Playable Cities: the city that plays together, stays together
Forget
about smart cities, Playable City ideas – like Bristol’s water slide or
its temporary play streets – are a human response to the coldness and
anonymity of the urban environment
Luke Jerram’s
crowdfunded Park and Slide project temporarily transformed Park Street
in Bristol into a 95-metre water slide open to the public
During the past year in Bristol you could have plunged down a 300ft water slide on one of the city’s main shopping streets, had a text message conversation with a lamppost, let your children play outside during a temporary street closure, or played a zombie chase game around the city centre.
All good fun, you might or might not think. But the people behind
these and other similar projects believe they add up to much more than a
good laugh. Next week, many of them are meeting for a conference at
Bristol’s Watershed on Making the City Playable.
Although their work is in many ways disparate, three key ideas bring
them together. First, that cities create problems of living that can
only be addressed by collective action. Second, the sense that the
well-being of communities cannot be left to local authorities; citizens
need to take control of their own surroundings. Third, an optimism that
we can do more than just tackle problems one by one. By encouraging
public activities that actively bring joy, we can create a happier, more
cohesive urban future.
The Playable City movement can be seen as a creative response to the
coldness and anonymity of the urban environment, which technology
threatens to make even worse. Conference organiser Clare Reddington
told me of her despair over visions of “smart cities” where technology
aims to remove all the friction from our movements, guiding us by smart
phone to exactly where we want to be. For Reddington, this is
“over-planned” and all about “how fast you can get from one place to
another”. It’s also a vision tailored for tech geeks rather than the
whole community. She recalls a workshop in Europe’s then Capital of
Culture – Guimarães in Portugal – in which the older people feared being
left increasingly alone and cut off in a world in which “everything is
going to be mediated by a screen”.
Candy Chang’s Before I Die … interactive public art project.Photograph: Randy Duchaine/Alamy
Play might appear to be a rather frivolous response to this, but in
its broad sense it simply means any kind of enjoyable activity which is
not a functional means to an end. In cities, people are often completely
wrapped up in what they have to do, where they need to get to next. It
is no accident that many film-makers and artists have represented cities
as machines in which people scurry around like lab rats. Play is about
interrupting the utilitarian efficiency of the urban environment and
getting people to think about what actually makes us human.
This is not an idea confined to quirky eccentrics in the south west
of England. The playable city meme has travelled to Sweden, Texas, Japan
and China. There was also a recent playable city conference in Brazil,
in which urban planner and policy-maker Claudio Marinho participated. He told me that for him the notion of the playable city arises from the need for “an affectionate
re-appropriation of public places to get back city-centre life from our
bunker-high-rise isolation.” In Brazil, he sees high-rise apartments
behind walls “creating non-place neighbourhoods”, a place being a “space
with meaning, history, narratives”.
Similarly, Usman Haque’s
interest in playable cities is “motivated by exploring how people relate
to each other and their spaces around them; how they express their
agency and take ownership of their environments, and the structures of
participation through which they collaborate with neighbours to take
ownership of their environments collectively.” For instance, his permanent installation in Bradford’s City Park
sees fountains and lights respond to the movement of the people around
the space. By trial and error they can learn how to choreograph them.
Only by giving citizens the ability to creatively shape their own
environment can their agency and ownership develop. “I’m interested in
how the designer of a system can best support ordinary people’s
creativity,” says Haque, “by being neither too prescriptive, and
therefore unable to accommodate the unplanned, nor too unspecified, and
therefore giving no firm take-off points, for people to contribute
meaningfully.”
Paolo Cirio’s
Street Ghosts featured life-sized pictures of people found on Google’s
Street View printed and posted at the same spot where they were taken
For the playable city to thrive, it requires cooperation from local
authorities, something that Reddington says is very forthcoming in
Bristol which “has a unique set of permission structures that enables
this stuff to happy really easily”. There are very clear incentives for
councils to come on board. Since Rome, legislators have acknowledged
that a thriving metropolis requires bread and circuses, more than just
the bare essentials. Many of the playable city ideas provide very cheap
ways of doing this.
Artist Luke Jerram’s “park and slide” water slide was crowdfunded, so
the council only needed to close the street. His similarly low-budget “Play Me, I’m Yours” project has seen 1,300 pianos installed in public spaces in 45 cities around the world.
All councils have to do to allow street play is to create a statutory instrument like Bristol’s Temporary Play Street Order
and make it easy to obtain. A straightforward form needs to be
completed six weeks before the first closure, and roads can be closed as
often as once a week for a maximum of three hours, as long as residents
are allowed vehicular access. Once granted, a TPS order is valid for 12
months. Volunteer parents take care of the rest. Shadowing, the winner of the 2014
Playable City award, has a budget of £30,000, which is not a lot for a
city-wide arts initiative. From 11 September Jonathan Chomko and Matthew
Rosier’s creation “will give memory to eight of Bristol’s city lights,
enabling them to record and play back the shadows of those who pass
underneath”.
Many of these projects might sound like rather contrived and
artificial ways of dealing with the problems of atomised urban living.
That is for a good reason. Cities are in a sense artificial, and if they
have a natural form at all, it is a cold and alienating one. It
requires self-conscious, artificial interventions to disrupt this.
2.8 Hours Later - a city-wide zombie chase game that regularly takes places in Sheffield and London
There is, however, nothing unnatural about the objective,
particularly when it affects children. “Over the past few generations,
the idea of the whole city being a child’s playground has been lost and
outside play is now generally restricted to designated times and places
and managed by adults,” says Playing Out’s director Alice Ferguson. “The
ability to ‘play out’ independently, to discover one’s own city and
develop skills, resilience and self-reliance cannot be replaced by this
type of ‘managed’ play.”
It’s hard to object to anything which is, as Reddington says, about
“connection, community and people”, which in Marinho’s words aims to
“make cities new and renewed with landscape (urban memories), texture
(human scale) and affection (place appropriation).” But does it really
work? Objective assessment is inherently difficult, since it is not as
though the desired outcomes are easily quantifiable. Nonetheless,
Watershed is working with the University of the West of England to get a
PhD researcher to work on how to qualitatively assess the benefits of
playable projects.
Some ideas are bound to be better than others. But the value of the
playable city idea can easily be seen if it is placed in its context, as
very much part of a broader movement aimed at softening the edges of
the urban environment and engaging people more with each other and their
surroundings. There are now around 50 “incredible edible”
towns and cities in Britain, which grow fruit and vegetables in public
spaces for everyone to share. Bristol-based Playing Out is a pivotal
member of a community of groups nationwide
which strive to open up roads to pedestrians. All of these initiatives
aim to give a more human, friendly face to our concrete and tarmac
world. Behind them all is a simple maxim that rings true: the city that
plays together, stays together.
Tape corrugated plastic to top *so rain does not collect) , add logo ($8)
...and a bunch of children's books and possibly magazines for adults
then we put them together and place them in a public space with seating
and if we are successful we get something that looks like this...
Poster on community garden fence letting public know about reader
Bird Feeders for Readers are a lot like Little Free Libraries, the difference being Little Free Libraries work on the Take a Book/Leave a Book principal . Bird Feeders for Readers childrens books and magazines for adults are not meant to circulate, they are meant to be read while you are at a park and returned when you leave.
Note: All access organizers are not UV protected. They will be good for at least a year, if your outdoor library is working well at that time, consider replacing this with a more permanent unit
Some of the Benefits of Outdoor Reading Rooms:
Lack of Libraries and Bookstores
There used to be a lot of
bookstores in our neighborhoods where people could go to browse books and read magazines. There aren't a lot of these anymore.
Our
neighborhoods do still have libraries, but there aren't a great number
of these. And besides when the weather is good, wouldn't you rather be
reading outdoors?
Literacy-
Studies have shown that"Giving Children Access to Print Materials Improves Reading Performance" link and " the first
step any literacy campaign needs to take is to make sure children have
access to plenty of books."link
This map shows the libraries of community board 4. There are just 2, for a rather large area. Ain't many bookstores anymore here either. Outdoor reading rooms in our public spaces can help fill the gap of access to print reading materials.
Lack of Adult Activities in Neighborhood Parks
Many
of Manhattan's neighborhoods lack a sufficient quantity of green
spaces. But beyond a lack of open space there is even a greater problem
with our public spaces. As it turns out many of Manhattans public
spaces offer their adult users little more then a bench to sit on.
This is an example of a neighborhood park offers adults a place to sit and little else
Alternative to Food Recreation
The major activity offering of our Dept of Transportation Plazas and Parks Dept. Conservancy Parks seems to be offering people something to eat.
The yellow dots are "food recreation" locations in parks, plazas, and privately owned public spaces. The green dots are activities recreation in the same area.There are 17 food vendors in these spaces. Only 3 spaces in this same area offer active recreation.
Hey, food is great, but offering only "food recreation" as an activity in our public spaces helps to fuel our obesity crisis.
Little Free Library books are meant to be taken, they are a success when person takes care of unit (constant restocking)
Little Free Library PEN Writes Union -Failures -no one restocks library
Great designs-no books when i visited
Penn South Laundry room Book/ Magazine Recycling -There is no one keeper of the units , tenants have the responsibility to restock themselves and constantly do so
Bird Feeders for Readers are not meant to be Libraries they are Outdoor Reading Rooms -no taking of books
Why have Outdoor Reading Rooms
Lack of Libraries in many neighborhoods
Lack of Bookstores The number of bookstores in Manhattan fell drastically between 2000 and 2012,plummeting by almost 30 percent.
Even large chains like Barnes & Noble, once painted as the enemy of
independent bookstores, have not been immune to the industry’s woes.
Borders, which had five outlets in Manhattan, declared bankruptcy in
2011. Several Barnes & Nobles have closed throughout the city in
recent years. NYT
Literacy stuff
Research
consistently shows that children who live in low-income neighborhoods
have little access to reading material in
their public libraries, in their schools, and at home. After
investigating access to reading material in different neighborhoods,
Neuman and Celano (2001) concluded that that " ... children in
middle-income neighborhoods were likely to be deluged with a wide
variety of reading materials. However, children from poor neighborhoods
would have to aggressively and persistently seek them out" (p. 15).
If
more access leads to more reading, and if more reading leads to better
reading, writing, spelling, grammar, and a larger vocabulary (for
overwhelming evidence, see Krashen, 2004), this means that the first
step any literacy campaign needs to take is to make sure children have
access to plenty of books.link
Bryant Park-Stocking outdoor reading room partially through magazine subscriptions
Bryant Park 300-500 users a day.
Magazine subscriptions
Under $5.00
$5 to $10
-Either each locations gets to choose $50 in magazines
or 2 locationswill get to choose $100 of magazines
-To get magazines someone(s) at garden must volunteer to receive magazines and bring to garden
-ask garden keepers if willing to do, gardens that say yes get magazines