都江堰游乐场项目 田野工作 震后废墟 2010年8月
For the Exhibition Catalog ——“The Geography of Play” in the Living City
Play As an Urban Design Tool: The Playground Project in Dujiangyan
The Playground Project in the city of Dujiangyan, jointly directed by Liane Lefaivre and Li Kaisheng in 2010, is an experiment in “the geography of play” which aims at reinterpreting physical spaces through play, reflecting on the poetic potential of the urban fabric. It is rooted in the Chinese traditions of urban planning while redefining the traditional “geographic” aesthetics of social life. This playground project is a practice oriented to daily life which combines urban design, artistic creating, and education. It is also part of a partnership and dialogue with the government of Dujiangyan in the post-earthquake reconstruction, and an attempt to find in ordinary neighborhoods the link between art and the city.
The Dujiangyan Playground project, on display at the Shanghai Biennale, includes fieldwork, analyses of “the geography of play”, playground designs, and artistic interpretations of the project.
Eternal Ambiguity
In his now classic work, Homo Ludens, Johann Huizinga argued that play, far from being frivolous activity dictated by an innate instinct and separate from other forms of social behavior, is on the contrary, the very stuff of human civilization. 1 In fact, religion, language, law, art, and sports are, he conjectured, different forms of play actually, insofar as all are rule-based behaviors that serve to keep aggression in check by sublimating it. Play, in this sense, is what organizes all interchanges in social life. Communities at play express many commonly held ideals, and communities are reinforced through play. This means that the research into the enhancement of community in cities, perhaps, cannot be detached from the concept of play.
(The statement that follows here in black is not Huizinga, it is the common sense view that play is the opposite of civilization. He turned common sense upside down. That’s why his book is a classic. For Huizinga play is the exact opposite. Its main function is to sublimate aggression and order social relations. The next two sentences should be out: Play is its own goal and meaning, which is why our ecstasy in play us from life’s nihility. Play is prior to and superior to civilization, and potentially longer lived.)
The City as a Playground
As Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis were the first to point out, pre-war urban planning as conceived by the architectural avant-garde in the West, represented by Le Corbusier, Josep Lluis Sert, and Ludwig Hilberseimer among other members of CIAM, took a “top down” approach that neglected the daily lives of ordinary people; the post-war period brought about a very different approach which can be called “ground-up.” 2 One of the first persuasive proponents of this approach was the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. He saw the forgotten aspects of urban life the site of poetic experience and social interaction, and defended this as a human right, as what he called “the right to the city.”3 Another was the Canadian theorist Jane Jacobs who harshly criticized the mainstream type of urban planning that had destroyed many North American cities by the mid 1960s; 4 yet another was the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck, who during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s designed almost one thousand playgrounds in Amsterdam embodying this humanism and reflecting new post-war notions of public space.4
In her study of Aldo van Eyck and Cor van Eesteren’s postwar Amsterdam playgrounds, Lefaivre5 has pointed out that they were characterized by what she calls the PIP Principle model, treating playground design as part of an overall urban design strategy that is Polycentric, Interstitial and Participatory. participatory refers to interaction between citizens and the city government; interstitial refers to the insertion of playgrounds into existing urban framework; and polycentric refers to an network of densely packed small playgrounds. The PIP model was tested as a tool for cultural integration in a study by Lefaivre and Doll in an inner city, multi-cultural neighborhood of Rotterdam in 2005 and, in 2009, Lefaivre lead her students from the University of Applied Art in Vienna to test the PIP model in the 15th district of that city, another multi-cultural neighborhood, and again as a means of integration. The results were displayed at the exhibition “The 15th District as a Playground: The Child, the City, and the University”. She is now engaged in a similar project in Vienna’s 11th district.
The Geography of Play
Despite the efforts that have gone into designing and researching playgrounds, the fundamental issue of the relationship between ‘play’ and ‘ground’ has long been overlooked in China. Play, it is generally believed here, is an immaterial, imaginary activity, while playgrounds are ordinary, temporal spaces. But play has the power to transform everyday urban spaces into battlefields, theaters, or arenas, and thus into metaphorical spaces. Play releases the ground, de-materializing it, giving rise to ambiguities, and making it the object of what the Situationist Guy Debord referred to as “derive,” providing a different way of conceiving the city, a wandering away from the regimented logic of mainstream urban planning. When playgrounds become metaphorical, polysemantic spaces, spatial meaning can be boldly refigured, reflecting the development of situationist strategies of détournement, of subversion. This subversion disolves the opposition between reality and spectacles by using play to turn the city into poetry. The urban “order” is subjected to the civilizing, in Huizinga’s sense, rules of “play”. By creating new play elements in a city, “the Geography of Play” reinterprets, reorganizes, and restructures urban life, using the geography and the everydayness to enlarge the applicable scope of what Liane Lefaivre has called the PIP principle.
Play Communities: the Latent Power of Civilization
Dujiangyan is still recovering from the traumatic shock of the earthquake of 2008. Li Kaisheng initiated this project in the belief that the example of the Liane Lefaivre’s PIP Principle, as derived from the Amsterdam playgrounds, the creation of a group of architects and urban planners whose aim was to heal the city following the devastation of World War II by taking play seriously and exploiting its full potential for creating a sense of community, might be worth testing in this context.
Play enhances community when its self-consciousness dissolves, and these communities often continue to exist after the game is over. “The geography of play” is a continual nurturing of the self in relation to others. Dujiangyan is succeeding in rebuilding itself following a disaster.
It is hoped that through this playgrounds project the natural and historical traditions of play, deeply rooted in the local culture of Dujiangyan, can bring to the fore the city’s traditional forces of self-renewal and growth.
Notes:
See Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens / 1998-1-1/ China Academy of Fine Arts Press / various translators; First published in 1938.
2. Liane Lefaivre is Chair of Architecture History and Theory at Vienna University of Applied Arts, Alexander Tzonis if Professor of Archtectural Theory at Tsinghua University. See Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Aldo van Eyck, Humanist Rebel. In Betweening in a Postwar World, Rotterdam, 010, 1999.
3 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World，translated by Sacha Rabinovitch, New Brunswick and London, 1994; first published in 1947.
4 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, / 2005-5 / Yilin Press / Translated by Jin Hengshan; first published in 1964.
5. For background on the Amsterdam postwar playgrounds and Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999) see Liane Lefaivre and Alex Tzonis, Aldo van Eyck, Humanist Rebel. In Betweening in a Postwar World, Rotterdam, 010,1999; Liane Lefaivre and Doll, Ground Up Architecture, Play as a Design Tool, Rotterdam, 010, 2006; Liane Lefaivre, The Child, the City and the University, Vienna, 2010; and Liane Lefaivre, The Child , the City and the Power of Play; or the PIP Principle. Beijing, Dept of Architecture of Tsinghua University, 2010.
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