Het Portret with dr. Ekim Tan

Ekim Tan, PhD is an urbanist specialising in city gaming, an innovative method that uses games to improve urban planning. Her company, Play the City , designs games that make urban processes collaborative, organic and creative.

A significant part of her work involves integrating AI into urban planning, which she believes fundamentally differs from the traditional smart city approach. While 'smart cities' focus on collecting data through sensors, Tan views Urban AI as a hybrid form that merges the digital and physical worlds.

Inclusion is central to Ekim's vision of urban planning, both in the physical and digital contexts. Her games create a platform where diverse voices and perspectives come together: residents, experts, and even non-human players such as a pigeon, a fox or a tree.

“Games really allow different roles, different interests, different positions to come together to come up more nuanced collective stories which is not black or white but everything in between.”

She also talks about the risks of large tech companies and their influence and how there is a need for Europe to invest more in technological developments, rather than only focus on regulation.

“In the European front we see a lot of regulation, but we don’t create the technologies and that’s where we are lagging behind.” (...)“Regulation is always reactive to technology.”

Listen to the podcast Het Portret, with host Annick van Rinsum , to learn more about Ekim's insights and approach.