Toward A Collaborative Smart City: A Play-Based Urban Living Laboratory in Boston

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an urban living laboratory that designed a suite of play-based prototypes, as an attempt to “institution” collaborative smart city governance in the city of Boston. This project was called “Beta Blocks,” and it geographically defined “Exploration Zones,” governed by local residents and business owners, who decided whether, where, and why to temporarily install technologies in the public realm. To recruit and facilitate the participation of Zone Advisory Group members, the authors fabricated a lavender, parking-space-sized, inflatable art exhibition (Beta Blob) that hosted a suite of public-facing activities. Although the composite model failed at “institutioning” itself into Boston’s government through this prototype, the discrete components succeeded in centering play in public learning situations and prototyping a model for collaborative governance between publics, and the public and private sectors.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the staff of the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics for their curiosity and support throughout the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The risk of adopting play as a mode of engagement in governance is making light of the situation or communicating that the matter at hand is frivolous simply because it is playful. In other words, it would be detrimental for participants to see the process as “only a game.” As such, we were careful in our design to assure that while playful experiences were appropriately cordoned off from “everyday life,” there was enough scaffolding to connect the affective experience of play to the rational completion of tasks (specifically, decisions about technology in the public realm).

2. https://monum.github.io/playbook/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Eric Gordon

Eric Gordon is a professor of civic media at Emerson College, where he directs the Engagement Lab. His research and design focuses on collaborative governance in smart cities. His most recent book is Meaningful Inefficiencies: Civic Design in an Age of Digital Expediency (2020, Oxford University Press).

John Harlow

John Harlow is an Assistant Research Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. His research includes defining social values for the Global KAITEKI Center, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded projects “Convening the Center” and the “People’s Collaborative Governance Network.”

Melissa Teng

Melissa Teng is a multimedia artist and designer whose works explore memory and imagination, often with communities recovering from violence. She is currently a graduate student in the Data + Feminism Lab in the Dept. of Urban Studies + Planning at MIT.

Elizabeth Christoferetti

Elizabeth Christoferetti an assistant professor of practice at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She is also a principle in the architecture firm Supernormal, an architecture, urban design, and research practice.