Play spaces

Mixed methods research (MMR) is useful for addressing complex and multidisciplinary urban problems. This article demonstrates an integrated MMR approach with a novel two-phase exploratory sequential design while studying play, play space, and children's (age 7-15 years) location preference for play in three residential areas in Dhaka. We used directly administered survey and interviews in the first phase to describe play and play space from children's perspective. Informed by the first, we employed GIS-based spatial and statistical analysis in the second phase to study patterns of children's location preference for play. Our article contributes to the methodological literature by combining MMR with urban spatial analysis in children's play environment studies.

"In the last couple of decades, the phenomenon of ‘play’, specifically children’s play, has got significant attention in global policy debates as well as in a variety of academic disciplines. Although much has been written on play, play remains to be a puzzlingly ‘difficult’ concept to define (Piaget 1962, Flanagan 2010: 4). The difficulty lays in the construction of the concept of play itself. Play seems to be more an ambiguous metaphor (Sutton-Smith 1997) than a serious topic of scientific study. Metaphorically, ‘playing’ might refer to almost all human and animal activities (Karoff 2013) and as such tries to escape definition. For example, playing as designing, playing as writing, playing as doing music, playing as creative exploration, playing as taking part in sports, playing as making fun, playing as playing role, playing as story telling, playing as acting, playing as pretending, playing as hiding and so on. Such vagueness and multiplicity of meaning (re) creates a new ground for (re) interpretation of the significance and meaning of play and its spatial derivatives such as playground.
Given such complexities exist, in this presentation I will highlight my explorations on two dominant strands of literatures on play: a) those creating a voice for play by seeing it as a significant ‘right’ in a diminished world of (children’s) outdoor play; and those trying to (re) conceptualize the variegated meanings of the cultural phenomena called ‘play’. I will show, by borrowing concepts from earlier theorists-of-play, why it is important to (re) consider both of these strands together while (re) addressing spatial manifestations of play, i.e. playgrounds, in planned urban settings. I will argue that it is not feasible to isolate ‘play’ and ‘playgrounds’ from other interconnected sociocultural and spatial-temporal phenomena. Such explorations might help me to develop a framework for my research involving play, playgrounds and their networks.
"

The TGarden is a space in which people can move and play together in dense fields of computationally mediated sound and light. Visitors, called players, are dressed in garments with embedded sensors transmitting their gestures to sound and video textures that evolve partly in response the players' gestures and partly according to autonomous dynamics. The players individually or collectively improvise gestures that take on meaning in the course of play. What is at stake is a new form of performance environment in which the logic of the event is not fixed or random or based on decision logics, but is instead latent in and emergent from a responsive field of media: dynamical fields of light, sound and material fabric. In this sort of performance space social-aesthetic objects are concurrently formed by the players' contingent activity and by potential fields composed by the creators of the play space. These potential fields are not scripts nor rules but continuous dynamical fields of superposed metaphorical states that may evolve over variable scales of time. The TGarden replaces the technology of representation by a technology of performance. In this essay, I first describe the TGarden as envisioned and as exhibited in prototype in 10 cities. I then describe its architecture in enough detail to discuss the conceptual concerns in this project regarding intentionality and embodied performance. I then suggest that this investigation be considered performance research by comparison with Artaud's and Grotowski's work. And I close with comments on the a-linguistic semiologies of performance based on the notion of substrate.

Mixed methods research (MMR) is useful for addressing complex and multidisciplinary urban problems. This article demonstrates an integrated MMR approach with a novel two-phase exploratory sequential design while studying play, play space, and children’s (age 7-15 years) location preference for play in three residential areas in Dhaka. We used directly administered survey and interviews in the first phase to describe play and play space from children’s perspective. Informed by the first, we employed GIS-based spatial and statistical analysis in the second phase to study patterns of children’s location preference for play. Our article contributes to the methodological literature by combining MMR with urban spatial analysis in children’s play environment studies.

This dissertation explores children’s play and their spatial pattern in urban settings -- a research domain that has received little attention in urban studies and design in recent decades. Particularly, this dissertation i) explores the concepts of play and play space by delving into 7 to 14 years old children's every day play practices in Dhaka; ii) develops methods to study children’s location preference for play and configuration of urban physical environments; and building on the results from i. and ii., iii) explains the impact of the configuration of urban physical environments on children’s location preference for play in the urban spaces. It argues that understanding childhood play practices and their spatial pattern is important for advancing knowledge in urban morphology and children’s geographies.  Attention on these issue is vital for planning and designing of livable and inclusive urban spaces, particularly in rapidly urbanizing Global South.