Placemaking for urban sustainability: Designing a gamified app for long-term, pro-environmental participation

Abstract

Engaging with urban sustainability requires not only changes in individual behavior, but also a collaborative process of decision making together with local constituents. In this paper, we argue for integrating principles of behavior change and gamification with urban participation strategies, to achieve long-term engagement of citizens. We present Smart Citizen, an app we designed by following a gradual process of engaging citizens through setting defaults, triggers and incentives, encouraging reflexivity, active participation and co-production. We evaluated Smart Citizen with 31 users who tested it for two weeks and found a positive attitude towards being more active and acting sustainably locally. Especially users who would be interested in the topic of sustainability but need more tools to establish behaviors had a positive attitude towards using Smart Citizen long-term.