The city is our playground suggests a set of playable urban street facilities that could transform our mobility patterns and reshape our public space textures. With the micro-scale approach, the idea is attempting to vibrate our urban life by encouraging both children and adults to explore and play ourselves ; and to recall our senses and freedom of movement.

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Questioning how the urban built environment is shaping our body movement in our daily life. While, also considering outdoors child culture is more than playground; the project believes public space is where different cultures play and create.

 

Corresponding to children as citizens and public users, the empirical knowledge of this public space project was built up with the perspective of children, specifically on looking for play opportunities and human beings' spatial relationship with the living environment. The research part included 3 workshops with a focus group and semi-structured outdoor observations in two specific locations in the city of Gothenburg.

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The invisible space inspired from a child's perspective

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The project involved UPPDRAG54, Tuesday group children (age 8 - 12 years old) from Folkets Hus Hammarkullen. To understand how children perceive our living environment, the workshops included 'walk and play', landscape model making, and prototyping trying, where we analyzed the three main factors to a more child-friendly urban public space:

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• Fun factors

• Touchable artifacts

• Invisible space in relation to human scale

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In a 'walk and play' workshop, we found play opportunities other than playgrounds by making use of artefacts in the neighbourhood, such as railings, curbs, ramps, and booms.

 

Other than fun factors, the human scale in the environment also contributes to how children perceive play opportunities, which adults usually don't see. That's why a boom gate blocks adults, while for children, it's a place to pass through. Another workshop 'what's our feeling of the city?'was a discussion around why the city is uninspiring even though making a city landscape model. 'Trees in the city are not for climbing', 'Stones are boring.' but 'if lamps had stairs to climb on, it would be fun.' were among the comments from the children. 

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Integrating reachable factor in relation to children size to forester play signal, the design deliberated on street facilities which is more inviting for body interaction, as well as keeping the original functions.

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