Play the City is a twofold organization: a design studio and a public foundation.
Play the City Studio is a for profit design agency. Community building, planning for temporary use, interactive urban renewal and digital urbanism constitute the main expertise of the studio. Cities, housing corporations, cultural institutions and collectives hire the Play the City studio as designers and advisors to organize interactive multiplayer processes.
Play the City Foundation is a non-profit organization. The mission of the organization is to introduce interactive tools, both analog and digital, into the legal procedures of urban planning and design. The ambition of the foundation is to perform this aim in an international context. Meanwhile, we value the strength involvement and building up long-term relations with local stakeholders. So far Amsterdam Noord and Almere in the Netherlands, City of Tirana in Albenia, and Sariyer and Arnavutkoy municipalities of Istanbul are parties with which we have been developing future oriented relation.
To fulfill the goal of opening governance and design for people, the foundation initiates research and publishes reports and books about urban communities, co-design, digital urbanism and interactive tools for urban transformation, self-organizing development and temporary use.
To fulfill the goal of opening governance and design for people, the foundation regularly organizes public brainstorm meetings, workshops, lectures and exhibitions. We have been teaming up with other design and education platforms such as TU Delft, Balkan in de Polder, International New Town Institute, Kijkruimte, Tolhuistuin, and Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. In the future we would like to expand this network.
Using this growing network we plan to share our knowledge in open planning and governance with a wider audience. For this purpose, the foundation will initiate manifestos with relevant partners e.g. Arch-lokaal. Within this framework we also plan to curate works of other like-minded organizations in the future. In 2013, we plan to find a location and build workshop spaces for the foundation’s public events.
