Sengupta, U., cheung, P., iossifova, D., Hyde, R., 2016.

Gamifying 'Smarter' Planning: Adaptive and resilient future cities

This paper examines future planning methodologies based on development of 'smarter' new digital tools. These new tools are critical of the conflation of Smart Cities with sustainable futures and explores the subject from a complex adaptive system framework (including Ecological Resilience). Custom digital tools enabling multi-stakeholder participation and building of evidence bases for policy change within urban governance will examined against the techno-utopian promise of sustainable futures based on the use of urban data. The operative framework of the new tools focuses on guiding urban transformation towards desirable and resilient cities using co-productive top-down and bottom-up approaches enabled by digital interfaces, designed for discourse and decision-making rather than simply dissemination of information. The theoretical framework based on the complexity sciences addresses change over time within emergent relational social and infrastructural urban systems. Cases developed in co-operation with Manchester City Council demonstrate how system trajectories based on an understanding of existing transformational trends, probability fields and indicators within 'situated' social, economic, geographical, cultural and ecological topographies, can be extrapolated for sustainable future scenario evaluation. Possibilities for direct democracy enabling citizens to co-produce their future cities are examined against the structural changes required to organisational frameworks in government and urban planning institutions before this potential can be fully realised. By combining 'gamification' with 'smarter' cities the research aims to critically bring together system capacity with multi-level stakeholder involvement in decision making and behaviour change using digital interfaces to engage with the sustainable transformation of cities.