for civic purposes may strengthen the “right to the datafied city,” that is, the degree to which different people engage and participate in shaping urban life and culture, and experience a sense of ownership. The notion of the commons acts as the prism to see how data may serve to foster this participatory “smart citizenship” around collective issues. This contribution critically engages with recent attempts to theorize the city as a commons. Instead of seeing the city as a whole as a commons, it proposes a more fine-grained perspective of the “commons-as-interface.” The “commons-as-interface,” it is argued, productively connects urban data to the human-level political agency implied by “the right to the city” through processes of translation and collectivization. The term is applied to three short case studies, to analyze how these processes engender a “right to the datafied city.” The contribution ends by considering the connections between two seemingly opposed discourses about the role of data in the smart city – the cybernetic view versus a humanist view. It is suggested that the commons-as-interface allows for more detailed investigations of mediation processes between data, human actors, and urban issues.

This open access book is about public open spaces, about people, and about the relationship between them and the role of technology in this relationship. It is about different approaches, methods, empirical studies, and concerns about a phenomenon that is increasingly being in the centre of sciences and strategies – the penetration of digital technologies in the urban space. As the main outcome of the CyberParks Project, this book aims at fostering the understanding about the current and future interactions of the nexus people, public spaces and technology. It addresses a wide range of challenges and multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging phenomena related to the penetration of technology in people’s lifestyles - affecting therefore the whole society, and with this, the production and use of public spaces. Cyberparks coined the term cyberpark to describe the mediated public space, that emerging type of urban spaces where nature and cybertechnologies blend together to generate hybrid experiences and enhance quality of life.

In this edited volume, eighteen scholars examine the increasing role of digital media technologies in identity construction through play. Going beyond computer games, this interdisciplinary collection argues that present-day play and games are not only appropriate metaphors for capturing postmodern human identities, but are in fact the means by which people create their identity. From discussions of World of Warcraft and Foursquare to digital cartographies, the combined essays form a groundbreaking volume that features the most recent insights in play and game studies, media research, and identity studies.

Over the last few years, the term ‘smart cities’ has gained traction in academic, industry, and policy debates about the deployment of new media technologies in urban settings. It is mostly used to describe and market technologies that make city infrastructures more efficient, and personalize the experience of the city. Here, we want to propose the notion of ‘ownership’ as a lens to take an alternative look at the role of urban new media in the city. With the notion of ownership we seek to investigate how digital media and culture allow citizens to engage with, organize around and act upon collective issues and engage in co–creating the social fabric and built form of the city. Taking ownership as the point of departure, we wish to broaden the debate about the role of new media technologies in urban design from an infrastructural to a social point of view, or from ‘city management’ to ‘city making.’