At a time where technology aims to remove all the friction from our daily lives, guiding us to exactly where we want to be, Playable Cities aim to interrupt this utilitarian efficiency with a touch of creativity and ludic intervention. From Stockholm’s Piano Staircase to Lisbon’s dancing traffic signals, there is a global trend of introducing playfulness into cities.
The Playable Cities movement is a creative response to the highly functional and structured urban environment. A situation that the Smarter City movement threatens to exacerbate. It’s by no chance that films such as the 1920’s Metropolis or the more recent film, LEGO present cities as machines and their inhabitants as workers. People in cities are often completely absorbed in getting from one place to another. It’s not called rush hour because people are going for a stroll.
