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Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today
Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Playgrounds
New Spaces of Liberty (The Question of Form)
Kunsthof, Zurich, 2013
A project curated by Dimitrina Sevova in cooperation with Prof. Elke Bippus, Franziska
Koch and the department Vertiefung Bildende Kunst of the Zurich University of the Arts
Contents
The Function of the Playground in Public Life brief outline and historical background 3
Public Space and Social Organization 3
From Outdoor Play in the Medieval Town to the Playground Movements of Modernity 4
The Invention of Childhood 5
The Democratization of Play 6
Crisis and Playground 8
The Rise and Fall of Adventure Playgrounds 10
The Creative City where the city itself becomes a new total playscape, introducing a new
work time timeless play of precarious perfection, the bold recreation the total playscape
is part of a major urban renewal, replacing the machinery of the factory system 11
Public Art and Urban Renewal 14
Between Art for Social Change and Subjection to the Technological Apparatus 17
Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today
Text and research: Dimitrina Sevova
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Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today
This preliminary research provides a gen-
eral introduction to the historical condi-
tions and social function of public play-
grounds in Western societies, in the con-
text of the project Opportunities for OutdoorPlay? Playgrounds New Spaces of Liberty
(The Question of Form)at Kunsthof, Zurich,
2013. The aim is to initiate a transdisci-
plinary collaborative research group which
is to focus on analytical micro-research on
the city of Zurich, taking into special con-
sideration the district 5 in which Kunsthof
is located. During the last one hundred
years the playground has transformed
from its 19th-century factory-regime guise
to a public place for raising the kids of
mass production and automation, and lat-
er to the exible playscapes of the creative
city with its economic bio-games.
Book cover of Ingeborg de Roode (ed.), Aldo Van
Eyck: Designing For Children, Playgrounds,
NAi Publishers/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,
2002.1
1 Referenced in Paige Johnson, The Play-
grounds of Aldo van Eyck, Amsterdam, 1950s-
1970s,playscapes a blog about playground
design, 18 March 2008 (accessed
2013-02-23).
Meteor boulder being unloaded from a truck
and installed in Cantelowes park storyscape in
Camden.2
2 Muarrikh Choiron, Cornish Megaliths for
Camden Playgrounds, worlds children: The
Kids and Family On The world(blog), 12 No-
vember 2009 (accessed 2013-02-23).
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Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today
An Iraqi boy squeezes through a gap in a stretch
of security barrier erected in Baghdads Azami-
yah neighborhood.3
Boys play soccer near a blast wall in Baghdads
Karrada neighborhood. U.S. forces plan to erect
walls and Jersey barriers around at least 10
districts.4
3 Bryan Finoki, Border to Border, Wall to
Wall, Fence to Fence, Subtopia: A Field Guide toMilitary Urbanism(blog), 24 April 2007 (accessed
2013-02-23). Photo: AP/Asaad Muhsin (accessed 2013-02-23).
4 Karin Brulliard, Gated Communities
For the War-Ravaged, Washington Post, 23
April 2007 (accessed 2013-02-
23). Quoted in Bryan Finoki, op. cit.Photo:
Getty Images / Wathiq Khuzaie.
The Function of the Playground
in Public Life brief outline and
historical background
Public Space and Social Organization
Between childhood and personhood, be-
tween labor and education, work and free
time the production of subjectivity in public
space is placed under contemporary condi-
tions of urbanization. Playgrounds can be
seen as urban prototypes of technological
and architectural apparatuses involved in
the production of the liberal subject, aimed
at generating articial structures and sur-
faces of safety and regulating outdoor activ-
ity in public spaces, leaving their mark onsocial, economic, and biopolitical identity-
making.
They serve as a means of combining play
and pedagogical methods with the interest
of psychologists in order to stimulate
cognitive, affective, physical and social skills
in children, thus installing a habitus. From
the outset, in this concept of recreating
kids play environments the main task is
to provide public instructions and control,
mediated through the technologization of
childrens play. Their playground activities
have to be observable from a distance.
Every movement has to be exhibited anddisplayed in order to avoid violence between
them and to regulate and design behavior,
which at the same time is prone to increase
their physical activity and the socializing
mechanisms between them without
the intervention of pedagogues or adult
supervisors to structure and regulate their
play.
This is why from the very beginning
preference was given to transparent
architectural structures, borrowing from
adapted archaic rituals, and appropriating
its materials and forms from the factory.The history of playgrounds reects the his-
tory of capitalism at each stage of its eco-
nomic transformations, and the ways in
which the social system and its dispositifad-
dresses and controls behaviors at a distance
through the installing of common sense. A
new form of planning emerges along with
the social sciences, a form of surveillance, a
form of insurance. The architectural setting
and the functionality of the design directly
form the body, i.e., the materiality of power
operates a reality of abstraction, inscribing it
directly in the body, disciplining it.
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From Outdoor Play in the Medieval
Town to the Playground Movementsof Modernity
In the medieval inner city, protected by
the city walls, there is no space for play.
Such activity is relegated to the outside of
the city in the common green lands, un-
regulated and accidental. The playground
makes its appearance on the public scene
in the industrial city of the mid-19thcen-
tury, an articial creature of modern
time and its forces, a social technological
device combining the model of the panop-
ticum with the techniques of the factory.
It spreads rapidly and is appropriated asan organizational apparatus of modernist
discourse and socio-cognitive instrument,
and nds its supporters and promoters to
master spatial arrangements and habits
of the population of big industrial cities
in the developed West. These are social
techniques directly implicated, along with
industrialization, in the production of new
liberal subjects ready to participate in the
new economic and social order, its rules
and limits. This is a process of individu-
alization, secularization, rationalization
and disciplining of bodies. With its socialfunction and form of orchestrating group
activities, personhood and childhood in
public places, the playground stands as a
historically distinct relation to the private
sphere, just as important to the bourgeois
urban population of the time.
The Playground, a Vacant Lot, Hale House,
Boston, Mass., c1903. 5
It takes time for public playgrounds to be-
come common-place directly at the heart
of the city, be it within a park or occupying
their very own playing area. Campaigns
are launched, shaped by activist argu-
ments not unlike those in favor of public
baths, green areas and grounds for out-
door sports in the city, and public parks
5 Social Museum Collection, Fogg Museum,
Harvard Art Museum. Quoted in Nancy Cott
(ed.),Women Working, 1800-1930, Harvard
University Library Open Collections Program
(accessed 2013-02-21).
Francis Goodwin Peabody established the So-
cial Museum at Harvard University in 1903 to
promote investigations of modern social condi-
tions and to direct the amelioration of industrial
and social life. Peabody was a leader in social
reform, teaching popular courses on social eth-
ics as early as the 1880s and forming the De-
partment of Social Ethics in 1906.
Sports feld in the city moat. Childrens Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
(detail), circa 1560.
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in the history of Commonwealth countries.
A large gamut of genres emerges, among
them adventure playgrounds combing fun
and pedagogy, or eld experiments for the
outdoor cultivation of plants in the newlyconstituted public schools for mass educa-
tion.
It is as part of a reorganization of the
social eld that the market economy of the
19thcentury introduces a modern concept
of childhood as a distinct happy life stage
of personhood, rst for the kids from the
upper classes, but with the rise of the
concept of the mass society, gradually
extending to be the norm for all social
strata.
A diversity of playground movements
makes its appearance around that time,
led by a range of interests. Social activists
engage to promote and standardize mass
leisure time and organize free time after
long working days in the new crowded
cities, hand-in-hand with education,
public life, entertainment, and urban and
social planning. First publicly accessible
playgrounds are built, while the state
starts supporting, planning and governing
comprehensive recreational programs,
outdoor play and green spaces and areas
for physical and cultural activity in
order to structure the interplay between
environmental, social, cultural andeconomic factors on a given site.
After the 16th-century enclosures
where an end was put to the access to
land as a common good and the living
wage was introduced for the proletarized
rural populations, this is a big step in
reinventing the social space as a public
space, which takes place not without great
social and political struggles. Playground
reformers believed that supervised play
could improve the mental, moral, and
physical well-being of children, and in the
early twentieth century they expanded
their calls into a broader recreationmovement aimed at providing spaces for
adult activities as well. 6
The childrens behavior is to be
supervised in order to develop better
citizens for the near future, to serve the
industry and the economic exchange. At
the same time this is a means of cleansing
6 Julia Sniderman Bachrach, Playground
Movement, Encyclopedia of Chicago (accessed 2013-02-20).
and integrating marginalized elements
such as migrant kids, of disciplining
children infested with lice, or the children
of the working class who are roaming the
streets after school without supervision ifthey are not forced to work, that is.
Armour Square, Children in wading pool. South
Park System, 33rd to 34th streets, from S. Wells
Street to S. Shields Avenue, Chicago, IL, 1909. 7
The Invention of Childhood
This is why the history of the early-20th-cen-
tury playground incorporates the construc-
tion of childhood as a myth, but is also a
part of policy-making, the foundation of legal
liberalism assigning to them certain rights
and even some privileges as sovereign sub-
jects with special treatment under public law,
allowing them to a certain extent an indepen-
dent status in contrast to their previous sta-
tus as property of their parents, imposing
on parents obligations in the public domain
a rather new phenomenon at the time.
In the form known to us, childhood
dates back about 100 years, to the early
20thcentury, which coincides with the
construction in a commercial mode of the
toy system of the fast-growing industry, and
with the rise of scientic disciplines with an
interest in the social and the subject. Theseprocesses reshape the perception of what can
be called a happy childhood while placing it
in the light of consumerism and the economic
benets and developing in children the habits
required by the new relations.
7 Georgia Silvera Seamans, Contested waters
at Americas swimming pools, local ecologist
(blog), 25 February 2009 (accessed 2013-02-
21).
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Before that, children were playing on the
street itself, along the river, or had to work
in the farm, do housework and raise their
younger siblings. Child labor was widespread
in factories, mines and on constructionsites. In the USA it is only after the Great
Depression, i.e., in the 1930s, that child labor
comes under regulation and is forbidden in
some cases, something that comes about not
without struggles and efforts, just like the
newly appeared free time, with the regulation
of the working day, and the vacations
of workers and of the lower strata of the
population.
In Switzerland, the widespread
phenomenon of contract children, or
indentured child laborers, continued into
the 1960s. These were children who were
taken away from their parents and given to
other families, where they were often forced
to work. These social processes replicate
the new economics techniques and recreate
the enormously growing industrial city, as a
result of which playgrounds provide different
spatial realities, under the regulation of the
state, derived from complex urban change.
The Democratization of Play
Matador No. 1, Korbuly, 1932. 8
Take todays highly standardized play-
grounds for instance. These post-and-
platform structures attempt to design
every risk and fall out of play. Danish
landscape architect Helle Nebelong writesand lectures about how the regularity of
most playground equipment lulls children
into thinking that every rung or step will
be a uniform distance or height.
Nebelong believes that mid-twentieth-
century Danish examples of play environ-
ments, which permitted children to work
8 National Building Museum, Architectural
Toy Collection. Photo by Museum staff. (accessed 2013-02-22).
with surplus materials and objects (loose
parts) and to use real tools, helped forge
her own passion for playgrounds in which
there are no set ways to do anything.
These older outdoor spaces were calledAdventure Playgrounds. Children would
decide what they wanted to build and
how to build it, using hammers and nails
to construct their own structures and
spaces. These playgrounds, which had
excellent safety records, gave children the
opportunity to direct themselves and take
control of their surroundings.9
Roy Toy Log Camp Building Set, Roy K. Dennison
& Sons, 1946. 10
Prior to the advent of Adventure Play-
grounds, early 20th-century construc-
tion toy systems gave children an outletfor imaginative play. 11
If in the beginning play is the privilege of chil-
dren from the afuent strata while other chil-
dren are often forced to work, in our days the
fault line is between rich and developed coun-
tries in which child labor is outlawed and child-
hood is under the protection of the law system,
and those in which child labor to a varying ex-
tent remains widespread. If in Germany or Chi-
na child soldiers were last used during World
War II, they have in recent times been, or are
still sent to the front in such countries as Sierra
Leone, Yugoslavia, the Philippines or Bolivia.
9 Susan G. Solomon, Play and Parenting,
imaginationplayground (blog), 13 January 2013
(accessed 2013-02-22).
10 National Building Museum, Architectural
Toy Collection. Photo by Museum staff. (accessed 2013-02-22).
11 Susan G. Solomon, Play and Parenting,
imaginationplayground (blog), 13 January 2013
(accessed 2013-02-22).
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Since the ancient Greeks (or even earli-
er) there has been a strong link between
physical health and general wellbeing.
For nearly 100 years, the Parks Depart-
ment has been at the forefront in sup-
porting a healthy city and putting the
recreation in Parks & Recreation.
From the early bathhouses to the anti-
obesity programs of today, the Parks
Departments focus on active recreation
has supported the goal of a healthy
citizenry and positive social and moral
conduct.12
Charles S. Hamlet (left), supervisor of outside
maintenance for the Akron Board of Education,
and Herbert A. Endres, assistant manager of
Goodyear research, inspect the wear patterns
beneath the swings on a rubberized playground
at Margaret Park School in 1951. 13
12 City of New York Parks and Recreation,
Recreation in Parks: NYC Parks (ac-
cessed 2013-02-20).
13 Akron Beacon Journalle photo. Source:
Mark J. Price, Akron gives big bounce to play-
ground safety in 1940s, Akron Beacon Journal
Online, 18 March 2012 (ac-
cessed 2013-02-20).
Workers from the Portage Bituminous Co. sweep
away excess rubber from the top of Akrons
bounciest playgroundat Margaret Park School
in 1950. Akron experimented with rubber play-
grounds with materials furnished by Goodyear
and Firestone. 14
14 Akron Beacon Journalle photo. Source:
Mark J. Price, op. cit.
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Modernist design principles came to the play-
ground through the work of Dutch architect Aldo
Van Eyck. When he began his work in 1947
there were few public playgrounds in Amster-
dam. When he fnished thirty years later, he had
constructed over 700 serene, minimalist play
environments. Sometimes, as in these photos, he
simply carved out a section of the street, giving
children as much legitimacy in the city fabric as
vehicles.15
The noble and generous era of the play-
ground as part of the utopian, modernist
project of the city, with their equipmentand things, part of an agenda with its
machinery for organizing the betterment
of life, the typical playground with xed
equipment that some can still remember
is on the wane in the contemporary urban
environment. In a time in which play spac-
es start out from the factory regime they
consist of the typical metal play equip-
ment, concrete and pipe design, asphalt
surfaces perfectly replicating the needs
and spirit of mass society with its housing
system, the factory, and production lines.
These places with all their
contradictions in effect embody utopianideas, promote dramatic play, and
imagination towards practices linked
to social constructivism and some sort
of pedagogical impulse placing and
treating equally its citizens in the social
15 Paige Johnson, Mid-Century Modern on
the Playground, dwell at home in the modern
world, 1 August 2011 (accessed 2013-02-22). Images from
Aldo van Eyck, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,
NAi Publishers, 2002.
fabric. Speculatively speaking, public
playgrounds with their impact on the city
population contribute to the establishmentof new kinds of businesses following the
principles of the playground system of
commanding behavior from a distance,
and the introduction of self-service models
such as supermarkets, which start to
develop as businesses between 1950 and
1960.
Crisis and Playground
Every endeavor to uninstall and reinstall
a new playground system is accompanied
by much heavier and stratospheric shock
waves and the ow of composition-decom-position-recomposition of capital and of
social production and technologies. As a
result, the playground apparatus under-
goes continuous rethinking, replanning,
endless unshaping and reshaping of its
internal structure and surface, along with
the idea of its materials, design and archi-
tecture and their integration, as a part of
a bigger project of optimization reecting
planning interests and the economic con-
ditions.
A few principal periods stand out after
World War II of these social apparatuses,
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comprising socio-economics post-
war crises and the desire to overcome
them with the Fordist model of mass
consumption. The 1960s bring the decisive
change with respect to the recreation ofthe landscape and working places, and
the understanding of leisure time. Most
of the playground structures are removed
after 1980 and never again reinstalled or
reconstructed in the same guise, following
the tendency to deindustrialization of
the big global cities and their turning
into attractive places for the headquarter
economy.
The deindustrialized city is subjected
to a privatizing mechanism of its public
space, to increase its exibility under
the new dispositifof the social coming
from the context of social science, maths,
information technologies and biology, as
techniques of a soft technological society
which prefers indoor recreations like body
building, cosmetics or computer games
and gambling.
Various semiprofessional sport activities
and the emergence of tness centers
replace to a large degree the traditional
places for free play in public space in
the 1980s. Labor and work in precarious
perfection are subjected to multiple
abstract choices in a limited gamers eld.
The scal and social crisis of the1970 of the plan economy pushed local
politicians and planners to adopt growth-
oriented or entrepreneurial policies. To
support the market, governments have to
invent and install new capitalist rules of
the game to secure the participation of all
players, limiting them and increasing their
competition. Architecture and designer
initiatives respond to this radical change,
consisting in the forming of a reexive
project of the self, rst by creating lots of
closed, commercial spaces for play, and
in recent timesby producing pseudo-eco
environments as part of gentrication andtotal urbanization even of the landscape
between cities.
The spatial arrangement and the
production of space in todays urban
environment entail an entirely new
concept in which the spatial gives way
to the temporal, increasing neurologic
stimulation, where affective and
immaterial labor are dominated by
psychological and behavioral changes
intended to integrate their creativity
into the new production system. At the
same time, the new places for play create
decision-making environments under
scientic and biopolitical discipline and
self-reexive control, exposing players to a
calculated risk and increased competition,providing the perfect semiotized context
for the nancialization of the market and
the new demands put by the new spatio-
temporal regime on the relation between
work and play.
Following the economic downturn of the
1970s and residual effects that lasted
for the city into the 1980s, Parks was
able to redirect its energies towards
building recreation centers. Asser Levy
Recreation Center was updated and
equipped with a computer resourcecenter. Sorrentino Recreation Center in
Queens was acquired by the City from
the Knights of Columbus in 1974 and
rented to the Police Athletic League
until 1985 when it became a full Parks
facility.16
16 City of New York Parks and Recreation, op.
cit.
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The Rise and Fall of Adventure
Playgrounds
Cubbies adventure playground on Con-
dell St has evidently existed for a long
time, as this photo from 1975 shows a
place that was denitely not recently
created. They make it look like it has
experienced a war or natural disaster;
decline and abandonment are obvious.
Until a few years ago the site looked like
an occupational health and safety night-
mare. Since then it has been cleaned up
and made safe for a new generation of
children from the Atherton gardens. 17
With the disappearance of unregulated
vacant lots in-between the neighbor-
hoods of big cities, the general tendency of
privatizing all areas, and tightened regula-
tions and procedures for permission, the
self-made peculiar playground structures
and inventive public places for free and
alternative play have disappeared.
Unable to reappropriate the city,
children and youths spend more and
more time isolated. This varies from one
neighborhood to the other, segmenting
the city even more clearly in low-incomeperipheral zones and high-income
neighborhoods usually located around
the city center and downtown, depending
on the concentration of capital and on
economic interests.
17 Brian Ward, Fitzroy history Cubbies ad-
venture playground on Condell St, Fitzroyalty:
Hyperlocal news about Melbournes frst suburb:
Fitzroy 3065(blog), 12 January 2009 (accessed 2013-02-23).
Most adventure playgrounds emerged
in the 60s, 70s and 80s through grass-
roots community action in desperately
deprived areas. In London, about 80
have survived the battles of the Thatch-
er years and attacks from health and
safety over-regulation. It is hard to con-
vey their special qualities to those who
have never visited them. Their dizzy,messy, low-tech architecture is at its
best a glorious dreamscape inspired
by the collective memories of past free-
range childhoods. 18
18 Tim Gill, Families need adventure play-
grounds, and cities need families, the guard-
ian, 16 May 2011 (accessed
2013-02-21).
Cubbies adventure playground on Condell St,
Fitzroy 3065, Melbourne.
Tennis court at King George V Recreation Centre, The
Rocks (City of Sydney), New South Wales, Australia.
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K o lle 3 7 19
K o lle 3 7 2 0
The Creative City where
the city itself becomes a new
total playscape, introducing
a new work time timeless
play of precarious perfection,the bold recreation the total
playscape is part of a major
urban renewal, replacing the
machinery of the factory system
With the restructuring of the urban space
and the introduction of private companies
to maintain their different parts, the ten-
dency is towards supervised play services
that have to create a sustainable busi-
ness model for something from which one
would not expect any revenues. As a result
of this process thematic play areas are es-
19 Paige Johnson, Spielwagen Portable
Playground, Berlin, 1980s to present,play-
scapes a blog about playground design, 5 May
2010 (accessed 2013-02-21).
20 Paige Johnson, Kolle 37, Berlin, self-
constructed and constantly changing, 1990 to
present,playscapes a blog about playground
design, 2 May 2010 (accessed 2013-02-23).
tablished, which integrate new forms of an
economics of fancy playscapes with their
equipment combined with recreational
areas like cafs, restaurants, sports and
gambling facilities, which are supposed
to t into the city landscape. The effect
is similar to that of multiplex cinemas
or shopping malls, at the expense of the
small public playgrounds and vacant lots
in the city which were used for alternative
and non-commercial outdoor activities and
play, as common property in the public
space. The self-organized and grassroots
community initiatives have vanished, and
growing parts of the urban territory are
organized on the principle of the landown-
ers economic benets. This ends up being
a way of privatizing and commercializing
parts of the public space that have re-
mained as a sort of commons under the
regulation of the city even during indus-trial urbanization. Extending nancial
logic to the public sphere, with its rules,
its privatizing discipline and concentration
of power according to Christian Marazzi
leads to common poverty and moments
of deconstruction-without-reconstruc-
tion. 21
21 Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial
Capitalism (New Edition), trans. Kristina Lebede-
va and Jason Francis Mc Gimsey, Semiotext(e),
2011.
Interestingly, Kolle 37 grew out of an earlier move-
ment, Spielwagen Berlin, in which grown-ups con-
cerned about the lack of play opportunities in urban
Berlin started a mobile playground that traveled to
parks and public squares.. 19
Kolle 37 is another amazing adventure
playground located in the Prenzlauer Berg
district of Berlin for children 6 to 16. Uniquely,
it is an integral part of a larger park complex,
nearby to a central square and open air mar-
ket. Its perimeter fence even has openings
that see through to the street and its sidewalk
cafes.20
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From playgrounds that derive inspi-
ration from nature to pop-up urban
installations, spaces for play are transi-
tioning away from traditional manufac-
tured solutionsie. the ubiquitous plas-tic and/or metal jungle gyms one spies
at most playgroundsand getting the
attention they deserve as exciting design
opportunities. I use the term playscapes
to highlight sites that move beyond the
playground fence to become total land-
scapes for play.
By using only safety surfacing and
equipment in a naturalized garden
space, Stoss Landscape Urbanism de-
signed a springy playscape that also
comments on our obsession with play-
ground safety (gotta watch those trees).Image courtesy of Stoss Landscape Ur-
banism.22
New genres of playgrounds appear out of
this process, such as these thematic mast-
odons returning to nature in the form of a
simulacrum, simulation models of stimu-
lating virtual reality integrated in nature.
Their surfaces are treated such that they
are not only safe, but inspire creative and
intense sensual and emotional feelings
while developing cognitive skills. It might
bring up the idea of the zoo, only withoutanimals or of outdoor props of cinema
studios with their fake reality. Since in
most cases they are found outside the
city, they are reachable mainly by car as a
family entertainment precinct in which to
engage in a creative environment with an
ecological touch providing a higher de-
22 Paige Johnson, An Introduction to Mod-
ern Playscapes, dwell at home in the modern
world, 11 July 2011 (accessed 2013-02-26).
gree of interaction with the equipment sur-
face and structure, for extreme sports and
the development of bodily strength and
orientation skills. This is a kind of militari-
zation of the concept of the playground, atraining camp for the whole family, a new
type of virtual combat-play, extending into
real space.
Those playgrounds that remain on the
territory of the city are equally subject to
a new public policy and urban planning
under the motto of the City Beautiful
or the Creative City, where they often
merge with what is known as Public Art,
which tends to turn it immediately into
a highly active space within the public
domain.23This unleashes opportunities
for authority to put them under its
constant protection and supervision as
signicant details, lending urbanization
an identity of economic and social growth.
This coalescence undoubtedly contributes
to the broad social perception of the
economic and cultural value of the place
and its valorization on the map of the
city. This version of the playground as
Public Art embodies the long-standing
history of conict and irts or complicity
of interests between architects, artists,
designers and the public administration
of the city, manipulated as they are by
various economic and political lobbying.In-between recreation facilities,
playscapes and the totality of architecture
projects and the functionality of design,
the impact of public art from the beginning
of this process of installing a free market
economy has been one of the new
techniques for implicating the notion of
creativity and exible time in the heart of
the city where in shiny ofces biopower of
labor appears as privileged form of labor
the production of men through men.
(Marazzi)
Public art in most cases ts in
with what Bourdieu calls the logic ofdisinterested art, i.e., art that is part of
the symbolic goods and works within the
logic of commerce, taking in postmodern
urbanism the role of the ornament, so
despised and rejected by modernism.
This type of art has in various guises
been an active participant in the larger
socio-economic changes from the modern
23 Grant Pooke, Contemporary British Art: An
Introduction, Routledge, 2012, p. 37, talking
about Trafalgar Squares fourth plinth.
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time to the global creative city. Indeed the
concept of public art has from the outset
been targeted at showcasing the relation
between an author and authority
governing the concentration of ideas andproduction of the artist. However, as it
seems, the old notion of the playground
as a safe place of kids gathering is not
really vanishing in this transformation
process of constant re-forming of the social
place, where the focus of interests shifts
to seeing the playground not primarily as
a place in which children play, but as a
construction praised for realizing aesthetic
needs and the desires of art lovers under
the motto of art for arts sake. The new
aestheticization accompanying exhibitions
of art in public is part of a restructuring of
the urban space and draws on arguments
regarding the possibility of control at
a distance, chiey through imposing
disciplining mechanisms of self-control.
This is actually an amplication of the
function of the playground as a social
apparatus as both pure and functional
aesthetic object.
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Public art as playground at Postdamer Platz in
Berlin.24
Public Art and Urban Renewal
Indeed today the concept of public art as a
playground thrives remarkably and nds
its total application in the global creativecity, on the territory between the blur-
ring boundaries of a range of interests
and practices. Without this function that
lends it an added aura, it might have been
subject to public criticism. The contempo-
rary re-created and expanded concept of
the playground allows it to rehabilitate in
social space concepts that contemporary
democracy has rejected and found unac-
ceptable, giving a fresh touch even to the
symbolic of the monument in its imperial
acceptation, a phenomenon which until
recently seemed overcome and put out of
fashion by contemporary society and re-vives imperial, colonial, fascist and totali-
tarian visions of representation of the sym-
bolic presence of power in public space.
This new style of monuments of playful
consumerism which symbolize nothing
but the production of modern mythologies
in their Barthean sense, often made of
24 Paige Johnson, Berlin playground ele-
ments,playscapes a blog about playground
design, 20 July 2009 (accessed 2013-02-23).
temporary and cheap materials, can in
some cases be called anti-monuments,
or grotesque, second-order monumentsin the desert of the real, products of
the society of what Baudrillard calls
second-order simulacra, multiplying the
Disney-Land scenery. It crawls out of the
playgrounds established by corporations
like McDonalds or Shell and spreads to
ever greater urban territories.
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New York Citys annual Figment festival is
an ideal t for this scheme, as it transforms
one of the citys favorite playgrounds into a
wacky world of art installations. This example
may be rather funny with its folk festival spirit
introducing some vulgar enjoyment in this
concept, as in the installation of the life-size
torn-off head of the Statue of Liberty lying in
the terrain like a ruin or ancient vestige of
American democracy.
Another, Parque Gulliver in Valencia, Spain,
built in 1990, can be seen rather as a prototype
marking the launch of a new genre in the
urban environment, of a properly neoliberal
understanding of creative urbanism. It is a
joint project of a perfectly triumphing triangular
group consisting of architect Rafael Rivera,
artist Manolo Martin and the designer Sento.
Gullivers body morphs into slides, ramps,
stairs and caves, scaled so that visitors are the
size of the Lilliputians.25
This description eloquently refers to themonument in its classic imperial and colonial
form, whose function was to achieve precisely
this to create historical memory through a
certain perspective, to make people feel like
Lilliputians in front of the dominant power
celebrating its rule.
25 Paige Johnson, Parque Gulliver, Valencia
Spain, 1990,playscapes a blog about play-
ground design, 16 November 2009 (accessed
2013-02-23).
F ig me n t2 6
L ib e rty 2 7
Parque Gulliver, Valencia, Spain, 1990. Gullivers
body morphs into slides, ramps, stairs and
caves, scaled so that visitors are the size of the
Lilliputians. A joint project by architect Rafael
Rivera, artist Manolo Martin and the designer
Sento. 28
26 Jessica Dailey, Public Art: Figment Festival
Takes Over Governors Island With Oddball Art,
Curbed, 11 June 2012
(accessed 2013-02-23).
27 B. Hudson, 67th Anniversary of V-E Day,
The Denver Post, 8 May 2012 (accessed 2013-02-23).
28 thekittycats, P L A Y T I N E R A R I E S: Play-
grounds Worth A Trip, Citineraries(blog), 18
New York Citys favorite playground was transformed into
a wacky world of art installations this weekend, as the an-nual Figment festival took place on Governors Island. [] The
lawns were dotted with sculptures including Lady Libertys
lifesized face (which you could climb all over). 26
People crowd Times Square at 42nd
Street in New York City to celebratethe victory in Europe on May 8,
1945.27
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At the same time, more elaborate and
well-organized structures than this have
developed in the contemporary urban
landscape and have provided unsuspected
opportunities for new expressions of totalarchitecture, gradually imposing the
model of the playscape and inventing new
super-apparatuses covering the entire city
environment and transforming the city
into a total arena of play as a post-Fordist
strategy.
In the context of Outdoor Play?
Playgrounds New Spaces of Liberty
(The Question of Form)at Kunsthof,
Zurich, 2013, we aim to investigate more
carefully the relation between art and
public space and playgrounds, and how
we can critically reect its agency in this
process. If on the one hand there is art for
social change, linked to art and political
movements, on the other there is the
cultural form of art in public space, which
with Bourdieu can be understood as forms
of aesthetic domination.
What are their codes of the former,
and of the latter, and how do they relate
to social forms and the architectonics of
space? In what way are art movements
for social change linked to the ephemeral,
creating temporary social gures,
temporarily re-appropriating the urban
space in order to intervene in everydaylife? Or to what Rancire calls relational
art in which the construction of an
undecided and ephemeral situation
enjoins a displacement of perception, a
passage from the status of spectator to
that of actor, and a reconguration of
spaces.29
On the other hand there is so-
called Public Art, which installs rather
prefabricated solid forms directly in
social space, thus fencing it in, or rather
marking it, directly mastering the social
tissue. As far back as the 19thcentury the
relations between art, the economy, andindustry were a priority of public policy
July 2011 (accessed 2013-02-
23). Paige Johnson, Parque Gulliver, Valencia
Spain, 1990,playscapes a blog about play-
ground design, 16 November 2009 (accessed
2013-02-23).
29 Jacques Rancire, Aesthetics and Its Dis-
contents, Polity Press, 2009, pp. 23-24.
and interests. Even then the potential of
organizing the production and exhibiting
of art as a display of consumer culture,
something which was a priority also on the
part of the market economy. The creativeindustry produces universal products, as a
result of which there is objective art as a
realization of the dreams of rationalization.
This form of public art can be termed
an oxymoron, after the gure of speech
embodying paradoxes with respect to
an object. An apt characterization of the
destiny of contemporary art according to
Adorno: Art that is simply a thing is an
oxymoron. Public art as an oxymoron
is a gure between the creative industry
and a badly understood ready-made
between Duchamps (R. Mutts) Fountain
and Walter Benjamins statement from
his essay The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproducibility that the
new art will be produced industrially and
apprehended chiey as a thing produced
of solid materials with shiny and colorful
surfaces, on the boundary between a
designers object and a luxury commodity,
showing off the social status of its owner,
in this case of a given district of the
city, of the municipality, the museum or
corporation whose property it is.
Yvonne Domenge Olas de Viento (Wind Waves)
(2010)30
In the Vancouver of today, everything
adds up to the realization that artistic
creation is rendered impossible under
the auspices of state sponsorship and
ruling class culture. On the balance
30 Graeme Fisher and Andrew Witt, Fabri-
cating the Creative City: The New Monuments
(2/3), The Mainlander (Vancouvers Place for
Progressive Politics), 10 January 2012 (ac-
cessed 2013-02-23).
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sheet of recent artistic production, the
empty pluralism of public art ambigu-
ous text-based works, gardening, light
projections, and billboard images is
found siding with the medium of theculture industry. All established means
in the arsenal of artistic creation, to
paraphrase the words of Alain Badiou
on militant art, are mobilized to sing
the praises of conservative institutions,
while artistic novelty is inscribed within
the continuity of the state. 31
While sculptors focused on designing
better playground parts, landscape
architects began to emphasize the com-
plete play landscape: a playscape. Rob-
ert Roystons California parks included
pedal car freeways and gopher holes.
The freeways are gone, but you can still
visit the gopher holes at Mitchell Park in
Palo Alto. 32
If landscape architects began to empha-
size the complete play landscape, the
playscape, it would seem appropriate to
ask the question what role art on the one
hand, design on the other have played for
urban culture and the social production in
the city. Despite their complicity with ar-
chitecture they have secretly always tried
31 Ibid.
32 Paige Johnson, Mid-Century Modern on
the Playground, dwell at home in the modern
world, 1 August 2011 (accessed
2013-02-22).
to betray it even in their most subservient
guises in order to realize their own ends.
Londons Trafalgar Square is considered
the rst place in which public art was of-
cially exhibited.In reality it is an emanation of a cross-
space in which a public square and public
art have become an example of how an
event or happening can be tamed and
reduced to a showcase, to create space
for cultivation, for actions and events,
as a free-speech platform and location for
protest demonstrations, a government-
subsidized open-air gallery, a site for
commercial publicity stunts, or whatever
the case may be. Then again, there are
projects much more ambiguous than
the aforementioned, and yet it looks like
they contribute to the reterritorialization
of spatio-temporal relations, as playtime
and disappearance of the space, a dead
structure over the entire range of living
production.
Between Art for Social Change and
Subjection to the Technological
Apparatus
This is the case of Longplayer by Jem
Finer at the Lighthouse in Trinity Buoy
Wharf, London, which started playing on 1
January 2000 and will run without repeat-ing itself a 1,000-year-long composition.
Created with London-based arts organiza-
tion Artangel to mark the turn of the mil-
lennium, Longplayeris Finers response to
the difculty of representing and under-
standing time on a grander scale. At its
core, Longplayeris a mathematically self-
generating score not random, but a set of
principles that allow the score to continu-
ally create itself in a way that is aestheti-
cally beautiful and musically unique. 33
Bearing in mind the challenge of
keeping Longplayer playing for a thousand
years overcoming short-lived technologies,
the future prospects of the project oscillate
between thoughts of techno-feasibility
reminiscent of deep-space missions of
the space industry, and the use of social
production relying on setting up a long-
33 Phil Thompson, Jem Finer Launches
Longplayer with Shortplayer, Pittsburgh New
Music Net, 1 October 2010
(accessed 2013-02-24).
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term machine orchestrating human
performance.
If Longplayer is to survive at all, then
people will have to want it to. So, ulti-
mately, the best strategy might be forit to be played by humans as long as
they are around. This may mean that an
idea of Longplayer as an intermittent
continuum might, in time, have to be
adopted something like thinking of a
partially submerged landscape that is
only ever visible as a string of islands.
In theory, once a stable platform for
human performance is established a
durable or easily replaceable set of
instrumental tools, an accurate meth-
odology and a means of conveying this
methodology from one generation to the
next future performers would be able
to pick up the performance at any given
point in time based on a set of simple
calculations.34
The point could be argued whether
this would lead to a truly participatory
and emancipatory project or whether
it would rather be the embodiment of
pure industrialization and automation,
linking the symbolic dimension to the
subjection and automation of living labor
in a technocratic machine. The question
that arises is how art contributes to the
domination of dead labor over living labor,
and whether this is a monument of human
creativity and vitality or a machine of
the creative industry, which puts human
labor power under the command of the
machines and the total computerization
of the social system. Is this not the
apparatus that sucks out social
production, as Kronos the Titan ate his
34 Jem Finer, About Longplayers Survival
(accessed 2013-02-24).
children, to perpetuate itself through its
repetition? Is it not this empty repetition
that lls the void left by the absence of
rituals, social memory and traditions in
the social bond that Paolo Virno speaksabout, where the social exchange is
executed through market economic models
colonizing the energy of play?
Metropolitan forms of life, stripped of
tradition and poor of experience, actu-
ally show childish, or rather puerile
traits: although childhood is their key of
explanation, they only show a depraved
and sometimes terric image of it. The
society of advanced capitalism uses the
threatening one more time for building
a dreadful kindergarten. Playful repeti-
tion is countered by technical reproduc-
ibility with the compulsion to repeat
commodity and wage labour. Culture
industry decorates the poverty of expe-
rience in order to make it unnoticed; it
fosters the lack of customs and shows
simple reiteration as their substitute; it
establishes furtive and annoying pseudo
traditions; it gives serial repetition
an aura. Its fault is not damaging the
hearts and souls, but, quite on the con-
trary, to lull them at all costs. (Virno)35
THE LIVE DEBUT OF THE LONGEST
PIECE OF MUSIC EVER WRITTEN
Lasting 1000 years, Jem Finers Long-
player has been playing without inter-
ruption, since the rst moments of the
year 2000, at listening posts around the
world. Originally commissioned by Ar-
35 Paolo Virno, Three Remarks Regarding the
Multitudes Subjectivity and Its Aesthetic Com-
ponent, in Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw
(eds.), Under Pressure: Pictures, Subjects, and
the New Spirit of Capitalism, Sternberg Press,
2008, p. 39.
Early calculations for Longplayer Live,
2009.
Original schematic drawing, 2009. Image: Sam Collins.
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tangel, for almost 10 years it has been
performed by computer. Now, for the
rst time, a tiny fragment of its millen-
nial expanse receives its live debut.
On September 12th 2009, Finer will
direct Longplayers spectacular rst-
ever live performance 1000 minutes
from its vast continuum, performed by a
26-strong orchestra, on a purpose-built
20-meter wide instrument, effectively
a giant synthesizer built of bronze-age
technology, with highly resonant bells
for tone generators and humans for
power. 36
Another project that can be viewed
through the prism of public art while be-
ing rather ambivalent in that it raisesquestions with regard to public space in
relation to aesthetic and social produc-
tion is Jeremy Dellers The Battle of Org-
reave. It is a homage to the minor strike
of 1984 and the events that followed from
it. The lm is a re-enactment using as its
arena and scenery the place of the original
events, and gathering for its expressive
mass scenes of the face-off between police
and the workers directly former miners
and ex-police ofcers from the local com-
munity to take part in the re-enactment
commissioned by the British agency Ar-tangels and publicly funded.
Jeremy Dellers approach is similar to
Sergei Eisensteins for his lm Strike37
which he lmed on the premises of the
factory, using the place of the actual
36 Alexander Rose, Long Player Live in
London, The Long Now Foundation(blog),
21 August 2009
(accessed 2013-02-24).
37 Soviet silent lm by Sergei Eisenstein,
1925.
events as the scenery of his lm, and hired
as extras a great number of workers who
had also participated in the strike and
protests the lm is about. As a result,
the cinematographic shock effect is muchstronger than in half-documentary,
half-ction lms, which lend a striking
authenticity and materiality to the lm
material.
In the case of The Battle of Orgreave
despite the similarities to Eisensteins
Strike we can nd many of the
contradictions between contemporary
capitalism and living labor and the
position of contemporary art that rather
perpetuates the spectacle. The project
tests on the one hand the performative
dimensions of public space as a theaterarena and on the other, casts in the
role of actors and extras former miners
who lost their jobs when the mines were
closed, many of whom have remained in a
precarized situation since. It is not a real
protest, but the performance of a protest
where they play themselves in a time in
which they were active and really struggled
for their right to work, in a time in which
they were miners. They are thus turned
into a kind of creative workers, which
makes the project potentially ironic if not
cynical. The question is towards whom.
Clearly, not towards the former miners.Something deeply subversive remains
in the project, not only in the beauty of
the performance but also in the hidden
potential enclosed in the cycle of the
media spectacle. This is a project that
truly looks at playtime and work time
and their changed conditions in the
new neoliberal capitalism, and at the
resistance of the miners. What is then
the role of art between social space
and social engagement? What Rancire
intends with his question: Why does
Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreaves, 2001. Photos: Martin Jenkinson, courtesy of Artangel.
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this suspension [of the players cognitive
power of understanding that determines
sensible givens in accordance with its
categories, and of the power of sensibility
that requires an object of desire]simultaneously found a new art of living,
a new form of life-in-common? And yet
there remains a sadness that this is only
a repetition, play, stimulated and made
possible by a commission.
Called The Social Playground, the exhibition
at Liverpools Foundation for Art and Creative
Technology (FACT) was based around the Brit-
ish tradition of racing eggs down hills at Easter,
2011.38
38 Kate Chiu, The Social Playground by Aber-
rant Architecture, dezeen magazine, 10 July
2011 (accessed 2013-02-23).