User:Mania/synopsis
Species of spaces and other pieces, Georges Perec, 1974
A)
Perec's text is a reflection on how we experience space, from the smallest—like a page or a bed to streets, cities, and the world.
By sharing his observations of everyday details, Perec describes how spaces shape our lives. In his opinion, the problem is not inventing space anew, but how we question that space, how we read it. His text collects these observations, which he often lists in the form of inventories. He also asks questions about how we observe, live, and move. The text encourages the reader to pay attention to ordinary places in a new way. Perec sees cities as spaces full of surprises, and with his book, he created a place for them. He explores how we engage with our everyday surroundings. We do not think enough about these familiar places, and even the most well-known spaces hide deeper meanings.
B)
Perec lists his observations in the form of an inventory. In his view, everyday life around us is not something obvious—as it turns out, seeing is not as easy and self-evident as it might first seem. He wrote down what he saw, questioning what demanded his attention and what did not, giving equal importance to things that could easily go unnoticed.
Similarly, I try in my notes to list what happens before my eyes, the living fabric of the city—not just what loudly calls for my attention. Reading my lists of what I see in space, it becomes clearer what is missing in it. Or who is not included in that list. I searched for lists from my notebooks. These are mostly records from my immediate surroundings but also from other places in Rotterdam. I try to look at a place that seems familiar to me, as if I know it like my own pocket, but from a new perspective. Recording space as text...
Perec suggests practical exercices to notice how space changes when, for example, we choose a different staircase. He propose to write down what is the most obvious to describe a street. Looking at the building you live in—look upwards at the building you live in... if it is a new building, try to remember what was there before. It is not just about an aesthetic experience but about discovering those hidden meanings.
At the very beginning of the book, when he describes his observations starting from the smallest spaces, like a piece of paper, he says, "I travel across it" → this greatly feeds my thinking about the book and the space the book creates. I think of a book as a physical object that occupies space but also creates it—whether it is space through a more intimate experience, giving room for reflection, or transporting us to other times, to places we can only visit in dreams. Between words, there is so much space on the paper. But I also think about it's surface. What have I assumed about the magazine's form or function, and how can I subvert those assumptions?
Smooth City, René Boer
A)
In Smooth City, René Boer examines how cities are becoming more controlled, predictable, and optimized for efficiency. Everything runs smoothly, clean, and designed for convenience—but at the cost of spontaneity and diversity. It doesn’t come from nowhere. Boer argues that this “smoothness” is driven by power structures, design decisions, and economic forces that prioritize investment, efficiency, and corporate interests over real urban communities. Digital technologies make services instant, and we basically don’t even need to leave the house. Avoiding conversation, we can order food delivery through existing apps. We also have dating platforms, these services are seamless and fast, but at the same time, they tighten control over public space. In such a city, difference and unpredictability become flattened. This way, the city serves the needs of a selected group, eliminating those who don’t fit the expectations. But is this perfection worth it? Boer stands for more open places that allow for resistance, creativity, and real human connections.
B)
The kind of city I desire is in agreement with Boer, who questions that a well-functioning city must be a strictly controlled one. Boer advocates for more open spaces that allow for resistance, creativity, and genuine human connections. I would like my project to be driven by similar values. This text is a direct inspiration for considerations about what should guide a magazine published in the city. This question, which is so present in Boer’s text: How we as designers make sure that we don’t work only toward the smooth city, also inspires my work. I am curious about what role the magazine can play in this. A magazine that plays with paper—it only takes a fold, and it could become an object that can be played outside and shared with others... so I treat these paper tools as an invitation to engage with a space. Maybe it is not the most important thing to own this publication, which is why I am not bound by the traditional magazine format. On the contrary, I am curious about what happens when the magazine leaves its traditional framework. I would like my publication to be passed from hand to hand. And so, how it will be distributed plays an important role in this project.
The result of the described urban condition is a city that gives the impression of being staged. This is where my fascination in scripts that would be open to intepretation came from. But it turns out that with this project, I am not trying to formulate a set of scripts. I am much more interested in these paper tools.
Playtime, Directed by Jacques Tati, France, Italy, 1967
"In Play Time, Tati’s character, M. Hulot, and a group of American tourists attempt to navigate a futuristic Paris constructed of straight lines, modernist glass and steel high-rise buildings, multi-lane roadways, and cold, artificial furnishings.
Play Time is a very funny film with the humour created through circumstances brought about by a barrage of modern impracticalities and the bumbling Hulot’s ( plated by Tati himself) attempts to navigate the overwhelming changes that have transformed the Paris he once knew."
https://www.dedeceblog.com/2014/11/11/jacques-tati-playtime/
Situationist Times, Jacqueline de Jong
A)
Jacqueline de Jong started magazine The Situationist Times in 1962 as a response to internal conflicts within the Situationist International (SI). She had been involved with the SI, a radical artistic and political movement that sought to challenge capitalist culture and everyday life through détournement (appropriation and recontextualization of media) and psychogeography (exploring urban environments for new meanings). De Jong was inspired by the Situationist movement but wanted to do something with a more autonomous approach, less focused on politics and more on creativity. Unlike Internationale Situationniste, controlled by Debord and focused on theory and political critique, The Situationist Times was more open ,and visually rich, mixing mathematics, topology, linguistics, and radical politics freely. It was experimental, playful, and completely independent—mixing art, theory, and found images. De Jong was interested in making the magazine more about creative connections than strict ideology. The magazine didn’t follow a strict format; instead, it brought together a mix of essays, drawings, and unexpected visual connections. Each issue explored a different theme, like knots, labyrinths, and rings. The Situationist Times was an experiment in making connections, and seeing the world in a different way. The magazine was a way to keep SI movement’s experimental and multi-disciplinary spirit, without strict ideological constraints.
Superstructures (Notes on Experimental Jetset / Volume 2)
A)
it's a book and exhibition by the Amsterdam-based design collective Experimental Jetset, exploring the connection between city and language. The project looks at four key historical movements—Constructivism, the Situationist International, Provo, and Post-Punk to look into how signs, symbols and architecture convey meaning – and how language itself shapes how we experience cities, how urban environments and language influence each other. The book make a point that cities are dynamic combinations of signs, texts and symbols that influence how we think, move and interact. Looking at the historical movements of Constructivism, the Situationist International, Provo, and Post-Punk, this project shows that language is not just something we read, but something we experience in urban spaces.
B)
It is a very inspiring thought for me to think of the city as a text, something to be read, rewritten, and reimagined. The way I referred to the concept of reading the city was because I wanted to emphasize that observing the city is not a cold act from a distance, that by moving around the city, making contacts, paying attention, touching textures, I also discover them. Reading a city has a lot to do with experiencing the city, it can be read with both eyes and feet. Experimental jetset referred to How protest movements used typography in urban space (e.g., graffiti, posters, leaflets). They gathered materials from four moves; like historical newspapers, protest posters, DIY zines to show how printed language influence urban culture. This is new in my research and I don't know yet how and what I can use from it, but I feel that this example pushes my research forward, I'm glad I dug it out, because before this example I felt like I was stuck in a pond, and here it's right under my nose, a critical reference to city as text, paying attention to very specific examples between DIY culture (zines, flyers) and urban resistance. How protest movements used typography in urban space. Perhaps the only common thing I've touched on so far is how city planning and street signs dictate movement and meaning.
Future Book(s) Sharing Ideas on Books and (Art) Publishing
https://valiz.nl/en/publications/future-book-s-2
<3
Urban Play
Urban Play
In Urban Play by Fabio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez, the desribe the power of play in engaging with the city. The chapter I have read so far; "Orchestrating Serendipity" talks about how urban spaces can encourage unexpected, fun interactions. How can cities facilitate chance encounters through technology, but technology that does not add to efficiency and continuous productivity, but, through sweetly unproductive fun, favors the exploration of space in an unusual way, the establishment of connections. They say that technology has the power to change not when it is purely functional, but when it becomes fun at its core. It talks about how play contributes to different points of view and to involvement in collective action. "play creates new possibilities along with unintended and unexpected scenarios of interaction".
Situationists methods
Reading list ( still to define what would be the most useful for now)
Roland Barthes – Semiology and the Urban (1967)
Barthes examines how cities function as texts, composed of signs that can be read and interpreted. He sees urban spaces as a system of language, where structures and movements communicate meaning.
Simon Sadler – The Situationist City (1999)
Covers the Situationist International and their dérive (drifting) strategies, linking the city as text with radical print experiments and ephemeral publications.
Bruno Latour – Paris: Invisible City (1998)
Examines the material networks of the city, like newspapers, pamphlets, and other printed matter that circulate within urban life. To see o see cities not just as places made of buildings and people but as dynamic networks of interactions between humans and objects.
Susan Stewart
"Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world. Originally published in 1984 (Johns Hopkins University Press), and now available in paperback for the first time, this highly original book draws on insights from semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist criticism. Addressing the relations of language to experience, the body to scale, and narratives to objects, Susan Stewart looks at the "miniature" as a metaphor for interiority and at the "gigantic" as an exaggeration of aspects of the exterior. In the final part of her essay Stewart examines the ways in which the "souvenir" and the "collection" are objects mediating experience in time and space."
I lost myself in
- Aspen magazine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_(magazine)
- Mail art
- Flexi disc----> "flexi discs were sometimes used as a means to include sound with printed material such as magazines and music instruction books. A flexi disc could be moulded with speech or music and bound into the text with a perforated seam, at very little cost and without any requirement for a hard binding."
PLAY
Urban Play
In Urban Play by Fabio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez, the desribe the power of play in engaging with the city. The chapter "Orchestrating Serendipity" talks about how urban spaces can encourage unexpected, fun interactions. How can cities facilitate chance encounters through technology, but technology that does not add to efficiency and continuous productivity, but, through sweetly unproductive fun, favors the exploration of space in an unusual way, the establishment of connections. They say that technology has the power to change not when it is purely functional, but when it becomes fun at its core. It talks about how play contributes to different points of view and to involvement in collective action. "play creates new possibilities along with unintended and unexpected scenarios of interaction".
Chapter EMBODYING FANTASIES page 29
That chapter suggests that fantasies connected to leisure and play can be freeing and appealing in creating spaces.
Emotions and play as spatial narratives
page 31 - part about situationists
"Situationists in postwar Europe explored how our environment affect our emotions and behaviors. Guy Debord's "Guide Psychogeographique de Paris" (1955) described th ecity not just in abstract representations of space but rather through the emotionsgenerated by different areas of the city "….
…p.31 As in the case of play in Huizinga's 1938 book Homo Luudens, the true goal of wandering is freedom; breaking the monotony of everyday life, roaming th estreets without destinatiom or purpose. For Debord, this is defiance of the spatial monotony in capitalist industrial city. Shifting the focus from the abstract component of symbolic representation to the sensous aspects of the city, th esitationists did not ask what the visitor or viewer thought but rather how they felt in the space. The idea was to understand th echoreorgaphy of spatialized emotions'
Page 58 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "In all these cases playfulness is seen as a strategy to appropraite spaces in unexpected ways, revealing perceptual and affective qualities that are usually subdued by established functions and uses. …….Yet regardless of how radical these activities are in resignifying urban spaces by emphasizing aspects that we take for granted and and dont bother to pay close attention to, the materiality of spaces appropriated during urban sports or pervasive games remains the same before, during and after these activities."
Then the autor continue with the qestion: " what if spaces could dynamically respond to how people approprate them, and playfulness transform and even generate spaces purposfuly designed to foster emotions, not efficiency?
Page 64 -
The city as playground
situationists- Drifting through the city seen as a political act
Games with GPS that can turn any space into a playground or better to say play spaces
ALDO VAN EYCK AND THE CITY AS PLAYGROUND
From the arcticle: https://merijnoudenampsen.org/2013/03/27/aldo-van-eyck-and-the-city-as-playground/
- transforming neglected urban areas into play spaces
- how play can be a form of resistance against the alienation often found in modern cities
- article makes a link to Situationist's - Situationists used play and spontaneity as a way to reclaim public space. In doing so, they questioned social norms and what behaviors were acceptable.
"Different elements of the playgrounds represented a break with the past. First and foremost, the playgrounds proposed a different conception of space. Van Eyck consciously designed the equipment in a very minimalist way, to stimulate the imagination of the users (the children), the idea being that they could appropriate the space by its openness to interpretation. "
"The focus on how space could be appropriated, stood in clear opposition to the prevailing modernist conception of space in architecture, most famously formulated by Giedion in his classic Space, Time and Architecture. Here he defined the essence of modernist architecture as the merger of space and time, creating the experience of movement (9). Van Eyck’s concerns were of a completely different nature: “Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion” (10). The question raised was not the emulation of movement towards some unknown horizon, the archetypical uprootedness of the experience of modernity (11), but exactly the opposite: how can people make space their own and create a subjective “sense of place”? How to feel at home in the modern city, this machine of mass rationalization? The transitory playground was “place” and “occasion” combined."
"In that context, also the notion of play gained symbolic importance. In 1938, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens (14), a book on the historical importance of the element of play in culture; Constant Nieuwenhuys used the idea as the basis for his critique on urbanism. Much like Aldo van Eyck, he was deeply critical of the functionalist architecture of the postwar period. Together with Guy Debord, he drafted the now famous tract on Unitary Urbanism that proclaimed the advent of a society of mass creativity. Due to mechanization, Constant proposed, Homo Faber, the traditional working man of industrial society, would be replaced by Homo Ludens, the playful man, or creative man, in postindustrial society (15). The Situationists took this element of play and developed it into one of their core notions, as Debord would state: “Due to its marginal existence in relation to the oppressive reality of work, play is often regarded as fictitious. But the work of the situationists is precisely the preparation of ludic possibilities to come” (16). The situationists, whose ideas came to play an important role in the ’68 rebellion, developed the notion of play into a subversive strategy to rebel against modern capitalism and modernist architecture; Le Corbusiers’ authoritarian architecture was portrayed as a form of fascism. With psychogeography and the famous dérive, they changed focus from “streets, buildings and businesses” to how “people inhabit the city and the collective psychic ambiances they project”, much in parallel with van Eyck’s stress on place and occasion."
The politics of public playfulness - LECTURE - Bernard de Koven
https://philipminchin.com/2014/02/05/talking-points-play-and-freedom/
Playing in public as a political act - "demonstrating to people the freedom to play"
"exposing your playfulness and everytime you do it you invite others to also be Playful…
"we dont have to explain people how to be playful. Only give them a channce"
Oppurtunity, excuse, or permission to play
"Give each other permission to play - if you start playing together you are making a political statemet, and you are just having fun, its not like you are doing something serious…""expose your playful self"
Build it around question from Steve: How can freedom be expressed through play? How do your initiatives allow freedom?
(freedom from what, freedom to do what?)
Bernard de Koven explores how public play serves as a political act. He highlights how play in public spaces reclaims these spaces for contact and community engagement, not just for profit or productivity. This makes playing in public spaces a political act because it questions who has access to the space, how it is used, and what behavior is considered acceptable.
Rewriting space / Reaproprating space / Dreaming together
- Audiowalk: Brachland Weißensee Katya Romanova's - that ended up with constructing a small temporary bar together…https://c-makers.de/entry/brachland/
in this project the artist asks what if we look at the left spaces not as something that once was something but as if they are full of possibilities, as places that we also shape"In this audio walk, various protagonists from the neighborhood take us on a fantasy journey through free spaces and tell us how they have turned them into their playing space. They take us to a paradise island and a wild adventure place, invite us for a drink in their favorite pub, show us a war bunker and accompany us on an art safari through an industrial area. In these places we experience the freedom – even if only for a short time – to imagine everything we want."
- Residents sharing dreams for their community
- Drawing our wishes and dreams for space in my neighbourhood
- MVRDV's biennale installation
"Dreaming is human"
- An abnormal city - project I can't find again but I have this quote written in my notes;
standards are set based on data such as income or housing norms. Those who do not fit into the “norm” are even more excluded. But what do we not see? What happens on the street, between promises of luxury, what happens next to shiny modern buildings?"The city belong to all of us and yet not everyone feels that way. Our society is diverse, and yet the built environment is standardized on the basis of data such as income, family, and housing norms? who is actually normal?"
- CHALLENGING EVERYDAY SPATIAL POLITICS, by engaging with live interventions Sarah Ross shows resistance against urban injustice.
"Archisuits suggest a wearer might resist by not only being present but being present comfortably, leisurely.’"
- Writing as building, workshop on how language can be used to build alternative social and political worlds. https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/events/research-nights-writing-as-building
Pushing against alienation ( as an aspect of rewriting space )
"If the alienating effect of the modern city is political, your methods of pushing against that alienation is political too. You can develop this more, I think."
- De Boog - a graphic workshop for a collective use. For me this is an example of a place that is collectively shaped, focused on collaboration and creative exchange. The atmosphere there offers a lot of room for play and learning from each other, its is very chaotic, but also so alive. (qualities of an unsmooth place) A visitor on one of Open Days last week wrote a note and left it on the table in the workspace, which describes what this place is:
“Under an abandoned railway, some folks gathered and print and drink coffee and sing and laugh and make books and play CD’s and make messes of papers and riso and all that stuff at the same time; they call the place DE BOOG and call themselves commoners.”
Other examples / references:
- Open Jazdów in Warsaw, https://jazdow.pl/en/ is a community in Warsaw consisting of wooden Finnish houses, offering a social, cultural and ecological public program. Its so alive and vibrant and collectively shaped and its all happening in the center of the city, which is very unique.
- The Market Street Prototyping Festival - inviting the community to propose ideas for improving the public space along San Francisco’s central Market Street. Visitors, for instance, were greeted with ping-pong tables, a mini-library, a pop-up street museum, art installations, a tiny house, swings, exercise playgrounds...
- HAU TO CONNECT
practices of belonging to a neighbourhood.
Listen to a place
Look what is already out there
What are the limitations of the practice?
Who is active?
How can you support what is already happening
Curate a dialogue
Look at the space as if you are looking at it for the first time
Have patience
Have you changed after the work?
Try different tactics
Find like minded people
Whose perspectives are misssing?
Practice power sharing
What participants need?
Turn it into a graphic novel
How participants perceive gentrification?
Invite your neigbours for a picnic
Draw portraits of your neighbours and ask them for their stories
Be present at the local markets
Give small things a big stage
Don't be afraid of words
Look at the means of production
Be aware
Communal love
Make the work visible
Do u have support ?
Be aware of your power
Be soft
Step back, give voice
Share autorship
- Project during summer school. meetings at zukunplfpltaztz - inviting neigbours to think together what kind of space they want
- A Danish oval-shaped community gardens, designed by the architect to encourage residents to walk and meet and socialize more often - https://www.brightvibes.com/the-story-behind-the-unique-oval-community-gardens-of-copenhagen/
Chapter 2
Response to smoothness - The politics of public playfulness. How can freedom be expressed through play and imagination?
--->play as spatial narratives....??
Explain the concept of "fragments"
Why did I decide to look at the city in fragments, in a reality where it seems we lock ourselves in our own bubbles that do not fit together? I have the impression that by looking at something first on a smaller scale, I can devote more attention to it and get to know it more thoroughly. Cities are so complex, an infinite network of dependencies – how would I even begin a publication capable of holding that? In her speech, Tokarczuk outlines the necessity of a narrative that allows for a broader, holistic view that goes beyond the boundaries of one's own self. A view that allows for the connection of independently existing fragments into a wider network of connections. Putting these fragments together in prompts I treat them more like metaphors that stimulate my imagination. They make me open my eyes to other people in space, to other objects and experiences. I look at events or objects and interpret them anew. A fragment seen and narrated becomes alive. I become a witness to other stories happening in the city. And although I will not step into the skin of others, I will not share their experience, these random juxtapositions hold the intention to reveal previously unnoticed narratives. Fragments overshadowed by the main urban narrative of productivity and competition.
Karolina Wolszczak, Walking with speculative artefacts in public space of Amsterdam (Walking as research Practice)
In Karolina Wolszczak's work, a visual artist based in the Netherlands, objects found at street level and imagination allow her to explore the layers of the city more deeply. As she walks, she searches for traces that have so far remained invisible, collecting objects often seen as dirt and inviting others to do the same during workshops. These artifacts are physical, and thanks to them, as she says, other worlds become visible through the power of imagination. This process later involves imprinting artifact traces in clay and sharing stories. In this work, imagination plays a significant role in speculating and creating narratives about the found objects, fostering a deeper understanding of public spaces and their unseen relations.
“The poetic aspect of walking…We should walk repeatedly and focus on the debris of everyday life. We should sometimes slow down or even stop, extend our antennas and listen to our surroundings through our various senses. For new possibilities of a common future, we desperately need new interpretations, voices of other-than human narrators, shifts of perspective, disturbances of logic to open our imaginations. To connect already existing dots, before invisible. Perhaps the hint is not logical, singular, nor clear. Perhaps the hint is collective, civil, intuitive, and speculative. It is the voice out of I, out of time and gender, and the plurality of the broken artefact(s)” ( Page 69 (reference olga tokarczuk nobel lecture The tender narrator))
Sally Stenton, Search for the unpredicted, Walking in spaces of open enquiry
In a project walking Beyond Words - 52 prompts , one for each week of the year, encourage an exploration of our smallness and interconnectedness of everything.
- Poetic prompts for walks…
"Discovery is not held in the words but comes through the act of moving in the world. Responses from the walk are collected and formed into weekly poetry collages."
- This project invites new ways of experiencing space.
- How different experiences of walking are activated by words!
- Connection between movement, words, and the environment
The Situationist Times, De Jong
The magazine rejected categorization, efficiency. Instead, it embraced ambiguity and non-linearity as a method of critique. It was not just a magazine to be read but one to be experienced. It featured texts in various languages and musical notations, collages that the reader was meant to interpret independently. By creating unexpected juxtapositions—such as combining labyrinths with topological mathematics—de Jong’s magazine shows how meaning emerges from connections we wouldn’t normally make. This was not merely an aesthetic choice but a political statement about how knowledge, power, and imagination intersect. The Situationist Times demonstrated how creativity itself can be an act of freedom and resistance.
The Situationists
The Situationists used play and spontaneity as a form of resistance and a way to reclaim public space. Wandering through the city, they broke the routine. Through psychogeography and the dérive, they were curious about how people inhabit the city, with an emphasis on the emotional layer – how places make us feel. Emotions and play as spatial narratives. Fostering emotions, not efficiency.
Aldo Van Eyeck, The city as playground
From the arcticle: https://merijnoudenampsen.org/2013/03/27/aldo-van-eyck-and-the-city-as-playground/
transforming neglected urban areas into play spaces. He was also concerned with the emotional layer, how people make space their own. His playgrounds were meant to stimulate the imagination of the users.
“Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion” (10). The question raised was not the emulation of movement towards some unknown horizon, the archetypical uprootedness of the experience of modernity (11), but exactly the opposite: how can people make space their own and create a subjective “sense of place”? How to feel at home in the modern city, this machine of mass rationalization? The transitory playground was “place” and “occasion” combined.”
Urban Play, Fabio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez
In Urban Play by Fabio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez, the desribe the power of play in engaging with the city. The chapter "Orchestrating Serendipity" talks about how urban spaces can encourage unexpected, fun interactions. How can cities facilitate chance encounters through technology, but technology that does not add to efficiency and continuous productivity, but, through sweetly unproductive fun, favors the exploration of space in an unusual way, the establishment of connections. They say that technology has the power to change not when it is purely functional, but when it becomes fun at its core. It talks about how play contributes to different points of view and to involvement in collective action. "play creates new possibilities along with unintended and unexpected scenarios of interaction".
Chapter EMBODYING FANTASIES page 29
That chapter suggests that fantasies connected to leisure and play can be freeing and appealing in creating spaces.
Approaching space through play
example skateboarding appropraiating space (as a continuation opf a thoutght of bringing sport as play to the street…)
- "Skateboarders create their play spaces within highly codified environments; streets and other urban areas.” (Urban Play, P. 23)
- "Play takes us away from our comfort zone, away from the ordinary rhytms, habits, and meanings that mark the way we relate with the world. By doing so, play transforms our relationss with the world and, in its radical form, transforms the world altogether.”(Orchestrating Serendipity page 2)
Page 58! .. "In all these cases playfulness is seen as a strategy to appropraite spaces in unexpected ways, revealing perceptual and affective qualities that are usually subdued by established functions and uses. …….Yet regardless of how radical these activities are in resignifying urban spaces by emphasizing aspects that we take for granted and and dont bother to pay close attention to, the materiality of spaces appropriated during urban sports or pervasive games remains the same before, during and after these activities."
The politics of public playfulness - LECTURE - Bernard de Koven
https://philipminchin.com/2014/02/05/talking-points-play-and-freedom/
Playing in public as a political act - "demonstrating to people the freedom to play"
Bernard de Koven explores how public play serves as a political act. He highlights how play in public spaces reclaims these spaces for contact and community engagement, not just for profit or productivity. This makes playing in public spaces a political act because it questions who has access to the space, how it is used, and what behavior is considered acceptable.
These places remain the same before during and after play.
(Does play leave traces?
In the previous place where I lived, I could see the courtyard from above. Once I saw a girl there who was playing by moving a plastic chair that had been left there for the neighbors. These movements left something resembling an abstract drawing on the black gravel. I began to wonder if play leaves traces. Shortly afterwards, these traces disappeared and the courtyard was once again empty and sad.
The same is true for the other examples, such as skateboarders, the places where they play remain the same after playing.
Does play leave any trace. These places remain the same before during and after play. So what changes is our perspective…