Keynote Speaker I

Dr. Alenka Poplin,

Associate Professor, Community and Regional Planning

Community and Regional Planning Department

158 College of Design

Ames, IA, 50011

College of Design

IOWA State University, USA

Alenka Poplin is an Associate Professor of Geoinformation Science at the Community and Regional Planning at Iowa State University, and the director of GeoGames Lab and Community Engagement Living Lab. She widely publishes in the areas of serious online games and games for change, online geogames for civic engagement. big data for smart cities, happy cities, emotions related to places, mapping emotions in a geographic information system (GIS). Her recent publications include articles in the Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (CEUS), Journal of Cartography and Geographic Information, Journal of Urban Technology, The Cartographic Journal and others. She edited five books, the last one titled The Virtual and The Real in Planning and Urban Design: Perspectives, Practices and Applications, was published in 2018 by Routledge. America conferences in Belo Horizonte (2017) and Florianópolis (2019), both in Brazil. In 2020, she co-edited an open access online journal titled Gaming and Geospatial Information.

Keynote: Game-based and Playful Co-Creation of Smart and Sustainable Cities

This talk highlights ideas and implementations of game-based and playful approaches developed for citizen engagement. It is built on the idea of creating a pleasant and enjoyable process in which the residents develop trust and willingness to work with the local government. The main focus is on online, digital serious geogamesand their use for the co-creation of smart and sustainable citiues. Examples of such geogamesmay include location based geogames, geogames utilizing geographic information systems (GIS), geogames for big data, mixed-reality geogames, urban geogames, and geography geogames. Challenges of engaging underrepresented and marginalized groups of residents will be discussed. Examples of possible solutions for engaging youth come from the studies of Minecraft and interactive online maps. The talk concludes with the discussion of the question: Can geogames help create a better world?