For civic participation to lead to sustainable civic engagement, participants need to go through a process of collective reflection. Games have been put forward as tools to support this process. The commercialization of the Internet, mobile communication devices, and sensing technologies precipitated a substantial increase in the development and use of games, gamified environments, and playful experiences, to the extent that scholars speak of the gamification of society. The goal of this paper is to investigate the potential of gamification to improve the skills of citizens to reflect collectively on spatial issues in their daily environment. The paper presents two gamification experiments; B3-Design your Marketplace! and Cure for the Campus. It discusses the extent to which they support collective reflection operationalized as a process during which the players are triggered to (1) observe their environment; (2) categorize their observations; and (3) structure these categories. It analyzes the first results gained based on these two cases and discusses their limitations and further research directions.

In participatory design (PD) processes driven by institutions, designers struggle in reaching out to silent and/or silenced human and more-than-human voices within local communities. This can in a long run contribute to polarisation in the design process. This paper explores how to reimagine designing with communities beyond polarisation, by rethinking the PD practice of ‘infrastructuring’ (i.e. ‘commoning’ and ‘institutioning’) from within the perspective of the ontological turn. This process of ‘ontologising’ infrastructuring aims to enable designers to design with and for radical interdependence and reach out to (ontologically) diverse actors who might in first instance seem unrelated if not antagonistic. We situate and evaluate this process in a concrete case study in urban planning in the Low Countries where we used mappings and platforms to map and engage with radical interdependencies. Rather than crystallising ‘ontologising’ as a PD practice, in this paper we aim to foreground it as a set of capabilities that designers may use to steer and evaluate their PD process with close attention to its politics.

The understanding of urban morphology as a means of exploring the materiality of urban areas has been an emerging practice amongst academics, but the reach of the methods in urban-design research has been limited. This research presents the integration of GIS application and fieldwork analysis as the main methods to support the interpretation of urban morphology as methodical, exploratory, and multidimensional. The Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, commonly known as the KS test, is also conducted to illustrate a contrast among the settlements. The study focuses on various dimensions of informal settlements by drawing on three case studies of informal settlements in Lahore, Pakistan. The results show heterogeneity in the urban form in terms of land-use diversity, building density, connectivity, open-space ratio, and infrastructural quality within the case-study areas. The analysis displays the context sensitivity and diversity within these settlements that provide a better understanding of how informal settlement works in relation to urban morphology. This research has the characteristics to contribute to other urban-form studies through the coherent application of the procedures to various sites. The output of mixed-use techniques exercised in this study lends itself to integration with other systematic processes related to urban areas’ design, research, and planning.

Based on an in-depth study of how socially innovative processes are collectively reinforced within two cases, this article builds a reflexive framework that conceptualizes socially innovative processes as situated trajectories of collective learning. The framework starts from three theories in the field of pedagogy and organisational studies that try to contextualise and operationalise how internal processes of learning, supportive relationships and external demands interrelate withinprocesses of collective learning. In line with the reflexive character of social innovation research, the article presents the framework as a means to give concrete answer on how socially innovative processes can be supported and how the dynamic character of their collective learning trajectories can be managed. The conclusion of this article further reflects on the importance of a situational and multi-layered understanding of collective learning for creating institutional support for socially innovative processes in planning and presents reflexive questions that can help external actors as planning practitioners to position themselves within this often messy and complex reality.

Today’s patterns of work are very much defined by the ‘lean enterprise’ practice, taking form in organizations that are more competitive, customer-driven and agile on the one hand (Womack, J. P., &...

When defining participation in urban renewal projects in a political sense, this concept implies the challenging of power relations in each of its dimensions while addressing the need for knowledge, action and consciousness. Knowledge is defined as a resource which affects observable decision making. Action looks at who is involved in the production of such knowledge in order to challenge and shape the political agenda. Consciousness is how the production of knowledge changes the awareness or worldview of those involved, thus shaping the psychological and conceptual boundaries of what is possible. This paper addresses these politics of participation via the use of gamification, and more particularly gamified participatory artefacts. We discuss how a ‘good’ participatory planning process implies rebalancing existing power relations via the redistribution of knowledge, consciousness and actions, and aims to operationalize this ambition through a game. We particularly focus on the urban renewal process of one particular case, namely the Vennestraat—one of the main commercial streets of the city of Genk (BE) and present a three year participatory mapping process that made use of three gamified participatory artefacts (i.e., socio-economic network mapping, gathering mental images and scenario games). After uncovering the complex field of power relations in the entrepreneurial street, we analyze the different types of relations/groups that emerge from this participatory mapping process. The paper concludes with an analytical framework that employs gamified participatory artefacts in order to map and understand power relations and the mechanisms that frame them.