ABSTRACT
In both theory and practice, from Paul McFedries’s The City as System [Technically Speaking] to Alphabet’s (Google’s) Sidewalk Labs project, the city has been envisioned as an assemblage of code and hardware, an electronic system open to hacking, reprogramming and optimising (McFedries, 2014). But, as Shannon Mattern has rightly pointed out, ‘a city is not a computer’ (2017). This is significant because metaphors frame and inform how we see and live in cities, the design processes with which we construct cities and thus the material spaces and operations of cities themselves. Mattern calls for ‘new models for thinking about … urban epistemologies that embrace memory and history; that recognize spatial intelligence as sensory and experiential’ (2017).
While remaining aware of these critiques, this chapter counterintuitively posits the computational medium and representational tool of the game engine in thinking about the experience and making of urban space through an expanded reading of the body. Here the body is understood not only through its material propensities and constraints but also through its larger expression in the mosaics of embodied experience and sociocultural collective dynamics. This chapter builds on the theorisation of embodied experience following French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) concept of the body-schema, or bodily way of knowing the world; cultural geographer John Wylie’s (2006) definition of landscape as the materialities and sensibilities with which we see; and digital media scholar Brendan Keogh’s (2018) play of bodies bridging across our shared physical spaces and the virtual landscapes of videogames. Establishing and expanding on the conclusions that landscape and self are co-constitutive and that the body can be extended across the physical/virtual divide, game engines are argued to uniquely provide a new design heuristics of experimental play that recognises and employs spatial intelligence as sensory, experiential and contingent in studying and designing the built environment. With these new readings of cities, new possibilities of city knowing and city making can emerge.
