Sensing Playgrounding: Playful Design Workshops to Reimagine the City as Playground

Abstract

Cities are complex spaces of contesting infrastructures, media, humans and more-than-human interactions. They are places that house multiple visible and invisible cartographies that draw on multisensorial ways of being in the world. In the city, our senses are amplified and intensified in ways that reorient our processes of worlding. Cities have, more recently, been defined and approached as spaces for play. In this article, we explore how understanding the city as a playground—or through the activity of playgrounding—can invite new ways of designing urban games and playful interventions that acknowledge the uneven and multisensorial ways we inhabit the world. We reflect upon dominant, innovative, and interventionist ideas of playgrounds and notions such as the playful or playable city. We then reflect on findings from a placemaking game workshop designed around the Spanish Superillas (superblocks) in Barcelona. Superillas are playgrounds designed into street intersections that have transformed specific sections of the city in a playground. What does it mean to think about the city as a playground? Can this speculation/ provocation help us rethink the city in more inclusive and sensorial ways?