Make the city playable: The Playable City Movement

Piano staircase Stockholm

The universal Playable City movement creatively reacts to the cold, industrial, urban environment. Running counter to boring, machinelike cities where technology enhances the fear of isolation. A global human counterpoise to the anonymous, monotonous smart city, in which (swiping) screens predominate personal lives.  

The socio cultural movement has traveled to China, Brussels, Sweden, Brazil, Sheffield, Bristol, Italy, Texas, Japan and London, offering a gateway to a city of providence, hospitality and openness. Recently city conferences have been held in Brazil and Bristol. 

Urban planner Claudio Marinho explains that the project arises from the need for an affectionate re-appropriation of public places to get city-centre life back from our bunker-high-rise isolation. He aims to renew cities with landscape (urban memories), texture (human scale) and affection (place appropriation).
Bristol's conference organizer Clare Reddington claims smart cities are over-planned, with people hurrying like lab rats, guided by smart phones and paralyzed by technology. A safe urban playground has become a utopian ideal in the restricted setting of adult managed play. 

The key idea behind the Playable City project is the fact that urban living difficulties may only be addressed by collective action. 
A sense of communal well-being is not an issue to be solved by local authorities(but nevertheless requires their co operation), quite on the contrary: citizens need to be able to take control of their own surroundings. When given this creative ability, citizens can make profound contributions to their living area. The encouragement of public activities brings joy.

Much more than a trivial good laugh, play refers to any kind of pleasant activity which can act as an interlude in the city's functional productivity and stimulate individuals to reflect on what actually makes us human. Play ground cities combine art and play to ameliorate urban living. Self-conscious, artificial interventions are applied to unsettle our self made alienating, concrete cities, which are packed with people and filled with conflict.

There are easy, cheap ways of achieving a more human, friendly community. To add color to a grey, depressing society, many thinkers and artists have been commissioned. From Stockholm's Piano Staircase to Bogotá's traffic mimes, there are no restrictions to make people laugh.
This year Bristol allowed artist Luke Jerram to transform Bristol’s Park Street, one of the main shopping streets, into 95-metre a giant water slide open to the public.  His other low-budget Play Me, I’m Yours project has seen 1300 pianos installed in public spaces in 45 cities around the world. Other humoristic installations included temporary play streets,  a zombie chasing game and a text message conversation with a lamppost.

In Bradford artist Usman Haque designed a permanent installation of fountains and lights that respond to people's movements. Paolo Cirio's Street Ghosts consisted of life-sized printed pictures of people found on Google's Street View. In Britain there are around fifty incredible edible towns and cities, which grow fruit and vegetables for everyone to share. 

This unusual playfulness creates a happy city environment, it connects its citizens to each other and engages them to think about the ways of interrelating community and people.

A tube piano, unexpected light and sound installations, a narrated fairy tale on the way to the office, ...  are all simple but highly effective city interventions to generate an incentive, interesting atmosphere, as if on a delightful exploration in an exotic country.

Playable Cities: the city that plays together, stays together.
Let's all stop taking ourselves too seriously. It's about time we have some fun, play and be filled with wonder!

Giant water slide