Post by Ekim Tan, PhD

When Play the City was founded in 2010, we made a deliberate choice: analog over digital. While many were investing in platforms, dashboards, and online participation tools, we focused on tabletop city games. Over the past 15 years and more than 60 city games brought together people who rarely meet on equal footing: local communities and corporate decision-makers, housing providers and policymakers, informal traders and urban planning experts, mayors and NGOs. Around a shared table, participants could negotiate, imagine, and create together. Looking back, the success of these processes was not only about the game mechanics. It was about the human encounters they enabled. Physical presence fostered trust, empathy, and mutual understanding—often in situations marked by significant conflict, competing interests, and complex urban challenges. The pandemic pushed us to integrate digital tools into our practice. Yet we remained committed to preserving the human dimension, ensuring that face-to-face conversations continued to be the foundation of meaningful co-creation. Today, the rapid rise of AI presents both exciting opportunities and profound questions. AI can help make urban planning more accessible, inclusive, and responsive. But it also raises new challenges: Who understands the assumptions embedded in these systems? Who has the power to shape them? Who decides what data enters a digital twin, whose knowledge counts, and which questions are asked in the first place? These are not merely technical questions. They are questions of governance, participation, and democracy. To explore them, we have documented in this article one of Play the City’s latest initiatives, developed in close collaboration with the İzmir Planlama Ajansı. The project examines how citizen knowledge, local narratives, and community-owned data can play a meaningful role in the next generation of digital twins and AI-supported urban decision-making. #GamesForCities #UrbanAI #ParticipatoryDigitalTwins #CitizenParticipation #CoCreation #UrbanPlanning #DataGovernance #PlayTheCity #Izmir Faezeh Mohammadi Vereniging Deltametropool İrem Özdarendeli Koray Velibeyoglu Lilet Breddels Carolina Ramos Fallu Ger Baron Carissa Champlin 🟥 Roni Bulent Ozel Jutta Hinterleitner Remco Deelstra Dirk Sijmons Yukiko Nezu Can Guvenir, PhD Duygu AVCI Burçak Karlı Kira Clingen Ezgi Küçük Çalışkan Gizem Sever Ege Can Barçın Martijn de Waal Andrea Gorrini Micol Petrone Nadiia Makushynska Rens van den Bergh Onno van Eijk Carolina Miguel Barreiros