ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the integration of children’s public play spaces into the infrastructures of the smart city. While prior research has focused on personal mobile devices, this chapter examines deliberate design interventions that digitally augment children’s play spaces. Drawing on perspectives from children’s geography and game studies to conceptualise childhood play in the smart city, the chapter highlights the sometimes-contradictory relations that emerge. These contradictions arise in the smart city through the digital augmentation of spaces historically and culturally designated as play spaces. We introduce the notion of the postdigital to emphasise the blurring of boundaries of digital and nondigital play in children’s playgrounds and conceptualise the integration of playgrounds into digital infrastructures in relation to the broader impact that the smart city has on the uses of public space.
This chapter explores this ongoing integration of playgrounds into the smart city through two recent examples of interactive play designs that digitally augment public playgrounds and parks: HybridPlay and Disney Fairy Trail. These examples of postdigital play in public playgrounds are analysed in terms of their functionality, representation and online reception. Operating along a broader trajectory of smart city infrastructures characterised by the blurring of discrete spaces of sociality, these examples of postdigital play highlight tensions associated with the cultural sensibilities and historical meanings attached to public play spaces, digital technologies and childhood.
