Gamification and Public Space Co-Creation

This document is a presentation slide deck from the PLAY advanced Public Play Space project, a Creative Europe Programme initiative led in part by Breda University of Applied Sciences. Its central thesis is that games and playful mechanisms can be used as tools for co-creating public spaces, helping citizens, designers, and planners collaboratively shape the places where they live. The deck frames this through the concept of "play with a purpose," arguing that gamified approaches can make participatory placemaking more engaging and that combining planning with play-based data offers new opportunities for urban design.

The presentation organizes its content around a taxonomy of game mechanisms relevant to placemaking, including categories such as physical activity, role play, mapping, data collection, AR/VR, mobile interfaces, and location-based play. It profiles several example projects: Redesire, a digital and analogue multiplayer game aimed at understanding stakeholder desires during redevelopment; Block by Block, which adapts an existing game to placemaking with a focus on giving users ownership, especially among children; and Your Back Yard, a planning game with weekly AR design updates in which citizens vote on proposals and AI analyzes which designs are perceived most favorably.

The deck offers no quantitative findings, survey results, or sample sizes, and its scope is largely illustrative, with examples drawn from the Netherlands and elsewhere without a broader comparative analysis. Its conclusions are stated as guiding principles rather than empirical results, including the observations that a placemaking activity should genuinely feel like a game to succeed and that the combination of planning and play-generated data holds considerable promise for future urban design practice.