Burcu Yaslak (p)

Patricia Ikouta Mazza

Recently, games have stood out as an essential topic in urban studies. In this paper, we explored urban games through the sustainability context. A crucial question for existing urban games studies is their evaluation of their properties via contemplating sustainable development goals. Recent studies have evaluated urban games in subjects such as transportation, public participation, and city planning with a limited number of games. In this study, we combine these subjects under sustainable development and analyse them through 177 games.
It is interesting to consider urban games through sustainability because even though these two subjects have existed for a particular time, their relationship has yet to be explored. Therefore, via searching for existing games on both literature and online platforms, first, we listed a considerable amount of urban games and visualised their main characteristics such as location, number of players, being digital/non-digital, target group, type (3 environments), benefits and relationship with sustainable development goals.
We reached several crucial results. First, even though games in urban planning education are discussed in the literature in the early period, games are currently not widely used in urban planning education. Second, through sustainable development goals, “sustainable cities and communities” resulted in a highly focused goal. This means that, contrary to education, urban games have started to be used in practice. However, it should be noted that even though 35% of the games are aimed at decision-making in terms of the planning process, the use of games is limited to engaging multiple stakeholders.

Emilia Bogacka, Jan Hauke, Anna Tobolska (p), Justyna Weltrowska

Burcu Yaslak

Distance learning in all types of schools was forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, in Poland, this form of teaching was used sporadically, basically only with regard to extracurricular activities. The vast majority of academic teachers did not have any experience in this field. Digitalization radically changed education for students. The large-scale introduction of new forms of distance learning and methods of knowledge transfer and enforcement created a number of challenges but also opened up new opportunities. The presented study attempts to identify the social attitudes towards the digitalization of education during the COVID-19 pandemic expressed in the opinion of university students of the Wielkopolska region, Poland.

As a theoretical background, we use in this work behavioral direction, namely the concept of social attitudes. Attitudes can be defined as the expression of a person's cognitive-emotional state, connected with a specific tendency to act. The concept of an attitude reflects three basic aspects, namely knowledge about an attitude object (a), its evaluation (b), and behaviors towards it (c).

Analyses of social attitudes covered the following issues: (a) recognizing the knowledge of students about the tools that enable participating online classes; (b) analyses of students’ evaluation of their studying conditions during the pandemic (availability of basic equipment for studying), learning about students’ evaluation of the organization and delivery of online classes, (c) identification of the advantages and disadvantages of remote studying experienced by students during the pandemic.

The research was carried out on the basis of empirical material obtained from questionnaires addressed to students from public and private universities in the Wielkopolska region. We received more than 3000 questionnaires from students studying at 12 public and three private higher education institutions. The applied approach allowed us to obtain representative results, which may transpose into generalizations on the scale of the entire country.

Dimitris Papandreou, Patricia Ikouta Mazza (p), Maria Mavri

Anna Tobolska

Digital Transformation of Local Administrative Units (LAU) is imperative, especially after the COVID pandemic, which accelerated the need for Digital Transformation and growth of the digital economy. Digital Transformation is a conceptual framework that is viable in an evolving society and is achieved through the adaptation of applications and services provided by the new industry 4.0. This new approach not only leads to technological achievements, but also enhances economic and social relations, as well as the bond of local governments and their citizens.
However, European Union countries have not adopted equal measures at the level of local governmentstowards Digital Transformation of services to meet the needs of the new digital era.
Given the fact that the services provided to citizens by local governments, their general administrative structures and cultures differ between member states due to political traditions and historical, geopolitical as well as socio-economic conditions, five main types of organization can be distinguished: the Napoleonic, the Anglo-Saxon, the Scandinavian, the Federal and the East European.
The purpose of this paperis to provide a comparative study of the level of digital services of the local government organizations of the member states of the EU and the rate at which they have accelerated in the context of the measures and policies adopted during the period of the Covid 19 pandemic.
To achieve this scope, the goals of the study are:
1. the discussion of the concept of Digital Transformation,
2. the recording of the administration typology of local governments of the member states and finally
3. a comparative analysis of EU countries to proceed with the Digital Transformation in correlation to their typology.