City as Playground

Another good article in Spacing underlines the critical significance of play in an urban environment:

While parks are indeed good places for fun, we shouldn’t let games be ghettoized. By breaking out of these designated recreation zones and into the parts of the city we actually live in, urban games integrate themselves more fully into our experience of our environment and increase our ownership of our surroundings. By reminding people to visit and use areas of the city they might never otherwise pass through, such games are useful in helping people to think of their home as consisting of not merely their private dwelling or their neighbourhood but the city as a whole. They encourage us to bravely strike out from our home neighbourhoods and see and use parts of the city in fun new ways they were never intended to be seen or used, giving us new angles and fresh perspectives on city planning and the borders between public and private realms.

Speaking of which, a few more efforts to interact/play/observe/act, in the city:

Place In Place Of, a "synchronic journal of places" (see more at the website)  that currently immerses the viewer in multiple simultaneous impressions of Berlin (can I volunteer?);

Moving Canvas, which attaches a projector to the side of subway trains that displays images on the tunnels outside, adding a dimension to the experience of travel;

The Push-bike Architecture Treasure Hunt, a London "happening" that is "about stopping, searching and appreciating buildings overlooked in our daily routines from a roadside perspective."