Games, Play and Playfulness in the ‘Creative City’: A Brief Overview

This chapter provides a critical overview of the creative city agenda and how games, play and playfulness more broadly contribute to its objectives. I argue this is tied to the growing imperative for citizens and urban policymakers alike to ‘be playful’ in order to thrive in the new economy premised on the economic and spatial reconfiguration of cities in the post-industrial era. I begin with an overview of the literature on the creative city and the processes that led to its emergence, before identifying how games, play and playfulness instrumentally serve the creative city’s underpinning goal of attracting knowledge workers to its spaces. I argue that they serve this goal in three overarching ways: through their existence as a creative industry; by promoting cities as playful and playable; and by playfully instilling citizens with a creative ethos. I aim to establish a framework for examining this overlap between the games industry – and playful practices more broadly – and the economic exigencies of the creative city. In this vein, the chapter concludes with a series of provocations for future research on the role of games and play in urban economic policy and the imperative for cities to position themselves as creative, fun and playful.