Sustainable, inclusive city-making through smart, playable environments: developing and testing the CO2rdinates pervasive mobile game

Human activity, economic and non-economic, is a core driver of global climate change. With urban areas as the epicentre of human activity, cities are simultaneously the greatest contributors and the best opportunities for addressing global climate change and sustaining – even enhancing – planetary wellbeing. Therefore, city-based, stakeholder-inclusive, and evidence-informed solutions could constitute a meaningful inquiry for sustainable development. Enduring, evolving, and emerging concepts of civic engagement, smart urbanism, and urban play demonstrate such promise, albeit with several caveats. This study investigates the use of gamified, digital tools in supporting the co-creation of more sustainable cities, through a systematic review, a structured precedent analysis, as well as a small group app trial and playtest of a mobile pervasive game called CO2rdinates. CO2rdinates is developed as a hybrid tool combining climate action, citizen participation, smart city technology, and playability, and proposed as a part of a holistic response to urban sustainability challenges. Participants of the app trial were generally supportive of the development of gamified tools for co-creating sustainable cities, and most felt that the CO2rdinates app could motivate and facilitate them in doing so. Several participants further expressed that the app could integrate into a wider campaign to promote sustainability awareness and action. However, the study also highlighted key challenges in the use of the CO2rdinates app, and, more broadly, the deployment of gamified digital tools for sustainability-informed, playful, and participatory city-making processes. These include a better integration of the three challenges in the CO2rdinates gameplay, and concerns about potential disputes among stakeholders. This study demonstrates that gamified digital participatory tools can constitute an empathetic, effective response to urban sustainability challenges through stimulating curiosity and learning, as well as facilitating action. There is scope for future work to integrate a wider range of stakeholders in the app trial and development, and to create more cohesively integrated yet inclusively varied game architectures and narratives. Strategies to mitigate, or even facilitate mutual learning from, conflicting views and interests, are also important future considerations.