About ReClaim

ReClaim is a two-year, EU-funded research project dedicated to the study of Urban Gamification (MSCA-IF-2017, grant agreement No 793835).

The project is led by Dr Mattia Thibault (PI) and supervised by Prof. Juho Hamari, member of the Gamification Group and postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, Finland.

Nowadays, the idea that cities should not just be smart, but also playable is gaining more and more recognition. In addition to bottom-up, spontaneous activities of playful use of urban spaces (such as parkour, flash-mobs and zombie walks) and to urban games (the most famous being AR location-based mobile game Pokémon Go), pro-social activities such as those organised by Playable City at the Watershed of Bristol try to channel the power of city play and use it to promote more inclusive communities and a sense of city-ownership.

The citizens’ reaction to moments of urban playfulness is often the same: a simple, almost childish, joy at seeing the anonymity of modern cities being invaded by coloured, fun and light-hearted activities. Urban gamification, then, could be an effective strategy for helping those citizens that feel increasingly powerless and disconnected from their own cities in face of the changes brought by globalisation and by the ICT revolution: “Cities that play together stay together”.

ReClaim aims at studying urban play in the wider frame of gamification, in order to deepen our understanding on how we can use play to affect the urban spaces and on what effects this might have on the citizens and their practices. The project draws from the knowledge and methodologies of gamification, critical design and pervasive play and aims at building an innovative and usable methodology. The latter will be tested through the analysis of case studies and through empirical testing, thus ensuring the building of a framework for the study and implementation of actions of urban gamification. At the end of the project, ReClaim will offer to designers, gamifiers and researchers a concrete and methodologically sound framework on how to use playfulness to make cities more liveable and inclusive.