Last week, the Playable City Award shortlist was revealed to much excitement and debate. Artists, designers, technologists and creative practitioners responded to a call to propose “new and distinctive ideas that put people and play at the heart of the City”. The result was a range of projects from around the world that envisage the city not as the oft cited stage with citizens as players, but as a huge box of instruments with which we can all improvise at will. Applicants want us to jam with puffin boxes at pedestrian crossings, or whisper our secrets to a mysterious fluffy cloud. We can compose music through plants, or play benches together as one big marimba.
Amongst the usual squeals of anticipation, there are questions about the value of these ideas to the “real” world. Fun is all well and good – but surely fun is the stuff we get to when the grown up work of building hospitals and roads is done with? When we’ve fixed the economy, let’s play. Cities are full of problems, why are we not fixing them first?
Herein lies the real issue. When we see play simply as fun, a whimsy for those of us lucky enough to have the time to engage in it, we underestimate the transformative power of play and it’s role in our lives.
Fixing problems, making our living and working spaces more livable and resilient, designing better cities, starts at every level with the people that Iive in those cities. Increasingly we are realising that our cities are designed for exclusivity, so it makes sense that we don’t feel part of shaping the future. This is revealed in the language we use to describe our relationships to the services and organisations that our cites are made of. We want them to fix it, they don’t want us to have a say, they give money to them to exclude us: the language is divisive and separating, and that’s the problem. Even the descriptions of the projects fail to deliver what they promise, because a playable city is experienced, not described.
The idea of what our cities should mean, how public money is spent, what we imagine as good for us and who is involved in designing them, is only ever addressed when we have a complaint or we feel excluded. We talk to the city council when the road is road is torn up or the lights won’t come on. We complain that our voices are unheard, but we never seize opportunities to speak, fearing that if we do we will be ignored or shouted down by the loudest ones.
This feeling of separation cannot be undone overnight. We need new approaches, new tools, and new ways to talk to one another about how to live together in cities.
Conversations about the future, about how we want to live, have to begin from a level playing field, and crucially that level playing field may not be where we expect. Play is a leveler: when we play, we play as humans, first. Traditional status markers like wealth, celebrity, or qualifications are not really much use when invited to dance with your shadow or conduct lights like a demi-god.
Addressing problems and finding solutions that work for us all begin with inviting everyone into conversation. Play as unexpected interventions in familiar places act as invitations to connect, an offer to begin to talk about those parts of our cities that we feel excluded from. To new eyes and ears, some projects can seem esoteric – but that is because we have become numbed to dull public announcements, badly designed flyers and clunky websites which act as information dumps that no-one reads, let alone takes as an invitation to work together. Yet, this is important stuff: we need to talk about the kind of future we want or it be will be decided for us while we look the other way.
The Playable City is deliberately designed to disrupt the process of “us and them”. It is a bold acknowledgement that expertise comes in all shapes and sizes. This may mean leaving behind old hierarchies and approaches to thinking about cities. The playable city is about citizens: not artists, not planners, its not about us or them, it’s about we. All of us have a stake in the conversation, and that we looks and feels very different to the we we know and expect. All citizens need to be invited in to the we in open, hopeful, democratic ways. That is why we need artists and creatives, skilled at making surprising and disarming invitations, to craft them for us. Who else is so enchanted with the unknown? Who better to help us imagine the future?
So, the invitations are ready. Now, it’s up to us to respond. Let’s embrace the puffin jam, let’s whisper to the cloud, let’s forget what and who we know. Let’s look for ways to connect, share, debate, but most of all, take part.
Hilary O’Shaughnessy is a producer of the Playable City Award. The winner will be announced on Tuesday 9 June 2015 at on Watershed’s website.
