The Ludic Dimension of Public Space
A Strategy for the Creation of Collective Memory EURAU’12
ABSTRACT. In this paper we are interested in memory as a tool for building the future from the public space. We present first some of the approaches to the topic in the last decades of the twentieth century, especially those related to collective memory.
Second,
we
introduce
the
importance
of
play
in
human
social
development, from the pedagogical point of view, from cultural studies or the aesthetics. Finally, some approaches that link the play and public space, as tools to enhance and restore these areas from the establishment of a collective memory. KEYWORDS. Identity, memory, play, citizenship, public space.
Smara Gonçalves* _ Carlos Miranda** *Universidad de Burgos / Escuela de Arte y Superior de Diseño de Burgos/ A3GM Architects Av. Reyes Católicos, 14 com, oficina 4, 09005 Burgos
[email protected] +34 947214375 ** A3GM Architects Av. Reyes Católicos, 14 com, oficina 4, 09005 Burgos +34 947214375
[email protected]
1. The memory in the world today The issue of memory is a central concern in the cultural field from the last two decades of the twentieth century. This preoccupation with memory has been interpreted as a failure of the project of modernity, as a reflection of the fear of the future or as the result of saturation of memories derived from the abundance of information in the digital age (Huyssen, 2000). However, this preoccupation with memory, in addition to demonstrating shortcomings and fears of modern societies, it is revealed as a strategy to face the future. And any strategy can be used more or less successfully. In this paper we are interested in memory, not as nostalgic appeal of a better past than our present today, but as a tool: we are interested in the opportunity to experience this in a productive way to create memories that will improve the future. In urban areas the memory-related approaches have generally concentrated on the recovery of the material heritage: the restoration of historical centers mainly, and sometimes the creation of memorials. Actions that contribute to the museumization of the city, which are more focused on the occasional visitor perception than on the daily activities of citizens. These pasts that are rescued are distant: gothic grid, baroque city,... Aesthetic strategies, historical studies, touristic diffusion, are mechanisms intended to ensure that these actions form "artificially" a collective memory. It is not a memory that nourishes from remembrance of experiences, but assimilated by learning, often as self-imposed by the desire for identification and belonging to a collectivity. It is not the subject of this work a deep reflection about authenticity, but to show the potential for manipulation these types of memory recall allow, if only for the bias of the decision of what is recovered against what is discarded. Such interventions often present another problem: their homogeneity. Far from distinguishing a place individually, you can see the similarity of these interventions in different cities: the same aesthetic recovery criteria, commercial urban furniture repeated, and so on. Admittedly, the interest in the pasts that never existed is a constant in our culture, we can see examples in both the popular rise of postmodern historical novel and Joan Fontcuberta projects in which he recreates nonexistent pasts shown using strategies characteristic of historical documentary research, thus playing with the limits of plausibility. Like Viollet-le-Duc restored in style, most recently interventions in the city are interventions in style, a style that is not historical but thematic: interventions in historical style, contemporary periphery style, etc. To assess this type of action is worth the concept of "imagined memory" by Andreas Huyssen. Huyssen recognizes that all memory is imagined, but the concept allows him to distinguish between memories that are based on life experiences, difficult to forget, and those acquired through the file, marketed and consumed. These last are the ones called "imagined memories" and are much easier to forget than the lived memories. This kind of memories do not lead to a collective memory with a signified identity, but to an artificial global collective memory. Huyssen believes that consensual collective memory helps to ensure social and cultural cohesion, and that the "mediatic memory" spread by the media can not replace it. The lived memory is active and is part of the social: individuals, families, groups, regions or nations. For Huyssen this type of memory is required "to construct differential local futures in a global world" (Huyssen, 2000. 28). Before Huyssen, Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) also reflected on memory in this sense: "the living history differs from written history: it has everything you need to
be a living and natural framework in which a thought can be supported for conserve and find the image of the past "(Halbwachs, 1995) What Halbwachs called collective memory is not the events that preserves national history -the so-called historical memory-, but to "go back through one´s remembrances in a continuous movement," a memory reinforced and supplemented by the others’ one, which is given when their remembrances are related to the facts that make up my past. Another idea next to these approaches is the decrease of the present. The life cycle of consumer goods is becoming shorter and, consequently, there is a perception of a decrease in the present extent. This weakening of the present results in increased fragility of stability and identity that the present offers to the people. The tendency to museumization compensates the loss of stability: the traditional forms of cultural identity frozen in the museum repair the loss of alive traditions. For Halbwachs memory exists in the group and the society, which provides common constructions as time and space to men in the group, frameworks which provide generality to specific remembrances that rely on the material,-landscapes, objectsand allow to reconstruct the images of the past through the present. (Lasén Díaz, 1995) This paper aims to reflect on the possibilities of intervention in the urban environment conducive to experimentation and, therefore, creating lived memories. If the experiences of life provide real memories, public space should favor them. One strategy is to work the ludic dimension. The importance of play in human social development is an area extensively studied. From the pedagogical point of view we should highlight the theories of Piaget and Vygotski, from cultural studies we cannot fail to mention the Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga, not forgetting the aesthetic dimension of the concept of play in the reception of works of art on authors as Schiller and Gadamer.
2. Play in public space Public space is the place to build a collective memory derived from the establishment of social relations in particular physical environments. The loss of collective link with spaces has been produced by replacing the conditions of life experience: the most vivid and intense experiences have gone from being developed in a physical and social context to take place in a virtual private environment. This situation makes experiences homogeneous anywhere in the world, eliminates the identification of the person with the place and impoverishes social life. If citizens fail to understand public space as an essential element of their life experience, it will increasingly suffer more degradation. We do not mean necessarily physical degradation, but mainly a degradation in quality. If public space loses its function as an element of citizenship cohesion and identity, it runs the risk of becoming a mere decoration with a total lack of social functionality, poor at the perceptual level, and often with similar formal definitions in different cities. Below we present different approaches that link play and public space in order to show how strategies aimed toward the ludic can be used as tools to enhance and restore these areas.
2.1. Historical overview Ludic activities in the European urban public space has been a constant throughout history until the mid-twentieth century. In rural areas this use of space may have survived longer, but in the cities play no longer was the protagonist from this time. Plato highlights the importance of play in the seventh book of his Laws (Platón, 1872). In the dialogue between the Athenian and Clinias he says that between three and six children amuse themselves together with games that are natural. He states that children of this age should meet at the sites dedicated to the gods in each district, under the supervision of their nurses. Plato does not consider the children's play a residual activity, on the contrary states that the game's development should occur in a privileged place. He maintains that if children play the same games and in the same way as their elders, they will accept later the laws and established way of life. Many of the medieval play activities have been preserved in the rural as traditions associated with local festivals. With regard to children's play in public space we have a faithful and detailed representation in the table of Pieter Brueghel the Elder Young Folks At Play (or Children's Games). Until the first half of the twentieth century public space has been the playground for children, where children transformed reality around them in play, as a form of social learning. In a 1947 British documentary we can see children playing war, reproducing battles of World War II. Children are able to adapt his play to the possibilities offered by space. The vacant lots with debris of ruined buildings provide a flexible undifferentiated space that can accommodate different recreational needs. Another contemporary reference to this documentary is the film Hue and Cry which shows how children feel postwar London as a unitary territory where you work but where you also play, where the ruins are a place abandoned by adults, full of possibilities for adventure, that becomes a world reserved for play. (Crichton, 1947)
Fig. 1
2.2. Pedagogical dimension of play The ludic dimension of public space is not reserved exclusively for childhood, but this life stage it is very important because experiences, relationships, will be set on a more permanent and effective way in the memory of people: the quality of the remembrances of childhood linked to public space will encourage the desire to protect these places in the adult. But what kind of recreational activities are to be promoted in public space? In general, all those favoring the relationship, creating different and exciting experiences that are set as unique remembrances, and in particular thinking of the younger children, those who develop symbolic play. Piaget theories established that children's developmental stages determine the way they play (Martínez Criado, 1998). Between two and six years begins to appear the symbolic play which is that, in the presence of a particular object, the child pictures an absent object: a stone can be a boat or a stick a horse. This necessary distinction between signifier and signified can be stimulated or suppressed by the space where the game is played. To have elements with an abstract character that favor symbolic interpretation encourage such activities. Vygotski extended the ideas of Piaget to argue that play is not only a stage but a condition of child development: through play children move intellectually and learn to integrate into society. A highlight in the game is the freedom of choice. The obligatory play is not play, and the conditioned play is poor. A recent investigation (Bonawitz et al., 2011) has studied the learning of children between four and six years comparing instruction versus free experimentation. From this research can be deduced that the play elements with a plastic and indefinite vocation have a greater effect on the child's educational development that the standard elements for a specific use. Taking the results of this research to the recreational possibilities of public space we can understand why the ruins, wastelands, sticks, stones and other objects without preset function have provided the ideal context for the development of children's play in the past. In this respect we need to reflect if the commercial children's furniture, including precise indications of age and method of use, and usually placed in our public spaces, is an appropriate way of intervention. In addition catalog items configure indistinguishable spaces among cities or different areas, which leads to a lack of identity. In line with these approaches it can be highlighted the importance of adventure parks, which have their origin in the interventions of landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen in Denmark in the 30's. He was especially interested in meeting the play and recreational needs of children (especially those living in city blocks). After the Second World War, the Adventure Playgrounds were developed in England. Sorensen said of historical 'junk' creation: They can dream and imagine and make dreams and imagination reality, any rate a reality, which the child's mind is completely satisfied with…It is so obvious that the children thrive here and feel well, they unfold and they live.
2.3. Defiance, art and play Muntañola (Muntañola i Thornberg, 1980) uses the concept of deprivation to express a kind of death of the environment, which is "the progressive simplification of the environment by reducing its perceptual, kinesthetic, richness, up to build artificial habitat in which the body hardly call its senses into play, and in which
there is no difference when one place to another place". This progressive impoverishment of public space has led to the emergence of new forms of use, somehow rebel against the established normal behavior. An antecedent of these approaches are the urban excursions to the banal places of the city of Dada movement of the 20's. In the 50's the Situationist International invents a new concept, the dérive, which is “the realization of an alternative way of inhabiting the city” (Careri, 2002. 90). By exacerbating new ways of inhabiting the city stands the practice of parkour. Parkour is an activity that consists in moving fluidly through the city following a voluntary route not conditioned by the obstacles of public space, fences, walls, which are overcome by the abilities of the human body. Parkour is a playful way of liberation from the tyranny that is the public imposed public space.
3. Ludic interventions Below we analyze some interventions that are noted for their ability to put people back in a position to experience the way of life in public space, facilitating learning, relationships,... placing again those spaces in people's vital memory.
3.1. Focused on children's play In the 30, Isamu Noguchi started to propose large-scale sculptures that were intended to create play spaces by manipulating the field (Larrivee, 2011). These proposals were too advanced for the time they were proposed. It took 30 years for large field manipulations to be part of the art world through the land art. These works of Noguchi were aimed at entertaining children presenting a relief that favored races, jumps and movements. After the Second World War, Aldo van Eyck also dealt with play areas for children. With very austere resources, functional aspects predominating over formal or compositional, he made interventions in various lots of Amsterdam to create spaces that favored a free recreational use. Closer in time is the Children's Playground by studio Romi Khosla completed in Haryana, India. Like the works of van Eyck, it is characterized by the austerity of means, but also by great flexibility of space. It consists of pivoting movable panels for defining small and large enclosures, ordered or unstructured spaces, open or closed, so that children are free to set up a play environment which corresponds to freely decide the rules. It is a space that fosters free experimentation, thereby responding adequately to the demands of the game in children.
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
3.2. Irony of the everyday Other ludic intervention strategies in public space are designed to favor an ironic look on the everyday, so that the estrangement to novelty causes intense experiences that are able to generate remembrances for memory. Peter Gibson aka "Roadsworth" uses this kind of resources. He is an urban artist who became known through graffiti on the asphalt using the technique of stencil. Initial attention was on car use and promote cycling. His repertoire of images is based on everyday objects that interact with the marks of the road, with traffic signals or their shadows so that the clash between the familiar and decontextualized in the urban environment can support completely different readings of space. Sometimes these actions are used as new advertising techniques. In 2009 the advertising agency DDB Stockholm has launched a campaign which had the message that the best way to get people to make positive changes in his life was that these changes would be fun. To demonstrate it, they made an installation out of the subway stations of Stockholm. We all know that is healthier and more sustainable climbing stairs instead of using escalators, but people invariably used the latter. The installation was to convert the steps of fixed stairs in keys on a piano that sounded as they were stepped. This new option completely changed the way of using, living, and feeling space. Most people chose to climb stairs and even play with the sounds produced. If we consider that architecture is to organize and improve the usability of space, this publicitary intervention created architecture.
Fig. 4
3.3. Ludic as an active element In this section we will highlight two interventions that fall within the scope of the construction of public space that is combined with permanent art installation. Both aim to achieve the goal of significance instead favoring the activity of people. This activity has both a recreational and a relational component as people are forced to interact by sharing space. One of these interventions is the Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa at the Millennium Park in Chicago (2004). Plensa creates a large open space of a civil character and chaired by two large prisms which represent the faces of anonymous citizens of Chicago. It is therefore a monument to the public. Water as a basic element of life, is incorporated in a ludic way to the proposal: from the mouths of the ordinary citizens represented, intermittent water jets emerge. Children enjoy this space, interacting with the environment, getting wet, playing together. These exciting experiences are incorporated into their vital memory and reinforce its emotional link with the place. The work, the installation, is completed by the activity of people.
Fig. 5
The same type of intervention, though with a less festive ludic activity is presented in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisenman. Here, to effectively perceive the intervention, we must walk between the large concrete prisms. Although the material richness of the monument has kinesthetic properties -the waving ground plane that causes gradual changes in depth and therefore the perception of the environment, roughness of the ground texture when walking, etc.- One of the most significant is the sensation of proximity to the other. Although not seeing other people, one can hear their voices, feel the footsteps of children running. We know we are accompanied by others who are sharing with us the very special experience. The work is geometry, matter and, especially, the presence of others.
4. Conclusions The hope to recovery public space undergoes the citizens bonding, and this relationship will be more powerful if the experiences are developed since childhood. Public space will become a priority for future citizens if it facilitates learning experiences, individual and socialized. This must meet certain requirements: – Allow the development of different types of play adapted to child evolutional development: individual, symbolic, socialized play... – Be a place with opportunities for free experimentation, for people to appropriate it as an element of their vital memory (affective memorization). – Have a distinct character (from other parts of the city, other cities...) to support the generation of identity, collective memory. – Allow the coexistence of different activities and different age groups, so that socialization is effective (relationships). – Encourage everyday uses, turning them into exceptional experiences. – Have a certain character of open work completed by use, by experience. We want to show how this way, beyond form, that an action strategy with a commitment to playful component, may be an appropriate way of reclaiming public space in contemporary cities.
5. Legends Fig. 1. Children playing war games, England, 1947. Photo taken from the film Children Learning by Experience (Battle scenes), 1947. Documentary. British Library, 1947. British Film Institute. Fig. 2. Children's Playground by Romi Khosla Design Studio in Haryana, India, 2004. Fig. 3. Intervention by Roadsworth in the traffic signals on the street asphalt. Fig. 4. Image of the intervention by the advertising agency DDB Stockholm in the Stockholm Subway stations, 2009.
Fig. 5. Children playing at the Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa at the Millennium Park in Chicago. (Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/endymion120/4824635860/ [Consult. 13 may 2012].
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7. Biography Smara Gonçalves Diez is an Architect (1998, University of Valladolid) and Bachelor of Arts (2007, University of Burgos). Teacher at the Polytechnic School of the University of Burgos and the School of Design of Burgos since 2007. Her project and research activity focuses on issues related to public space, landscape and heritage. She is currently developing the thesis "Play, Relationship and Memory. Interactions Between Artistic and Architectural Strategies in Contemporary Public Space Project" in the Department of Theory of Architecture and Architectural Design at the School of Architecture at the University of Valladolid, under the direction of Dario Alvarez Alvarez. She is partner of A3GM Architects. Among his awards for interventions in public space highlights to have been a finalist in 2008 at the European Prize for Urban Public Space.
Carlos Miranda Barroso is an Architect (1996, University of Valladolid). His project activity focuses on aspects related to public space, landscape and heritage. He is partner of A3GM Architects. Among his awards for interventions in public space highlights to have been a finalist in 2008 at the European Prize for Urban Public Space.
