Smart Cities at Play

Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging Forms of Playfulness explores how experiencing the smart city creates explicit and implicit playful possibilities, revealing the socio-cultural problems of participation that transcend the technological. It shows that the lived experience of these spaces are currently overlooked and of the utmost importance to smart city researchers, practitioners, and policy makers as they engage with digital media, communication, human-computer interaction, and digital geography.Smart Cities at Play shows that play is within the context of smart cities and the embeddedness of technology. It engages with “playful mobilities” such as Uber, “playful inhabitants” such as Airbnb, and “playful identities” such as wearable technologies. At the same time it deals with emerging methodological possibilities and ethical issues that are symptomatic of the digital technologies now endemic of the urban environment.Smart Cities at Play provides a historical account of changing perceptions of cities in the context of human experience. It explores the impact emerging technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, wearable technologies and locative media have on perceptions and approaches to the urban environment, investigating what these technologies reveal about the socio-cultural problems of smart city participation.Smart Cities at Play provide readers with a critical overview of this field, serving as a primer for future studies examining emerging notions of play within the context of smart cities.