Beyond Nice: Mediating Urban life Through Play and Counter-play

Play has been let out of the playground and, in London at least, has become a ubiquitous dimension of the urban mediating environment. Urban spaces host playful events, pop-ups “play off” contrasts with their urban surroundings, and new venues offer playful new urban experiences. What does it mean, in scholarly terms, to metaphorically “play the city” in these ways? This article tests the spatial metaphor of city-as-playground by attending to how play actually comes to ground in the city, the uses to which it is turned, and the effects that it generates.

Grounding play

At Gillett Square in Hackney, play has been “in the air” since the square’s creation in 2007. Here different kinds of play have been hosted — often simultaneously — by a rolling cast of play “mentors”: Vicky Whyte and Mem Mehmet setting up domestic boardgames on tables in the open air; Marawa and the Majorettes hula-hooping on their high-heeled roller-skates; and, most enduring of all, Keyo Yendii’s afternoon ‘pop-up’ playground. Here, play has operated as a convivial place-maker, providing a shared focus and a medium of interaction. In these hosted forms, play has brought into being a momentary but recurring heterotopia, a world-within-a-world, where different terms of engagement apply between typically reserved Londoners.

Nearby at Hoxton Docks, art and architecture contrive a more ostentatious kind of playfulness. The canal-side arts venue is host to Antepavilion, an annual design competition for a temporary folly. Now in its seventh year, the competition’s promoter has repeatedly foregone planning permission for these structures, resulting in a series of arcane disputes with the local council, some of which ended up in the courts. The 2020 winner Sharks!, a reworking of the celebrated “Headington Shark” planning case in Oxford,¹The ‘Headington Shark’ is a full-size fibreglass shark permanently installed in the roof of a Victorian terraced house in Oxford, which won planning permission on appeal in 1992. was itself a pointed response to the absurd workings of the planning system. In common with other examples of the “pop-up” genre that has become so ubiquitous in recent years, the playfulness of the Antepavilion follies is not so much interactive as performative. They signal their playful tone through a form and materiality that is conspicuously expressive, contrasting with their surroundings through effects that range from the picturesque to the uncanny.

Across town on the edge of Soho, the Outernet is an attempt to transpose the playful and immersive qualities of online interaction into a new kind of public space. Occupying the ground level of a group of interconnected buildings, its spacious rooms are open to the street and lined with LED screens. This wraparound display is animated by a rolling programme of digital content, pushed through the space continuously so that it often feels just too much to absorb. If the effect is less of interaction than interchangeability, it is also too seductive for the viewer to become bored, only immobilized. Its backlit fidelity provides an excellent arena for selfies, however, and returns the viewer to the faithful screen of their own device for a hit of playful interactivity and personalisation.

Theorising play and counter-play

Considering urban play in these ways — as hosted, performed or pushed — helps us to think beyond normative concepts of play as somehow inherently benign, or necessarily emancipatory in the agency and embodiment it engages in participants. Such idealisation is implicit in the work of the canonical scholars of play, who have generally been more preoccupied with its content than its context, and with pinning down its mechanics in typology, topology and affect. The cultural historian Johan Huizinga, for example, defined play in rather wholesome terms as an activity freely entered into, standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life, involving intense and utter absorption, generating no material interest or profit, and creating its own sense of order within the boundaries of space and time it circumscribes.²Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Paladin, 1970 [1949]), 13. Sociologist Roger Caillois concurred on this general schema, though added that the outcome of play is typically uncertain;³Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1961]), 9. he went on to identify four play forms — competition, chance, role-playing, and vertigo — which can be combined in different ways and placed on a continuum from unstructured play to formal games.⁴Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 54. Caillois uses the classical terms agôn (competition), alea (chance), mimesis (role-playing), ilinx (vertigo), paidia (play) and ludus (game). And psychologist DW Winnicott regarded play primarily as a developmental phenomenon: it externalises interiority and invests it with “dream meaning and feeling,” involves concentration and implies trust, and is embodied, pleasurable, exciting and satisfying, if ephemeral.⁵D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Routledge, 2005 [1971]). The tacit suggestion one could draw from each of these normative accounts is that play proper means playing nicely.

Other scholars have attended more closely to ethical and moral value in the field of play. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz takes up a footnote from a treatise by Jeremy Bentham to elaborate on the concept of “deep play.”⁶Jeremy Bentham, The Theory of Legislation, trans. R. Hildreth (Trübner & Co., 1871 [1802]), 106. This is the compulsive play of addiction, fetish, folly and savagery, where “the stakes are so high that it is, from [Bentham’s] utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all…[but they do so] both passionately and often, and even in the face of law’s revenge.”⁷Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973), 432. Meanwhile, performance artist Richard Schechner conceptualised in-jokes and dares as “dark play,” a discrete and subversive pursuit where “some or even all of the players don’t know they are playing… their actions become play retroactively: the events are what they are, but by telling these events, by reperforming them as narratives, they are cast as play.”⁸Richard Schechner, “Playing,” in The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (Routledge, 1993), 36–39. In such dark play, the reactions of nonplayers — “innocents, dupes, butts, anxious loved ones”⁹Schechner, “Playing,” 38. — are both essential to its progression and key to its appeal. And in the field of digital games, Nick Dyer-Witherford and Greig de Peuter conceptualised the antagonistic practice of “counterplay” as “acts of contestation within and against the ideologies of individual games,” which may involve players adopting “some ‘bad’ subject positions, renegade options, outlaw possibilities, even if the logic of play often tends to their being unattractive to play or unlikely to win”.¹⁰Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, “Games of Multitude,” The Fibreculture Journal, no. 16 (2010), https://fibreculturejournal.org/games-of-multitude/. Alan F. Meades develops this idea further to encompass play that is “oppositional, anti-social, and even criminal” and recognises collusion, cheating, hacking and trolling as valid if transgressive modes of play.¹¹Alan F. Meades, Understanding Counterplay in Video Games (Routledge, 2015), 14. Using the term “meta-play,” Michiel de Lange makes a similar point about game design in Michiel de Lange, “The Playful City: Using Play and Games to Foster Citizen Participation,” in Social Technologies and Collective Intelligence, ed. Aelita Skaržauskienė, (Mykolas Romeris University, 2015), 434. Practices of deep play, dark play and counterplay — which for brevity I will roll together into the hyphenated concept of “counter-play” — indicate a world of play beyond the niceties.

Counterpublics and countercultures

Out in the spaces of the city, this tension between play and counter-play finds an echo in the tension between public and counterpublic, and between culture and counterculture. If publics are a self-organised, relational and poetic kind of world-making, queer theorist Michael Warner suggested that counterpublics are not simply contrary to this but can also “supply different ways of imagining stranger sociability and its reflexivity.”¹²Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Zone Books, 2002), 121. Warner develops Nancy Fraser’s concept of “counterpublic” from Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, in Habermas and the Public Sphere (The MIT Press, 1992), 109–142. In key respects, then, public and counterpublic can be mapped onto play and counter-play, as explored in the work of the postwar Situationists. They offered a counter-playful critique of the commodification of everyday life in capitalist society through the psychogeographic technique of the dérive (a critical and ludic observational walking practice moving through the city) and the construction of “situations” (for example, interventions in defence of “favoured sites and neighbourhoods from the forces of capitalist development”).¹³David Pinder, “Situationism/Situationist Geography,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, (Elsevier, 2009), 147. More recently, urban public spaces have often been playfully appropriated through critical countercultures including yarnbombing,¹⁴Joanna Mann, “Towards a Politics of Whimsy: Yarn Bombing the City,” Area 47, no. 1 (2015): 65–72, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12164. skateboarding,¹⁵Ian Borden, Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History, (Bloomsbury, 2019). parkour,¹⁶Oli Mould, “Parkour, the City, the Event”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 738–50. and cycling.¹⁷Simon Parry, “A Theatrical Gesture of Disavowal: The Civility of the Critical Mass Cycle Ride,” Contemporary Theatre Review 25, no. 3 (2015): 344–56, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2015.1049821. However, playing with publicness can also give rise to ambiguity and ambivalence, particularly when understood in the context of the wider “relational turn” in the arts since the turn of the twenty-first century. In relational practices, citizenship and spectatorship can become imbricated and compromised by the seductions of play. Take, for example, Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project,¹⁸See https://olafureliasson.net/artwork/the-weather-project-2003/. hosted in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern art gallery in the winter of 2003. Theatre and performance scholar Jen Harvie has argued that the installation “conscripts us to its spectacle while we simultaneously observe and even enact our own conscription […] We are not unwitting objects in an entirely coercive display; we are witting objects in, and partial makers of, the spectacle.”¹⁹Jen Harvie, “Agency and Complicity in ‘a Special Civic Room’: London’s Tate Modern Turbine Hall”, in Performance and the City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 215–216. For citizens, then, the stakes can be high in the interaction of play and public space in contemporary cities.

Rhetorics and tactics

The play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith’s final monograph, in which he aims to draw the proliferation of different play theories into some correspondence, is titled The Ambiguity of Play.²⁰Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Harvard University Press, 1997). Because the field of play is so obviously broad, he argues, each distinct theory of play tells us as much about the theorist as the theorised, and as much about what they have omitted as what has been included. Different disciplinary perspectives instrumentalise play for their own purposes.²¹Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, 16. Sutton-Smith embraces the ambiguity and instrumentality of play and conceptualises a series of play “rhetorics” associated with specific disciplines: the “ancient” rhetorics of fate (mathematics), power (sociology), identity (anthropology) and frivolity (culture), which derive from antiquity, tradition and collectivity; and the “modern” rhetorics of play as progress (education), of the self (psychiatry) and of the imaginary (art), which draw on secularism, consumerism and individualism.²²Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, 215, table.

In the spaces of the city, we can certainly see rhetoric in action in much of the contemporary discourse on play and urbanism. Camillo Boano and Giorgio Talocci, for example, invite us to consider play as a form of urban resistance. They elide play with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “profanation” in “challenging the current rules and structures of power, and hinting toward new modes of politics”, and regard play as “the fundamental component of an urban design that is finally given back to the citizens.”²³Camillo Boano and Giorgio Talocci, “The Politics of Play in Urban Design: Agamben’s Profanation as a Recalibrating Approach to Urban Design Research,” Revista Bitácora Urbano Territorial 24, no. 1 (2014): 13–14, https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=74830875012. This echoes many of the aspirations of “tactical urbanism” that can be seen in the playful grassroots movements of “guerilla urbanism” and “DIY urbanism,” which transform urban spaces with play-streets and parklets.²⁴Quentin Stevens and Kim Dovey, Temporary and Tactical Urbanism: (Re)Assembling Urban Space (Routledge, 2023). Michel de Certeau argued that “the place of a tactic belongs to the [O]ther,”²⁵Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984), xix. but tactical urbanism techniques have been increasingly deployed strategically by actors with power and capital to the point where it has become less an urbanistic category than an aesthetic one. The urbanism of “pop-ups” and “meanwhile uses” often pirates the visual language and affective atmosphere of collective resistance in an effort to stylize and disguise activities that only further entrench neoliberalism, austerity and precarity.²⁶See for example: Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Oli Mould, “Tactical Urbanism: The New Vernacular of the Creative City,” Geography Compass 8, no. 8 (2014): 529–39; Ella Harris, Rebranding Precarity, Pop-up Culture as the Seductive New Normal, (Bloomsbury, 2020); and Mara Ferreri, The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism, Normalising Precarity in Austerity London (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). At a glance, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish bottom-up initiatives from top-down approaches — the contrived edginess of commissioned graffiti, the enchanting playfulness of interactive installations, or the picturesque occupation of decrepit buildings. In London, at least, the playful aesthetics of tactical urbanism have now become thoroughly institutionalised in the mainstream practices of urban regeneration and “placemaking,” to the extent that Oli Mould has characterised it as the vernacular of Richard Florida’s “creative city” paradigm.²⁷Oli Mould, “Tactical Urbanism: The New Vernacular of the Creative City,” Geography Compass 8, no. 8 (2014): 529–39. Even within activist movements, play can also provide cover for arrogance and hubris: while the carnivalesque aesthetic of Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience actions in London was highly effective in articulating the urgency of the climate emergency, it also distracted attention and displaced scrutiny from the more dubious aspects of the organisation’s leadership and manifesto.²⁸See, for example, Matthew Taylor, “The Evolution of Extinction Rebellion,” The Guardian, August 4, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/04/evolution-of-extinction-rebellion-climate-emergency-protest-coronavirus-pandemic.

Playing, or being played?

In a recent polemic, sociologist Des Fitzgerald argued that the benefits of urban trees are grossly overstated, “as if, all of a sudden, there is no problem in the built or physical environment that might not be solved by a well-planted oak.”²⁹Des Fitzgerald, The City of Today Is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow (Faber, 2024), 133. He conceptualizes this reflex “tree-ification” as a kind of psychological transference of our displaced guilt for environmental destruction.³⁰Fitzgerald, The City of Today Is a Dying Thing, 137. In a similar way, we might consider urban play as starting out as a well-intentioned expression of care and conviviality, but easily ending up in the “cupcake urbanism” of colourful pop-ups and twee art installations that commodify and flatten the public domain. Just as Inner London has come to look and feel ever more playful and playable, the cruel irony is that it has also become more childless, its homes more unaffordable for parents, its households more often child-free, and its schools down-sizing or even closing.³¹See, for example, Jon Tabbush, “Is London becoming a ‘child-free area’?,” Centre for London blog, November 7, 2022, https://centreforlondon.org/blog/london-child-free/.

Richard Schechner regarded play (at least in the West) as “a rotten category, an activity tainted by unreality, inauthenticity, duplicity, make believe, looseness, fooling around, and inconsequentiality,”³²Schechner, “Playing,” 27. In a similar vein I argue we should decouple ourselves from its heartstrings, even as it has become a ubiquitous dimension of the urban mediating environment. When we come upon play in the spaces of the city, we should not simply take it at face value but also consider its rhetorical purpose, the ends to which it is being put, and our opportunities to adopt a posture of counter-play. To paraphrase art critic Claire Bishop, if playful environments risk becoming “artificial hells” of enforced jollity, they challenge us as citizens to counter-play the role of “unpredictable subject […] as uncertain and precarious as democracy itself”.³³Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), 283–284, citing Jacques Rancière.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Science Research Council through the London Interdisciplinary Social Science (LISS) doctoral training partnership (Grant Number 2112559). I am grateful to my doctoral supervisors Dr. Regan Koch and Professor Jen Harvie, and to Dr. Scott Rodgers for his advice in developing some of the ideas in this paper.

Conor Moloney

Conor Moloney is an urban designer and planner with a background in architecture and cultural geography. His recent doctoral study, “Playing the City: Mediating London’s Public Life Through Play and Counterplay,” was co-supervised in the School of Geography and the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University of London. He currently works in planning practice, is an MSc dissertation supervisor at UCL Bartlett School of Planning, and convenes a doctoral course on the use of hand-drawing in research practice for the London Interdisciplinary Social Science (LISS) doctoral training partnership.