Smart Cities, Playable Cities, and Cybersecurity: A Systematic Review

Smart cities connect humans to networks of information to create urban operating systems that optimize traffic management, sustainable energy use, and enact smart governance. The concept of playable cities has been advanced to create smart cities that are more human-centered. As smart cities are socio-technical structures involving technologies, people, and policies that each impact privacy and security, such an approach also has potential to develop stronger cybersecurity protocols for smart cities going beyond technological approaches. In this article, we conduct a systematic literature review of articles from 2015 to 2020 that discuss smart/playable cities and data gathering in relation to privacy and security. Based on this systematic review, we found a disconnect exists between smart and playable cities literature in terms of exclusive focus on technological solutions for security and little focus on people and policies as part of cybersecurity in the literature analyzed. Seeing as playable cities embrace user-generated co-creation, we argue that this personal side is important to get people to participate meaningfully in smart cities that lets them embrace cybersecurity policies as part of personal behavior. For this purpose, we propose utilizing a cybersecurity lens (e.g., McCumber cube model) so that smart city designers can more fully develop and consider cybersecurity that includes both personal privacy and playable approaches.