“Playmentalities”

2019 Vanolo, Alberto. “Playmentalities.” How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. Ed. Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern Shaw (Np: Meatspace Press, 2019), 941-53 [241-47].

The first part is fiction about a boy in a city that uses “civic games” through Playstation to teach good citizenship and uses the scores attained throughout life to award or punish its citizens. The second part is an essay on the current status of such programs. All the stories in the book are responses to a recent book, A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Government (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017), by Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman, that proposes, in the editors’ interpretation, that cities should act more like Amazon in dealing with their citizens. The author is Professor of Political and Economic Geography at the Università di Torino.