The City as a Playground Game tools for interactive planning

The emergence of a data space (Big Data and IoT) and, with it, the proliferation of communication means, led many scholars to describe the city through a series of concepts like the informational city, the intelligent city or the cybercity, all of them being characterized by a strong networked consciousness (Castells, Graham, Boyer). The hypothesis of this paper is that game methodology is now gaining momentum and can act as enabler of smarter communities by an increasing access to data infrastructures. This is why the city can be seen as a series of connected playgrounds where interactive tools can support citizen engagement and decision making processes. It does so by going through relevant theoretical background on gamification in the urban context and best practices, to finally describe two student projects developed at CHORA Conscious City, TU Berlin. The two projects are experimental and explore the capabilities of interactive tools in order to support planning processes.