In parallel to this year’s ASCA Cities Seminar, Carolyn Birdsall, Linda Kopitz and Alex Gekker are co-editing a special issue on “Playable Cities” for Mediapolis – A Journal of Cities and Culture to be published in September 2025. Some of the questions we are interested in:
# What makes a city ‘playable’?
# How is play rendered (in)visible in the city?
# What forms of play and playing are possible/desired/designed in the city?
# How is ‘playability’ operationalized in public policy and urban planning?
# In what ways are urban infrastructures made ‘playable’?
# How are urban environments represented in virtual games?
# How can activist interventions in public space draw on or be framed through play?
# How can we approach play both as a concept and method?
We invite contributions from diverse fields, including, but not limited to, urban studies, film/television studies, game and gaming studies, sociology, geography, gender studies, political studies, philosophy, new media theory, disconnection studies, history, and so on. We are especially interested in contributions exploring ‘Playable Cities’ from a global and interdisciplinary perspective including artistic research and architectural practice.
Please submit an abstract of your proposed article (300 words) and a short bio (100 words) to Linda Kopitz (l.kopitz@uva.nl) by 15 October 2024. Authors will be informed of the selection within two weeks after the deadline. Full articles (3000 words) will be due in May 2025 and will subsequently go through an anonymous peer review process. The dossier is scheduled for the September 2025 issue. You can find the full call for papers here.