The interlinked nature of today’s societal challenges asks for integrative approaches. The energy transition is an especially impactful challenge and presents a compelling opportunity to pursue integration, as it requires changes to space, landscape, infrastructure and organizations at different scales. While the added value of integrative approaches that address the energy transition alongside other societal challenges is widely acknowledged, it is not the status quo. The aim of this study is to uncover the institutional barriers to integration and suggest possibilities for redesign. The paper sheds light on a hitherto relatively understudied phase of integration, namely implementation. Two illustrative cases for energy transition integration are discussed; (i) sustainable residential heating combined with climate adaptation in the urban context, and (ii) biogas production from livestock manure for rural residential heating and nitrogen reduction in the Netherlands. Inspired by the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IAD) and networks of action situations (NAS) concept, the study shows that in the context of energy transition integration, action situations are pillarized with incidental interactions happening between sectors and across scales. The rules that govern actor interactions stem from sectoral institutional arrangements and produce sectoral action situations. Factors that especially obstruct integration are financial streams, budgeting and designated task responsibilities of actors that favour sectoral, one-dimensional projects. Actors interact in sectoral action situations and struggle to establish links to plan for more integrative outcomes. As a way forward, the study illustrates how rules can be redesigned to create integrative action situations and what mechanisms may help to achieve this in practice.

The past decade has seen a gradual but steady increase in the planning scholars’ interest in outlining a functional place for games in planning. A wide range of games for and about urban planning is developed and tested, from data-driven games that rely on extensive modelling techniques and aim to reduce the cost and risk of real-world scenario testing, to those that seek to educate their players about the complex nature of political and social issues. Despite the increasing interest in strengthening communications between planning and game studies, the current state is an amalgam of confusion and optimism about games’ role and added value. To shed light on why such confusions emerge, the article reflects on the nature and outcomes of communications between urban planning and games studies and explores games’ historical and current conceptions in planning. By adopting concepts from the work of Holbrook on interdisciplinary communications, the article explores how game studies’ concepts are rendered useful in planning and how planning theory has dealt with untranslatability and incommensurability of concepts in the processes of establishing and sustaining communications with game studies.

In this editorial linked to the thematic issue on “Gaming, Simulations, and Planning: Physical and Digital Technologies for Public Participation in Urban Planning,” we explore how urban planning has been, arguably, slow on the uptake of modern technologies and the move towards the next media revolution: The Metaverse is now on the horizon. By artfully pushing technological, cultural, and social boundaries in creating virtual environments, games and gaming technologies have presented interesting opportunities and challenges for the planning profession, theory, and education over the years. This thematic issue documents a wide range of innovative practices in planning enabled by games and gaming technologies. It attempts to open discussions about the way we conceptualize and treat new media and technologies in planning. By providing a wide range of examples, from non-digital games to gamified systems, interactive simulations and digital games, the issue shows that the lack of adoption of these practices has less to do with their technical possibilities and more to do with the way we understand tools and their added value in the dominant narratives of planning. As we note at the end, planning should be at the forefront of these technologies, not embracing technologies for technologies sake but because it should, as a profession, be leading the way into these new environments.

Social media is revolutionizing social dynamics and the way people take decisions. For town planners it is important not to see social media just as a supporting tool in data gathering and qualitative analysis but to explore the emergent culture of social media and its effect on the planning processes and decision support tools. This study shows how games and gamification can be used in this new culture to stimulate issue formation and participation among communities.

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