Cristina Ampatzidou

Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences · Civic Interaction Design Research Group

Three-Tier Garden: More-than-Human Choreographies in the Post-COVID City is a more-than-human design research project exploring shared urban gardens as places for healing and recovery from the traumatic ruptures caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. This publication collects project documentation and methodological guidelines aiming to, on one hand, pra...

The integration of learning goals with game mechanics in serious games used in urban and spatial planning processes has the potential to enable game designers and planners to create games with narratives tightly aligned to particular processes and lead to increased learning outcomes. This study presents the results from testing Energy Safari, a ser...

Games have become established tools within participatory urban planning practice that provide safe spaces for collective actions such as deliberation, negotiation of conflicting agendas, scenario testing, and collaborative worldbuilding. While a body of literature on the effectiveness of games to address complex urban planning issues is emerging, s...

Serious games have been hailed as particularly suitable learning technologies for unravelling complex urban issues and wicked problems. This chapter presents the main research findings from the development and testing of a serious game, called Energy Safari, which tackles the issue of local policy for the energy transition in the northern Dutch pro...

The integration of learning goals with game mechanics in serious games used in urban and spatial planning processes has the potential to enable game designers and planners to create games with narratives tightly aligned to particular processes and lead to increased learning outcomes. This study presents the results from testing Energy Safari, a ser...

Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social interaction among players who exchange information, negotiate and deliberate during gameplay. Energy Safari is a serious board game developed to make citizens familiar with the energy transition in the province of Groningen, the Netherlands and how it translates in local a...

Language is our interface with the world, the way we understand it, think of, remember, transmit, and transform it. The accelerated times we are living in are thus witnessing a growing, pervasive role of storytelling at any level of social, political, and commercial communication. More than ever before, irremediably lost any authority of the forms,...

Games, gamified environments and apps are celebrated as new tools to attract citizens and stakeholders for collective action and improve public participation processes. A better understanding of preferences and enjoyment and the relation of players’ motivations, (environmental) attitudes and player types could support decision making in game design...

Game design mostly engages future players as users and testers, whereas in the field of serious game design, approaches involving players more substantially are slowly emerging. This paper documents the participatory prototyping process of Energy Safari, a serious game for the energy transition in the Province of Groningen, and reports on the diffe...

This booklet was created as part of the JPI Urban Europe project “PlayUC! – Playing with Urban Complexity”. The focus of this interdisciplinary project was the development and evaluation of various analog and digital serious games for use in participatory processes in urban development. The project team consisted of international partners in the ar...

Spatial planning projects can be conceived as processes of collective learning. Planners have been looking at games and playful approaches to support these processes. Considering that planning projects are long and complex, we propose to not reason for single, full-fledged and allencompassing games, but instead work with strings of, so-called, seri...

Serious games and gaming are increasingly considered as the magic bullet for improved stakeholder involvement and citizen engagement in urban planning and governance. They are also discussed as means to instigate learning and capacity building and to raise the awareness of citizens and stakeholders about various urban topics. These learning process...

As games and gamified applications gain prominence in the academic debate on participatory practices, it is worth examining whether the application of such tools in the daily planning practice could be beneficial. This study identifies a research-practice gap in the current state of participatory urban planning practices in three European cities. P...

Das Thema der Partizipation in der Stadtentwicklung und -planung hat in den letzten Jahren einen deutlichen Bedeutungszuwachs erfahren. Traditionelle Planungs-, Steuerungs- und Kommunikationsansätze stoßen in einer immer vielschichtiger werdenden Akteurslandschaft und dem zunehmenden Bedürfnis der Bürgerinnen und Bürger nach Mitbestimmung an ihre G...

This paper takes a look at the relationship between informational space and territory. It questions the common dichotomy that positions virtual space in opposition to physical space. It focuses on the different roles modern urban actors play in defining a new understanding of space as an inseparable composition of both the virtual and the physical...

This paper takes a look at the relationship between informational space and territory. It questions the common dichotomy that positions virtual space in opposition to physical space. It focuses on the different roles modern urban actors play in defining a new understanding of space as an inseparable composition of both the virtual and the physical...

This paper takes a look at the relationship between informational space and territory. It questions the common dichotomy that positions virtual space in opposition to physical space. It focuses on the different roles modern urban actors play in defining a new understanding of space as an inseparable composition of both the virtual and the physical...

This paper takes a look at the relationship between informational space and territory. It questions the common dichotomy that positions virtual space in opposition to physical space. It focuses on the different roles modern urban actors play in defining a new understanding of space as an inseparable composition of both the virtual and the physical...