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

Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

Text and research: Dimitrina Sevova

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
1

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

This preliminary research provides a general introduction to the historical conditions and social function of public playgrounds in Western societies, in the context of the project Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Playgrounds New Spaces of Liberty (The Question of Form) at Kunsthof, Zurich, 2013. The aim is to initiate a transdisciplinary collaborative research group which is to focus on analytical micro-research on the city of Zurich, taking into special consideration 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 later to the flexible playscapes of the creative city with its economic bio-games.

Meteor boulder being unloaded from a truck and installed in Cantelowes park storyscape in Camden.2

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 Playgrounds of Aldo van Eyck, Amsterdam, 1950s1970s, playscapes a blog about playground design, 18 March 2008 <http://playgrounddesigns.blogspot.ch/2008/03/playgroundsof-aldo-van-eyck-amsterdam.html> (accessed 2013-02-23).

2 Muarrikh Choiron, Cornish Megaliths for Camden Playgrounds, worlds children: The Kids and Family On The world (blog), 12 November 2009 <http://worlds-children.blogspot. ch/2009/11/cornish-megaliths-for-camden. html> (accessed 2013-02-23).

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

The Function of the Playground in Public Life brief outline and historical background
Public Space and Social Organization
Between childhood and personhood, between labor and education, work and free time the production of subjectivity in public space is placed under contemporary conditions 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 artificial structures and surfaces of safety and regulating outdoor activity in public spaces, leaving their mark on social, economic, and biopolitical identitymaking. 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 and displayed 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 reflects the history of capitalism at each stage of its economic transformations, and the ways in which the social system and its dispositif addresses 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.
3

An Iraqi boy squeezes through a gap in a stretch of security barrier erected in Baghdads Azamiyah 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 to Military Urbanism (blog), 24 April 2007 <http:// subtopia.blogspot.ch/2007/04/border-toborder-wall-to-wall-fence-to.html> (accessed 2013-02-23). Photo: AP/Asaad Muhsin <http:// www.sfgate.com/entertainment/dayinpictures/ slideshow/SFGate-Day-in-Pictures-36214/photo-2474552.php> (accessed 2013-02-23). 4 Karin Brulliard, Gated Communities For the War-Ravaged, Washington Post, 23 April 2007 <http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/22/ AR2007042201419.html> (accessed 2013-0223). Quoted in Bryan Finoki, op. cit. Photo: Getty Images / Wathiq Khuzaie.

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

Sports field in the city moat.

Childrens Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (detail), circa 1560.

From Outdoor Play in the Medieval Town to the Playground Movements of 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, unregulated and accidental. The playground makes its appearance on the public scene in the industrial city of the mid-19th century, an artificial creature of modern time and its forces, a social technological device combining the model of the panopticum with the techniques of the factory. It spreads rapidly and is appropriated as an organizational apparatus of modernist discourse and socio-cognitive instrument, and finds 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 individualization, secularization, rationalization and disciplining of bodies. With its social function 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 become 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 arguments not unlike those in favor of public baths, green areas and grounds for outdoor 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 <http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/socialmuseumphotos.html> (accessed 2013-02-21). Francis Goodwin Peabody established the Social Museum at Harvard University in 1903 to promote investigations of modern social conditions and to direct the amelioration of industrial and social life. Peabody was a leader in social reform, teaching popular courses on social ethics as early as the 1880s and forming the Department of Social Ethics in 1906.

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

in the history of Commonwealth countries. A large gamut of genres emerges, among them adventure playgrounds combing fun and pedagogy, or field experiments for the outdoor cultivation of plants in the newly constituted public schools for mass education. It is as part of a reorganization of the social field that the market economy of the 19th century introduces a modern concept of childhood as a distinct happy life stage of personhood, first 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 and economic 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 recreation movement 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

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 if they 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-century playground incorporates the construction 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 subjects with special treatment under public law, allowing them to a certain extent an independent status in contrast to their previous status 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 20th century, which coincides with the construction in a commercial mode of the toy system of the fast-growing industry, and with the rise of scientific disciplines with an interest in the social and the subject. These processes reshape the perception of what can be called a happy childhood while placing it in the light of consumerism and the economic benefits and developing in children the habits required by the new relations.

6 Julia Sniderman Bachrach, Playground Movement, Encyclopedia of Chicago <http:// www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/976.html>(accessed 2013-02-20).

7 Georgia Silvera Seamans, Contested waters at Americas swimming pools, local ecologist (blog), 25 February 2009 <http://localecologist. blogspot.ch/2009/02/contested-waters-atamericas-swimming.html> (accessed 2013-0221).

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

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 construction sites. 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.

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 called Adventure 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 9 control of their surroundings.

The Democratization of Play

Roy Toy Log Camp Building Set, Roy K. Dennison & Sons, 1946.10

Prior to the advent of Adventure Playgrounds, early 20th-century construction toy systems gave children an outlet for imaginative play.11 If in the beginning play is the privilege of children from the affluent strata while other children are often forced to work, in our days the fault line is between rich and developed countries in which child labor is outlawed and childhood is under the protection of the law system, and those in which child labor to a varying extent remains widespread. If in Germany or China 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 <http://community.imaginationplayground. com/archives/929> (accessed 2013-02-22). 10 National Building Museum, Architectural Toy Collection. Photo by Museum staff. <http:// www.flickr.com/photos/nationalbuildingmuseum/8224331265/> (accessed 2013-02-22). 11 Susan G. Solomon, Play and Parenting, imaginationplayground (blog), 13 January 2013 <http://community.imaginationplayground. com/archives/929> (accessed 2013-02-22).

Matador No. 1, Korbuly, 1932.8

Take todays highly standardized playgrounds for instance. These post-andplatform structures attempt to design every risk and fall out of play. Danish landscape architect Helle Nebelong writes and 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-twentiethcentury Danish examples of play environments, which permitted children to work
8 National Building Museum, Architectural Toy Collection. Photo by Museum staff. <http:// www.flickr.com/photos/nationalbuildingmuseum/8224332325/> (accessed 2013-02-22).

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

Since the ancient Greeks (or even earlier) there has been a strong link between physical health and general wellbeing. For nearly 100 years, the Parks Department has been at the forefront in supporting a healthy city and putting the recreation in Parks & Recreation. From the early bathhouses to the antiobesity 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 <http://www. nycgovparks.org/about/history/recreation> (accessed 2013-02-20). 13 Akron Beacon Journal file photo. Source: Mark J. Price, Akron gives big bounce to playground safety in 1940s, Akron Beacon Journal Online, 18 March 2012 <http://www.ohio.com/ news/local-history-akron-gives-big-bounceto-playground-safety-in-1940s-1.275209> (accessed 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 playgrounds with materials furnished by Goodyear and Firestone.14

14 Akron Beacon Journal file photo. Source: Mark J. Price, op. cit.

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

Modernist design principles came to the playground through the work of Dutch architect Aldo Van Eyck. When he began his work in 1947 there were few public playgrounds in Amsterdam. When he finished 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 playground as part of the utopian, modernist project of the city, with their equipment and things, part of an agenda with its machinery for organizing the betterment of life, the typical playground with fixed equipment that some can still remember is on the wane in the contemporary urban environment. In a time in which play spaces start out from the factory regime they consist of the typical metal play equipment, 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 utopian ideas, 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 <http://www.dwell.com/ outdoor/article/mid-century-modern-playground> (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 establishment of 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 flow of composition-decomposition-recomposition of capital and of social production and technologies. As a result, the playground apparatus undergoes continuous rethinking, replanning, endless unshaping and reshaping of its internal structure and surface, along with the idea of its materials, design and architecture and their integration, as a part of a bigger project of optimization reflecting planning interests and the economic conditions. A few principal periods stand out after World War II of these social apparatuses,
8

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

comprising socio-economics postwar 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 of the 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 flexibility under the new dispositif of 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 fitness 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 field. The fiscal and social crisis of the 1970 of the plan economy pushed local politicians and planners to adopt growthoriented 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 reflexive project of the self, first by creating lots of closed, commercial spaces for play, and in recent times by producing pseudo-eco environments as part of gentrification and total 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 scientific and biopolitical discipline and self-reflexive control, exposing players to a calculated risk and increased competition, providing the perfect semiotized context for the financialization of the market and the new demands put by the new spatiotemporal 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 resource center. 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.

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

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.

The Rise and Fall of Adventure Playgrounds

Cubbies adventure playground on Condell St has evidently existed for a long time, as this photo from 1975 shows a place that was definitely 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 nightmare. 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 neighborhoods of big cities, the general tendency of privatizing all areas, and tightened regulations 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-income peripheral 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 adventure playground on Condell St, Fitzroyalty: Hyperlocal news about Melbournes first suburb: Fitzroy 3065 (blog), 12 January 2009 <http:// indolentdandy.net/fitzroyalty/2009/01/12/ fitzroy-history-cubbies-adventure-playgroundon-condell-st/> (accessed 2013-02-23).

Most adventure playgrounds emerged in the 60s, 70s and 80s through grassroots community action in desperately deprived areas. In London, about 80 have survived the battles of the Thatcher years and attacks from health and safety over-regulation. It is hard to convey 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 freerange childhoods.18

18 Tim Gill, Families need adventure playgrounds, and cities need families, the guardian, 16 May 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2011/may/16/wandsworthadventure-playground-charging> (accessed 2013-02-21).

10

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

Interestingly, Kolle 37 grew out of an earlier movement, Spielwagen Berlin, in which grown-ups concerned 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 market. Its perimeter fence even has openings that see through to the street and its sidewalk cafes.20

Kolle 3719

Kolle 3720

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 tendency is towards supervised play services that have to create a sustainable business model for something from which one would not expect any revenues. As a result of this process thematic play areas are es19 Paige Johnson, Spielwagen Portable Playground, Berlin, 1980s to present, playscapes a blog about playground design, 5 May 2010 <http://playgrounddesigns.blogspot. ch/2010/05/spielwagen-portable-playgroundberlin.html> (accessed 2013-02-21). 20 Paige Johnson, Kolle 37, Berlin, selfconstructed and constantly changing, 1990 to present, playscapes a blog about playground design, 2 May 2010 <http://playgrounddesigns. blogspot.ch/2010/05/kolle-37-berlin-self-constructed-and.html> (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 fit 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 landowners economic benefits. This ends up being a way of privatizing and commercializing parts of the public space that have remained as a sort of commons under the regulation of the city even during industrial urbanization. Extending financial 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-reconstruction.21

21 Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism (New Edition), trans. Kristina Lebedeva and Jason Francis Mc Gimsey, Semiotext(e), 2011.

11

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

From playgrounds that derive inspiration from nature to pop-up urban installations, spaces for play are transitioning away from traditional manufactured solutionsie. the ubiquitous plastic 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 landscapes for play. By using only safety surfacing and equipment in a naturalized garden space, Stoss Landscape Urbanism designed a springy playscape that also comments on our obsession with playground safety (gotta watch those trees). Image courtesy of Stoss Landscape Urbanism.22 New genres of playgrounds appear out of this process, such as these thematic mastodons returning to nature in the form of a simulacrum, simulation models of stimulating 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 without animals 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 de22 Paige Johnson, An Introduction to Modern Playscapes, dwell at home in the modern world, 11 July 2011 <http://www.dwell.com/ outdoor/article/introduction-modern-playscapes> (accessed 2013-02-26).

gree of interaction with the equipment surface and structure, for extreme sports and the development of bodily strength and orientation skills. This is a kind of militarization of the concept of the playground, a training 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.23 This unleashes opportunities for authority to put them under its constant protection and supervision as significant 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 conflict and flirts 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 flexible time in the heart of the city where in shiny offices biopower of labor appears as privileged form of labor the production of men through men. (Marazzi) Public art in most cases fits in with what Bourdieu calls the logic of disinterested 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.

12

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

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 and production 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, chiefly through imposing disciplining mechanisms of self-control. This is actually an amplification of the function of the playground as a social apparatus as both pure and functional aesthetic object.

13

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

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 finds its total application in the global creative city, on the territory between the blurring 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 contemporary re-created and expanded concept of the playground allows it to rehabilitate in social space concepts that contemporary democracy has rejected and found unacceptable, 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 revives imperial, colonial, fascist and totalitarian visions of representation of the symbolic 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 elements, playscapes a blog about playground design, 20 July 2009 <http://playgrounddesigns.blogspot.ch/2009/07/berlin-playgroundelements.html> (accessed 2013-02-23).

temporary and cheap materials, can in some cases be called anti-monuments, or grotesque, second-order monuments in 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.

14

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

New York Citys favorite playground was transformed into a wacky world of art installations this weekend, as the annual 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
Figment26 Liberty27

People crowd Times Square at 42nd Street in New York City to celebrate the victory in Europe on May 8, 1945.27

New York Citys annual Figment festival is an ideal fit 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 25 size of the Lilliputians. This description eloquently refers to the monument 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 playground design, 16 November 2009 <http://playgrounddesigns.blogspot.ch/2009/10/parquegulliver-valencia-spain-1990.html> (accessed 2013-02-23).

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 <http://ny.curbed.com/ archives/2012/06/11/figment_festival_takes_ over_governors_island_with_oddball_art.php> (accessed 2013-02-23). 27 B. Hudson, 67th Anniversary of V-E Day, The Denver Post, 8 May 2012 <http://blogs. denverpost.com/library/2012/05/08/67thanniversary-ve-day/> (accessed 2013-02-23). 28 thekittycats, PLAYTINERARIES: Playgrounds Worth A Trip, Citineraries (blog), 18

15

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

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 total architecture, 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 reflect 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 figures, temporarily re-appropriating the urban space in order to intervene in everyday life? 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 reconfiguration of spaces.29 On the other hand there is socalled 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 19th century the relations between art, the economy, and industry were a priority of public policy
July 2011 <http://citineraries.wordpress. com/2011/07/18/p-l-a-y-t-i-n-e-r-a-r-i-e-splaygrounds-worth-a-trip/> (accessed 2013-0223). Paige Johnson, Parque Gulliver, Valencia Spain, 1990, playscapes a blog about playground design, 16 November 2009 <http://playgrounddesigns.blogspot.ch/2009/10/parquegulliver-valencia-spain-1990.html> (accessed 2013-02-23). 29 Jacques Rancire, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 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 creative industry 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 figure 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 figure 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 chiefly 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, Fabricating the Creative City: The New Monuments (2/3), The Mainlander (Vancouvers Place for Progressive Politics), 10 January 2012 <http:// themainlander.com/2012/01/10/fabricatingthe-creative-city-the-new-monuments-23/> (accessed 2013-02-23).

16

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

sheet of recent artistic production, the empty pluralism of public art ambiguous text-based works, gardening, light projections, and billboard images is found siding with the medium of the culture 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

to betray it even in their most subservient guises in order to realize their own ends. Londons Trafalgar Square is considered the first place in which public art was officially exhibited. In reality it is an emanation of a crossspace 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 governmentsubsidized 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 repeating itself a 1,000-year-long composition. Created with London-based arts organization Artangel to mark the turn of the millennium, Longplayer is Finers response to the difficulty of representing and understanding time on a grander scale. At its core, Longplayer is a mathematically selfgenerating score not random, but a set of principles that allow the score to continually create itself in a way that is aesthetically 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-

While sculptors focused on designing better playground parts, landscape architects began to emphasize the complete play landscape: a playscape. Robert 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 emphasize 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 architecture 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 <http://www.dwell.com/ outdoor/slideshow/mid-century-modern-playg round?slide=1&c=y&paused=true#7> (accessed 2013-02-22).

33 Phil Thompson, Jem Finer Launches Longplayer with Shortplayer, Pittsburgh New Music Net, 1 October 2010 <http://www.pittsburghnewmusicnet.com/2010/09/25/jemfiner-launches-longplayer-with-shortplayer/> (accessed 2013-02-24).

17

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

Early calculations for Longplayer Live, 2009.

Original schematic drawing, 2009. Image: Sam Collins.

term machine orchestrating human performance. If Longplayer is to survive at all, then people will have to want it to. So, ultimately, the best strategy might be for it 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 methodology 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

children, to perpetuate itself through its repetition? Is it not this empty repetition that fills the void left by the absence of rituals, social memory and traditions in the social bond that Paolo Virno speaks about, 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, actually show childish, or rather puerile traits: although childhood is their key of explanation, they only show a depraved and sometimes terrific image of it. The society of advanced capitalism uses the threatening one more time for building a dreadful kindergarten. Playful repetition is countered by technical reproducibility with the compulsion to repeat commodity and wage labour. Culture industry decorates the poverty of experience 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 contrary, to lull them at all costs. (Virno)35 THE LIVE DEBUT OF THE LONGEST PIECE OF MUSIC EVER WRITTEN Lasting 1000 years, Jem Finers Longplayer has been playing without interruption, since the first moments of the year 2000, at listening posts around the world. Originally commissioned by Ar35 Paolo Virno, Three Remarks Regarding the Multitudes Subjectivity and Its Aesthetic Component, in Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw (eds.), Under Pressure: Pictures, Subjects, and the New Spirit of Capitalism, Sternberg Press, 2008, p.39.

34 Jem Finer, About Longplayers Survival <http://longplayer.org/what/survival/future. php> (accessed 2013-02-24).

18

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreaves, 2001. Photos: Martin Jenkinson, courtesy of Artangel.

tangel, for almost 10 years it has been performed by computer. Now, for the first time, a tiny fragment of its millennial expanse receives its live debut. On September 12th 2009, Finer will direct Longplayers spectacular firstever 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 being rather ambivalent in that it raises questions with regard to public space in relation to aesthetic and social production is Jeremy Dellers The Battle of Orgreave. It is a homage to the minor strike of 1984 and the events that followed from it. The film 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 officers from the local community to take part in the re-enactment commissioned by the British agency Artangels and publicly funded. Jeremy Dellers approach is similar to Sergei Eisensteins for his film Strike37 which he filmed 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 <http://blog.longnow. org/02009/08/21/long-player-live-in-london/> (accessed 2013-02-24). 37 Soviet silent film by Sergei Eisenstein, 1925.

events as the scenery of his film, and hired as extras a great number of workers who had also participated in the strike and protests the film is about. As a result, the cinematographic shock effect is much stronger than in half-documentary, half-fiction films, which lend a striking authenticity and materiality to the film material. In the case of The Battle of Orgreave despite the similarities to Eisensteins Strike we can find 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 theater arena 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
19

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

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 British tradition of racing eggs down hills at Easter, 2011.38

38 Kate Chiu, The Social Playground by Aberrant Architecture, dezeen magazine, 10 July 2011 <http://www.dezeen.com/2011/07/10/ the-social-playground-by-aberrant-architecture/> (accessed 2013-02-23).

20