Urban Play as a Means to Activating the City | Rennen Zunder

URBAN PLAY AS A MEANS FOR ACTIVATING CITIES

BY RENNEN ZUNDER, URBAN DESIGNER, Tel Aviv - Jaffa

The UN-Habitat opened its report State of the World’s Cities 2012/13 with the claim - “The City is the Home of Prosperity. It is the place where human beings find satisfaction of basic need and access to essential public goods. The city is also where ambitions, aspirations and other material and immaterial aspects of life are realized, providing contentment and happiness and increasing the prospects of individual and collective well-being”. The report presents a new measurement tool – The City Prosperity Index – defining a prosperous city as one that provides five conditions: Productivity (generating income and employment); Infrastructure development (amenities); Quality of life (public spaces and social services); Equity and social inclusion (ensures distribution of the prosperous city benefits); Environmental sustainability.
Yet, even in cities that score high on this index, such as Tel Aviv, an intangible element is missing. “There are some who experience loneliness and alienation. Certain parts of the city, particularly the city center, have lost their communal character, and solidarity amongst residents must be strengthened”

This phenomena is the result of fewer acquaintances occurring in public spaces of contemporary cities, the consequence of reduced interaction and engagement between people. It was not the case when cities were smaller and had lower rise/lower density fabrics. Jane Jacobs wrote: “In a town of 5,000-10,000 population you run into people you also know at work, or went to school with, or see at church, or people who are your children’s teachers, or have sold or given you professional or artisan’s services, or whom you know by reputation. But a population of 5,000 or 10,000 residents in a big city has no such innate degree of natural cross-connections within itself” . Nowadays, residents from the same building don’t bother to get acquainted when riding together in elevators, because a large proportion of tenants are on rental, rapidly revolving. Interaction and engagement levels are even lower in public spaces - e.g. sidewalks, public transit, even parks. Adults mind their own business, uncomfortable to interact, and walk or sit with their eyes glued to the smart phone screen. Wary of their children wandering outdoors, they prefer retaining them at home, with locked doors. Teenagers commute wearing headphones and listening to music. These age groups isolate themselves from the social and physical surroundings and unaware of what’s going on around them. Senior citizens sit on benches, watch all these behaviours with dismay, feeling lonely and alienated by their own city they grew up in.
This phenomena could be more severe in intercultural cities, where locals are wary of immigrants, and immigrants often end up residing in segregated neighbourhoods on the city outskirts, far away from the city centre public spaces.

The thesis and project proposals suggests that due to its unique characteristics, urban play has the potential to overcome these barriers and to entice interaction and engagement between citizens, leading to a social activation of the city. The project has three main themes:
• The thesis suggests that urban play can activate cities, and should be a design factor to consider for urban designers in any city program
• The tactical urban design proposal demonstrates this, by retrofitting public spaces, to pop up into community play-spaces during low utilization periods (e.g. parking lots, squares, pockets), designed for all ages to play simultaneously.
• The strategic urban plan proposal, with social objectives, is to create a city-wide network of such community play-spaces that can activate the entire city. In addition, they will serve as placeholders to protect and preserve these open public spaces for future developments.

Play has many unique characteristics that make it so enticing for interaction and engagement to occur between people:
a. Participants from any diverse background, whether race, gender, age, language, social, economic, educational - can all play together as long as they know the play or game rules. Therefore universal games, e.g. many sports, table games, surface games, music and dance provide opportunity for engagement.
b. In the temporary world of play, all players have the same possibilities and chances to win the game, so there is perfect equality in play, a situation which does not apply in the real world. A high school teenager from a poor neighbourhood and a powerful and wealthy person have equal chances and possibilities to win a game playing against each other, whether basketball or chess! The winner gets full praise, recognition and prize for his performance.
c. The goals of play are either to win (the gratification is excelling), to explore our wishes and desires (often with mimicry – e.g. the boy hammers a nail into the wood like his father, or wears a Batman costume), or to simply have fun without being criticized. Play never intends to harm the other player intentionally, or to gain anything materialistic from the other.
d. Play rules can override the “personal and intimate space barriers” (Edward Hall, Proxemics Theory, 1963) we wish others to respect. On a bus, should someone touch someone else, it would be considered invading privacy. In sports, dance or other games that allow physical contact, the rules of the games are known to the players, therefore acknowledged and accepted.

On the individual level, it is in play that our desire for a perfect world under our complete control is satisfied, and it is there that all the meanings of play meet: the theatrical play that can take us out of the real world into another world born of imagination and illusion (the word “illusion”, from in ludere, literally means in play); play as a spontaneous activity occurring within freely chosen limits; play as a process or a way of acting; play as a manifestation of choice. Architect Richard Dattner wrote: “That is what Schiller meant when he wrote that man is only completely human when he is playing, for play is the expression of human freedom, and, in a large sense, play is freedom.”
On the urban level, play can serve as civil and social function. Johan Huizinga, the Dutch anthropologist who wrote the groundbreaking, Homo Ludens, claimed: “Play promotes the formation of social groupings” . The architect Aldo van Eyck proved in the early 1950’s that a network of playgrounds spread across Amsterdam created interaction between children and their supervising parents/grandparents of the many scattered communities and neighborhoods of the city. “Emerging in the cracks and interstices of the city and overlaid upon the existing urban fabric, the playgrounds (of van Eyck in Amsterdam) are also forerunners of the interstitial approach to the city that Kevin Lynch was later to refer to as ‘knots of density’, which he proposed to link through a ‘polycentred net’. There are major differences between Van Eyck and Lynch, but they do share an opposition to the CIAM idea of a single, central, monocentric ‘heart of the city’ or ‘core’. Van Eyck’s design for this galaxy, this ‘starry sky’ of hundreds of playgrounds in postwar Amsterdam, it is here that one of the great breakthroughs of an architecture of ‘place’ occurred, opening a new window into new potentials of place where there had been nothing before but a void and empty space” (Editor Liane Lefaivre, Aldo van Eyck, the playgounds and the city, 2002, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam).

This project proposes cities to create a large network of neighbourhood play-spaces, either in temporary vacant lots or in existing lots, designing multi-function use on a time sharing base.
A network of play-spaces has a greater goal – developing interaction and engagement between residents from neighborhoods of the entire city. This can be achieved by designing each play-space differently, each one with unique attractions and surprising ideas that provides a different experience. Children, youth and adults will explore the network and meet new people from other communities and neighborhoods. This could lead to reciprocation or competitions between groups from different communities. Spectators from the competing neighborhoods and communities might also attend. The outcome would facilitate integration, identity, pride, tolerance, trust, friendships and fun.

The photos shown here, are from a project designed for the city Tel-Aviv, flipping public city owned parking lots into community play-spaces in the afternoons until mornings, hours when the parking function are at low capacity. The “pop-up” design is such that the parking lot functions in full capacity during daytime use.
The target for each play-space should be to accommodate at least 25-50 players per hour, for over 5 hours per day, with seating for additional spectators (family, friends, neighbours and guests). That’s an additional 3,750 to 7,500 monthly play hours per neighbourhood play-space. Each network of 100 play-spaces, provides 375,000 to 750,000 additional monthly play hours for the entire city.

The result is a playing city, with its citizens more tolerant, engaging, socializing, activating and energizing the city!

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The author was born in Canada, B.Sc. Engineering, INSEAD M.B.A., Masters in Urban Design.
Contacts: [email protected] www.rennenzunder.com fb rennenzunder.designer
© 2016 Rennen Zunder. All Rights Reserve