On June 12 and 13 we hosted a creative and interdisciplinary workshop bringing together international experts across playable cities artists, game designers, ethnographers, play theorists and designers to consider the possibilities of action research and co-design experiments in and around the Superilla located outside of RMIT Europe as part of Design Week.
Playgrounds are powerful vehicles for understanding cultural and social ways of being in urban spaces. Born out of post war civic re-invention of the city, they are powerful sites for intergenerational play. They activate public spaces in creative ways. Their design speaks of cultural and historical milieu. They are sites for quotidian activism which combines multiple cartographies such as nature, visible and invisible infrastructures, people, and situations. They are uneven sites for vulnerable agencies of human and more-than-humans.
Playgrounds are barometers for how play, urban spatiality and sociality are understood culturally and offer the potential to be platforms to develop creative and alternative scenarios for urban environments. In each different culture, in each different epoch, playgrounds take on diverse ideologies, possibilities and potentialities.[i]
Playgrounds are physical manifestations of how we do urban play and civic engagement and are as such in situ places to play with present and future scenarios. The metaphor of the playground is fertile ground for talking about, and playing with, intergenerational connection in public space. It can be a way of rethinking urban design which puts people and play at the centre.
We deployed the Superilla as a prompt, invitation, interface and living lab for codesigning for inclusive and playful urban futures.
[i] In 2014, Reina Sofia (Madrid) curated Playgrounds: reinventing the square. The exhibition forwarded a “historical-artistic approach to the space of play” to understand it “as an area that breaks up daily life, transgresses and appropriates the public sphere”. It sought to highlight the ways in which the urban can be actively transgressed through two common premises: undertaking public space as a place for the construction of the public sphere and understanding that play is an insoluble part of this equation.
Playgrounds are powerful vehicles for understanding cultural and social ways of being in urban spaces. Born out of post war civic re-invention of the city, they are powerful sites for intergenerational play. They activate public spaces in creative ways. Their design speaks of cultural and historical milieu. They are sites for quotidian activism which combines multiple cartographies such as nature, visible and invisible infrastructures, people, and situations. They are uneven sites for vulnerable agencies of human and more-than-humans.
Playgrounds are barometers for how play, urban spatiality and sociality are understood culturally and offer the potential to be platforms to develop creative and alternative scenarios for urban environments. In each different culture, in each different epoch, playgrounds take on diverse ideologies, possibilities and potentialities.[i]
Playgrounds are physical manifestations of how we do urban play and civic engagement and are as such in situ places to play with present and future scenarios. The metaphor of the playground is fertile ground for talking about, and playing with, intergenerational connection in public space. It can be a way of rethinking urban design which puts people and play at the centre.
We deployed the Superilla as a prompt, invitation, interface and living lab for codesigning for inclusive and playful urban futures.
[i] In 2014, Reina Sofia (Madrid) curated Playgrounds: reinventing the square. The exhibition forwarded a “historical-artistic approach to the space of play” to understand it “as an area that breaks up daily life, transgresses and appropriates the public sphere”. It sought to highlight the ways in which the urban can be actively transgressed through two common premises: undertaking public space as a place for the construction of the public sphere and understanding that play is an insoluble part of this equation.
