User:Ekimtan

City Gaming
City gaming is a collaborative method for making and maintaining cities. At the core of city gaming lies understanding cities as self-organizing systems. City gaming is born as to bridge gap between conceptualizing cities as complex systems and lack of present operational methods treating the city as a complexity, impossible to manage from above or from below only. City gaming conceives the city as a complex system generated by multiple agents of various powers and interests, diverting from the dualistic approach of participation theories which divides city’s generators into bottom and top. In city gaming collaborative generation of cities depend on the alliances built between engaged players independent from whether they act from above or below. City gaming relies on an urban order emerging from the interaction and negotiation of involved parties. There is no initial or predetermined order imposed in city gaming, making and/or maintaining the city runs on partnerships taking actions during the play. This property of city gaming is rooted in Yuval Portugali’s seminal work ‘Self-organization and the City’ which proposes reading cities as self-organizing systems. Instead of seeing actors such as planners, local and central authorities as utter creators of urbanities, Portugali suggests understanding informal processes as integral parts of urban complexity. City gaming assumes a self-organizing processes in charge of urban emergence and evolution. This approach sharply diverts from traditional city planning games and simulations assuming an top down authority managing cities. The most popular example is the city simulation game Simcity assuming a mayor in charge founding and developing a city, while maintaining the happiness of the citizens and keeping a stable budget.