Co-creating the Future of Cities with Games: New Technologies and Methods for Sustainable and Smart City Planning

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to contribute to the Special Issue of Sustainability titled Co-creating the Future of Cities with Games: New Technologies and Methods for Sustainable and Smart City Planning.

Games, serious games, geogames, games for community engagement, planning and design are emerging as methodologies, tools and strategies that can be implemented for the co-creation of smart and sustainable cities. Such urban games can be designed to enhance the dialogue between the stakeholders, stimulate an exchange of perspectives on a specific topic or inform the urban planning decision-making process. They can be analogue, non-digital and can come in the form of board or card games. They can also be offered in a digital form online or offline. Such games may use a role-playing game design or even technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) or virtual reality. They may include mixed reality and be played combined in a physical and virtual space, or just be offered as an entrance into a virtual community.

This Special Issue is dedicated to sustainability and how can it be achieved by using games in different stages of a planning process. Such games may help solve problems, simulate real-world situations, or enable learning and participation. This Special Issue brings urban planners and designers, game designers, geospatial scientists, developers, computer scientists and geographers together to discuss the current and novel approaches in designing, implementing, and testing games. It encourages theoretical submissions discussing fundamentals of game and play in smart and sustainable city planning and design. It aims at expanding the current state-of-the-art and provides a platform for an exchange on cutting-edge research on games and play for urban planning and design.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Sustainability and games
• Analogue games for urban planning and design
• Digital geogames
• Online geogames for urban planning
• Virtual reality games for urban planning and design
• Mixed-reality games
• Community engagement games
• Playful public participation
• Geospatial learning and games
• Games for change

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Alenka Poplin
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainability and games
• serious games
• geogames
• urban games
• games for community engagement
• playful public participation