A Review of Research on Urban Playability from a Social Justice Perspective

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments on research manuscript

A review of research on urban playability from a social justice perspective

 

Line 33 to 96

Comment

This article focuses on and discusses the characteristics and importance of playability in urban spaces and its potential to stimulate urban vitality and promote inclusiveness and equity in urban areas. The domination of urban space by transport, commercial, and residential areas has made playable space a scarce resource, which is seen as a site for the materialisation of social rights.

In the beginning of this article, some examples were provided on how the concept of playability emerged in the past. I believe that it is just one of the perspectives. The authors may need to state that more perspectives can be discovered

 

Line 98 to 111

Comment

Web of Science is just one of the online databases of academic articles. There are other databases, such as Google Scholar, where a lot of scholarly articles can be located. Have the authors searched other databases?

 

Line 111

Comment

After the initial search, how many articles were found? Also, how many articles were excluded? What are the criteria that the authors used for screening the articles found?

 

Line 140 to 141

Comment

As playability a relatively new term, such a term may not be used extensively in past research. If past research papers used other terms to imply similar or even identical meanings, have the authors thought about this possibility?

 

Line 142 to 197

Comment

Please insert space before and after the equal sign. Instead of writing “n=3”, the authors are suggested to write “n = 3”. This can improve readability.

 

Line 230 to 231

Comment

Is the table too wide to be displayed?

 

Line 325 to 343

Comment

As cities adapt to the post-COVID-19 world, providing urban spaces that cater to the playability needs of users of different ages, cultural backgrounds, and social classes has become a very important issue. However, have the authors considered that the influences of socio-economic influences brought by COVID-19 have gradually faded away?

 

Line 282 to 343

Comment

The division of the three research stages related to urban spatial playability and social equity is appropriate in this literature review.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper did a literature review on the concept of playful urban spaces. I think the topic is important to the field.  

-The introduction overall provided a good theoretical background of playful urban spaces. 

-why are playgrounds not part of the search terms in Table 1? 

- I think the analysis section is solid and well-written. One consideration is to recognize the limitation of time in centrality analysis, such as in Table 4. Of course, older studies gain higher attraction. But this doesn't mean recent studies are not valuable. I felt the author need to consider this limitation.

-I think the section 4 is not just about future research directions. The author also discussed historical study results and theoretical considerations. I felt it is more appropriate to call Section 4 'discussion'.

-the article has several claims without recent literature backing them up. Consider citing recent work talking about supply and demand inequality of playground facilities, such as: 

Song, Y., Newman, G., Huang, X., & Ye, X. (2022). Factors influencing long-term city park visitations for mid-sized US cities: A big data study using smartphone user mobility. Sustainable Cities and Society, 80, 103815.

And the studies talk about activating public spaces and the power of people's lives.

Fernandez, J., Song, Y., Padua, M., & Liu, P. (2022). A framework for urban parks: using social media data to assess bryant park, New York. Landscape Journal, 41(1), 15-29.

 

 

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

1. In the abstract section, the text related to the background is a bit too long. While explanations related to the methodological aspects and the results of this research are substantively inadequately explained.

2. Except for the research background, the term "social justice" as it appears in the title of this paper is not adequately elaborated on the objectives, methodology, results and conclusions of the study

3. The authors do not explicitly explain the definition of social justice in this study

4. Of the 6 research objectives described (lines 82-92) only the 4th objective explicitly elaborates on social justice

5. Table 1 (line 111): why are topics and terms related to social justice not used to be searched in this paper?

6. The systematic subchapters in chapters 3 and 4 seem to be inconsistent with the research objectives

7. The elaboration of the results of the analysis in chapter 3 seems superficial and mechanistic, not accompanied by an in-depth discussion

8. How does the discussion at the micro, meso and macro levels in chapter 4 relate to the objectives and research methods?

9. The relationship between the discussions in Chapters 3 and 4 with the literature review in the background (introduction) section of the research is not very clear

10. The conclusion does not provide a substantial overview of the usefulness of the results of this research. The conclusion should substantively answer the points of this research objective.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

I am satisfied with the significant and constructive improvement from the authors