PUBLIC SPACE AND PLAY THEORY, READING AACHEN THROUGH PLAY THEORY (original) (raw)
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IV. International Architectural Sciences and Applications Symposium, 2024
Play is commonly recognized as a creative and productive activity that fosters a child's innovative potential. However, its significance extends beyond childhood; it serves as a critical commentary on the consumption and rationality prevalent in contemporary urban life. Playful activities often manifest as spontaneous and voluntary actions, serving as a means for individuals to assert ownership over space. This ownership isn't defined by specific, written, and negotiated regulatory systems but rather by the ability of city residents to access and transform spaces through their lived experiences in the city. It represents a fusion of playful actions, creating spaces for both use and production that transcend the privatization of urban areas. This research explores the interaction between play theory and urban design in shaping inclusive public spaces and addressing issues related to space privatization. With a focus on community involvement, particularly through participatory design approaches, it aims to align spaces with diverse needs, as exemplified by public spaces in the Frankenberger Neighborhood in Aachen. Through observations and surveys, the study aims to illustrate how playful design fosters unique connections between people and places, thereby revitalizing public areas. The research advocates for the integration of play into design processes to inspire communal contribution, promote playfulness, encourage social engagement, and cultivate a deeper sense of ownership over space.
Design of Urban Public Spaces: Intent vs. Reality
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This study investigated how two public spaces for sport and recreation were utilized by different user groups, and how this aligned with the initial design objectives for these spaces. Two newly built urban spaces situated in Copenhagen, Denmark, provided the context for this investigation. The System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities (SOPARC) was used to examine the physical activity of users in these two urban spaces. The architects responsible for designing each space were interviewed to ascertain the intended target group of each space and to unravel the reasons behind the design decisions. The SOPARC observations revealed that males were more vigorously active than females when using the recreation facilities, and the observed users did not align with the intended target groups. The interviews suggested that design decisions were based on minimal interdisciplinary knowledge, and that expert knowledge was chosen randomly. These findings point to a systematic lack ...
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This thesis deals with the design of play in public places; this can mean both pervasive games and other freer play activities. In these activities (as well as in many other game activities) the same game can spur many different ways to play it, and the same activity can be experienced differently by different players, and even differently on different occasions for the same player. An activity such as playing must be observed as a whole. The surrounding culture, player preconceptions and the emergent mood within the group will affect the experience.
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Current behaviour is something that has its origins in history, and yet design normally places emphasis on innovation rather than learning from what works. Often the design of an urban space fails because reviewing and evaluating designed past design has been forgotten. The same mistakes are repeated without considering similar unsuccessful examples. Over time theoretical and practical research in urban design has attempted to answer the question of what makes a successful public space. Approaches to the study of place have focussed on its different aspects. Theories interested in the meaning of place have focussed on the link between meaning and physical setting while designers mostly look at the link between physical setting and activity. However, studies have rarely linked these two approaches together. This paper describes research that aims to fill the gap between theory and practice by investigating the influence of natural design attributes on behaviour in a small urban space...
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The neighbourhoods, which create the very fabric of cities, are incomprehensibly changing by forces far out of the control of many residents. The vital connections to their communities, which can ensure a sustainable vitality across generations, are being broken by the effects of intensification, and by the ebb‐and‐flow of resident migration and commercial development. Our children can renew our connections to our cities, first by getting to know their own neighbourhoods, then by reaching out to fellow communities across the city. By offering our children a mechanism to explore how their urban environs are changing, they themselves can become experts on their local community with a genuine voice. The cultural importance of storytelling and play are finding their way back as rediscovered learning tools. Legends, myths, campfire lore, secrets between friends – these are the stories which leave their greatest impact on how we understand our ever‐changing world, and how we begin to see ...
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How do we create strong urban narratives? How do we create affection for our cities? Play, an essential part of any species' biological existence and development, can often be perceived as chaotic and derogatory to social and spatial order. Play is also often perceived as a creative force which generates social and spatial value. This paper looks at the design approaches to both chaotic and creative perceptions of publics at play in urban space. Commonly, Urban and Architectural Design constitutes reactive management of perceived chaos, which derogatorily effects our sensory and emotional engagement with space. Alternatively, Urban and Architectural Design can appeal to the creativity of play, by encouraging unsolicited novelty that is vital to strong experiential narratives in the city and iterating environments that encourage the emergence of physical, emotional and cultural invention. These perceptions of chaos and creativity affect the design methodology of professional prac...
Revitalization of Public Space: From “Non-Places” to Creative Playgrounds
Santalka: filosofija, komunikacija, 2011
The aim of this paper is to discuss a mechanism of revitalization of public spaces, focusing on creative tactics, which are used by groups of enthusiasts and public artists. The author argues that creative public actions, such as flash mobs and performances, take part in forming the identity of the place and could be considered as an act of place-making. Referring to the idea that a space is constituted through practices (Merleau-Ponty, de Certeau, Lefebvre, Augé), three components, crucial for "place making" are distinguished: actualization of bodily experience, shared emotional experience, and emerging new solidarities (temporal communities of citizens, who are involved in active reinterpretation of public space). Creative public actions reveal a potential of the place by establishing a distance from routine scenarios and by performing alternative use of spatial elements, and it is a periodicity of actions and reorganization of spatial elements that produces long-term impact on the public space. Although applying a distinction between "non-places" and "empty spaces", which was proposed by Z. Bauman (2000), it could be found, that a short-term playful intervention into spaces, which are "public, but not civic" (such as supermarkets, airports and train stations), could be the most effective tool for initiating interaction among passers-by and reforming the "emotional scape" of the place.
Public space offers a variety of opportunities and experiences. Urban spaces and their activities on the one hand offer and generate, change and spontaneity, but also interruption and troubles on the other hand. The density and diversity of a city also leads to tensions, contradictions and conflicts, but also to exchange, development and interaction. Urban design in the traditional sense usually followed clearly defined objectives such as order, functionality and comfort. Managers, designers and economists often try to use these spaces for clear guidelines. This leads to contradiction because human behavior has no clear rational rules, much more could we say that it is unpredictable. The approaches of many artists to bring more diversity, spontaneity and game into this rooms are often referred as inefficient, ineffective and impractical. The variety public space can provide is also additionally exploited by governments and investors to increase power and profit for themselves.
The Spielraum: Making room for play in Urban Planning and Design
International Conference “Urban renewal and resilience: cities in comparative perspective", European Association for Urban History - ΕΑUH, Rome, 2018
From Red Vienna's "All for the children" motto to contemporary movements for a child-centered approach in urban planning and design, such as the European Network for Child Friendly Cities, children's play in urban space has its own "chapter"-albeit minor and peripheral-in the official urban history of cities. Whether in planning new districts, as in Le Corbusier's and Sert's Modernist manifestos or in interventions in existing ones, such as Aldo van Eyck's playgrounds in postwar Amsterdam, the last one hundred years have seen a variety in the degree in which children and their need for play in open space have been taken into account. The postwar rebuilding of cities, based on functional separation in most Western countries, dismantled the continuum of the traditional city and brought the disappearance of the street and the square as the theater of everydayness, and along with that, of the vital spaces for urban children to play and experience city life. The emergence of the playground as the specific space for the child in the city seemed inevitable, especially as cities were proclaimed unsafe due to the predominance of cars. The paper traces back the linkages between postwar urban planning ideas and realizations and their conscious and unconscious repercussions on children's lives, using as primary examples the story of New York's playgrounds, on one hand, and the case of Amsterdam, with the more than eight hundred play spaces designed by Aldo van Eyck, on the other. Examining the design principles of the two examples, it focuses on their differences in the programming and planning scale, in their actual design and in the "narratives" they tell about children's social position in the two, quite different, social and ethnic contexts. The paper introduces a new interpretative concept to analyze the convergence of intention and realization as far as children's play in the urban context is concerned: the Spielraum, a paradigm or a "playful spirit" that operates in the crevices of a system of production of urban space. Based on Michel de Certeau's distinction between "strategies" and "tactics," the Spielraum argues for the reintroduction of the concept of play in the contemporary city. As the quest for resilience and sustainability becomes more and more critical, cities should be reclaiming space for once-forgotten "functions" such as play, through the activation of its users, children included.