Cities as Playgrounds: Intergenerational and Inclusive Play in Urban Design

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 19 No. 1 (Spring 2009) ISSN: 1546-2250 The Playgrounds and the City van Eyck, Aldo (2002). NAi Publishers; ISBN 9056622498. In the last few years, several major U.S. cities have shown a renewed interest in becoming more child-friendly. The decadeold Boston Schoolyard Initiative has improved the play offerings and environment of nearly 100 schools throughout the city, developed using a bottom-up approach to collaboration among city agencies and community groups. Denver is in the midst of implementing a Playground Master Plan, engaging the public through a comprehensive survey on public perceptions of the need for play facilities. In New York City, through Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiative, 300 schoolyards are being converted through a participatory design process into public play spaces so that every citizen is within ten minutes’ walk of a city park. These playground projects owe a great deal to the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck (1918–1999), who designed hundreds of urban playgrounds from 1947 until 1978 and created a template for spaces and equipment that is still in evidence in his native Europe and here in North America. If anyone needs a primer on creating cities where play is part of the urban fabric, he or she would do well to peruseAldo van Eyck—The Playgrounds and the City, which details the process and effect of his work in Amsterdam.Edited by the curator Ingeborg de Roode and the architectural historian Liane Lefaivre, this book of essays, drawings, and photographs was created to accompany a 2002 exhibition of van Eyck’s work at the Stedelijk Museum. But the 128-page book stands alone as an engaging exploration of how an influential young Dutch architect came to reshape postwar cityscapes from the playground up. 369 In 1947, at age 28, van Eyck began working with Amsterdam’s Department of Public Works. The city’s postwar landscape was pockmarked with vacant lots and teeming with children, but offered few formal play facilities. With the encouragement of his boss, Jakoba Mulder, Van Eyck set about to create a small public playground in every neighborhood. Uniquely for the time, these play spaces were interstitial; land was not cleared for the special purpose, but instead the playgrounds were built within the usable framework of a working city. Born out of change and transience, many of van Eyck’s playgrounds were built in voids left by the demolished houses of Amsterdam’s deported Jews. His designs transformed these and other leftover spaces into a polycentric network of more than 700 playgrounds. His design palette of sand, concrete forms, and simple climbing structures were arranged according to his artistic vision and his belief in children’s capacity for imagination. Amsterdam’s density of playgrounds created the equivalent of stepping stones for children to safely move through and explore the city. As the number of playgrounds in Amsterdam increased, they formed a universe of places that children could identify as their own. Parents begged: “‘Let our children have a playground. They need it badly!’” (59). 370 After the Second World War, the needs of children generated significant interest among modern designers and planners. Van Eyck approached urban design with the well-being of children in mind, but he saw children as part of a communal fabric, and his playground programs were created through a collaboration between city officials and neighborhood residents. This bottom-up, participatory process was in part a reaction to modernists who were promoting comprehensive master plans for idealized cities. The playgrounds van Eyck and his colleagues created for the children of postwar Amsterdam shaped the city, but were also shaped by the city. The editors of The Playgrounds and the City have focused on two primary aspects of Aldo van Eyck’s work—his artistic vision and his precedent-setting approach to urban design. The exhibition at the Stedelijk, which featured drawings, letters, photographs, and architectural renderings, was designed to present van Eyck’s work in an art-historical rather than strictly architectural context. The exhibition venue was extremely fitting: van Eyck was one of the few architects to have been associated with the museum as an exhibition designer and as an...

“The Story of Another Idea” is the title provided to the first and the last issues of Forum voor Architectuur en Daarmee Verbonden Kunsten edited by the Dutch representatives of Team 10. From 1959 to 1967, Forum journal was the media employed by Aldo van Eyck and Jaap Bakema to spread not only the ideas shared during Team 10’s meetings but also their own research. The editorial board was comprised by other architects, like Herman Hertzberger or Joop Hardy, who developed outstanding careers afterwards. Despite the manifold authorships and formats, there is a common thread underlying all Forum’s contributions: the criticism of the functional city and the definition of an alternative urban model based on human relationships. The deliberate selection of the word ‘landscape’ for the title intends to narrow the focus on the visual component of urban design, which will be a distinctive feature of their theoretical investigations and more idealistic proposals. Forum’s issues published in this period are dissected by isolating those entries considered essential to reconstruct the evolution of the editors’ critical discourse on the construction of contemporary city mainly as a reaction against the functionalist approach encouraged by outstanding members of CIAM years before. This article aims at shedding light on the importance given by Dutch Team 10 to habitat configuration and visual composition in the design of contemporary city after the Second World War and the establishment of the Welfare State in the 1950s. The chronological ordering of selected contributions to Forum since 1959 until 1967, helps us to identify the changes in the editors’ research on urban design, as well as to contextualize it in the post-war social, political, and cultural framework. To conclude, this study intends to demonstrate in which way Forum’s content contributed to characterize an alternative Dutch Post-War urban landscape.

In this introductory article to the special issue ‘Co-Design and the public realm’, we discuss a common interest in how meso- and macro-political institutional contexts frame and are informed by Participatory Design (PD) and Co-Design processes. We argue that a unilateral focus within PD and Co-Design on the micro-political scale of fieldwork obscures interactivity with institutional framing processes, undermining their potential as sites of critique and political change. Our argument is drawn from a study of literature on the role of institutions in relation to PD and the public realm and our experience as participants in an EU-funded research project. The case study descriptions unpack how various institutional frames inform PD processes and how, conversely, PD processes inform various institutional frames: metacultural frames, institutional action frames and policy frames. To highlight the move to engaging with and creating new institutions, we introduce the notion of institutioning.

This paper tries to explore the act of drawing as a tool for analysis and cultural dissemination, an instrument of memory which lives beyond the vanishing of what tries to represent. It applies this idea to the house of Aldo van Eyck in Loenen aan de Vecht, in order to understand the building of which handrawn sketches, blueprints and numerous pictures are conserved. The text is a result of a deeper research on Aldo van Eyck’s house, an unkwnown project shown here for the first time, outside the inner circle of his family and friends. The paper takes but five aspects of the house which have been represented in five drawings. “Superponer”: the house as a stop in a line of four houses inhabited by Van Eyck. “La casa, las cosas y los casos”: as a gathering of autonomous objetcs in a net of reciprocal relations. “Todo cambia”: as an overlap of two different ways of understanding and living space from two different times. “Entremuros”: as a space fully charged of potential, meaning. ”Abrir horizontes”: finally, the house as a place which holds inside the whole world. The objective of this essay is not to deduce final conclusions about the house but to present raw material, submitting it to a broad scientific discussion.

This essay investigates how Aldo van Eyck and Constant Nieuwenhuys’ respective visions of post-war society were influenced by their lived experiences. Rejecting the functionalism prevalent in society, both found a guiding principle for their post-war visions in the relation-based thinking found in Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book Homo Ludens. Seeking to reintroduce play into daily life to counter the societal rigidity prevalent prior to the Second World War, they developed visions of societal structures that facilitated and reflected new societal relations. Their respective wartime experiences influenced these visions. Van Eyck, who spent the war years in neutral Switzerland, developed a humane structuralist architecture while Constant, who lived under German occupation in Amsterdam, zeroed in on an all-encompassing utopian vision which surpassed Van Eyck’s, in everything but restraint. Through a comparative analysis, this essay will illustrate how Constant’s more extreme experiences pushed him to take a more radical stance than his spared counterpart.

In 1959, on the occasion of the last CIAM conference, Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck produced the “Otterlo Circles”, a collage of photographs, drawings, and texts which synthesised his view on the production of architecture. In the collage, two circles represent the relationship between architectural and social values. On the left, a circle labelled par nous (“by us”) contained a photograph of the Temple of Athens Nike on the Acropolis, a drawing of a Contra-construction by Theo van Doesburg, and a photograph of Aoulef, a town in the Sahara. This circle represented how architecture should, in the perspective of Aldo van Eyck, absorb the values of classical, modernist and vernacular architecture. In the second circle, named pour nous, (“for us”) he showed “a Sardic statuette of a sitting woman with child, an Etruscan statuette of a standing man and, beneath these, a Cypriot burial gift, a round dish decorated with a small community of people, representing a harmonious society”. Through this collage, and the talks and texts which accompanied it, van Eyck implicitly suggested how the images he collected throughout his life could interact to produce a new discourse. Along the path which leads from his collection of images to the construction of his architectural imagination and the elaboration of a discourse around architecture, the images become agents capable of guiding the architect toward the construction of a new practice capable of harmoniously synthesising different traditions.

This essay questions the privileging of the design of public over domestic spaces and buildings in architecture and urban design, and their education, and the identification of public space with a public realm seen as the location of democracy. It cites the case made by Doreen Massey that the division of public and private realms is gendered, allowing men the freedom of public affairs whilst confining women to domesticity; and argues that a dualism of public and private space ignores a third area of transitional spaces which affect patterns of urban sociation. The case of redevelopment in El Raval, Barcelona, demonstrates that public space may be, today, part of an anti‐democratic strategy of gentrification. But, if public space constructs a gendered public realm as imposition, there remains, as Hannah Arendt contends, a need for locations of social mixing in which difference is visible. What, if not public space, enables this?

Dutch Structuralism was an influential tendency in post-war Dutch architecture and urban design. Structuralist designs and buildings are made up of repetitive elements that can in theory be adjusted in both size and function. They take social relations as their starting point and have the potential to promote interaction between the buildings’ users. The way structuralist architects like Aldo van Eyck, Piet Blom and Herman Hertzberger drew broke with the tradition of previous generations. They adopted new forms of representation, the most striking being the so-called spreektekeningen (drawings annotated with speech bubbles), hybrid drawings and brightly coloured grids. This article explains the significance of these drawings by relating them to architectural education at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture in the mid 1950s and through analysis of the design method, the role of the drawing in the design process and the way the drawings were perceived. It will become clear that they were the result both of a specific design method and of the ambition to enable the architectural design to communicate with society in a new way. ‘The story of another way of drawing’ can be traced back to a deliberate deviation from the Dutch government’s bureaucratic regulations, which were designed to foster an efficient building process aimed at the rapid alleviation of the housing shortage. The grids and patterns, the bright colours and speech-bubble drawings were intended to present a different picture from traditional housing designs and can be interpreted as an alternative to that bureaucratic and pragmatic building practice. Although much has been written about the emergence and importance of Dutch Structuralism, the role and significance of these new forms of representation have not previously been studied. The different style of drawing is evident in Piet Blom’s design for Het Speelhuis en Woningenwoud in Helmond (1972–1978), which is the focus of this article. In the design file for this mixed cultural and residential project, the structuralist drawing appears in various forms and functions and during different phases of the design process. It is, as it were, a sampler of the new visualization methods. More particularly, in these drawings of Het Speelhuis scheme, Piet Blom combined two extremes of architectural representation: a mathematically designed order and an intuitive and subjective architectural impression. The mathematical drawings based on a geometric system were for Blom a means of getting a grip on the complex spatial designs he envisaged. He then supplemented his abstract patterns and grids with speech-bubble drawings and collages. In so doing Blom entered a different world – that of an individual desire, struggle, communality and sensibility – aimed at communicating his design in a more human and accessible manner.

This dissertation deals with ‘architectural space formation’, which is understood as the part of architectural and urban design that concerns the creation and structuring of physically defined spaces of inside and outside character separately as well as in relation to each other and to open space. Furthermore, it focuses on the fundamental significance of space formation in architectural design and aesthetics as well as the question of how Walter Gropius and Aldo van Eyck referred to space formation in their approaches towards architectural design and aesthetics separately, compared to each other, and in relation to the discussion of architectural space and space formation at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Like other disciplines, urban design is grounded in substantial theoretical foundations, despite differences among experts. Although urban design has undergone significant transformations over time, the evolving needs of urban spaces have played a critical role in shaping its adaptation. Notably, the theoretical and real objects of urban design—civil society and the public realm—are regarded as superior to those of related fields such as architecture and civil engineering. The development of a robust theoretical foundation for urban design through the lens of spatial political economy, as conceptualized by Alexander Cuthbert, has proven to be highly valuable. Cuthbert identified the integrative knowledge of urban design as the outcome of a coherent foundation that unites both theory and practice. This research adopts a theoretical and fundamental approach, utilizing a descriptive-analytical method and employing content analysis. By examining the evolution of Cuthbert's perspectives, the study seeks to analyze urban design through the framework of spatial political economy. The findings indicate that the dialectical relationship between urban design and Spatial Political Economy (SPE) establishes urban design as a distinct and structured discipline. This mutual dialectic is reflected in the process of place-making, where the production and reproduction of space align with the principles of SPE, and urban design serves as the mechanism for shaping urban spaces. It is clear that urban design stands as its own discipline, without requiring idealizations borrowed from other fields. Spatial Political Economy provides the most comprehensive framework for understanding urban design. Cuthbert’s perspective ultimately fosters a convergence of overlapping ideas, enabling the development of a strong theoretical foundation for urban design that promotes the enhancement of the public realm in cities.

To the field of professional architecture in Europe in the aftermath of World War II, the deserts of Western Africa were a margin that was viewed as an exterior to the modern metropolis and as a realm of escapism. However, to the ethnographic practices that had developed since the late 1800s, the notion of a desert hinterland supposed a primordial land, reflected in forms of habitation. For architects Herman Haan (1914‐96) and Aldo van Eyck (1918‐99), the desert was a tense geography that moved between being outside and at home. Revisiting the diaries from Haan and van Eyck’s journeys and their mediation of ethnographic methodologies alongside their engagement with modernist design, this article proposes that Haan’s impressions connect two seemingly opposite contexts: the Dogon lands on the Niger River, and Rotterdam. I argue that, in the architectural and ethnographic amateurism of Haan, the modernist metropolis and its exteriors were not delimited, distinct realms, but were rather engaged in a fluctuating relationship reflective of the contemporary fascination with post-Eurocentric landscapes in the discipline of architecture. I assert that this process of immersion was in fact a process of internalization of spatial experience.

<p>For me, urban design at its heart is a positive activity that has a primary objective to contribute a public benefit. This is principally achieved by designing a network of public spaces – the public realm – that form the setting for individuals and communities to live their lives efficiently, safely, purposefully, meaningfully and memorably. The public realm consists of typical urban elements of streets, lanes, plazas, parks and environmental areas of different scales and purposes. These elements of public space are combined to create distinctive and unique places that invite use and activity. Underscoring this is the view that the primary user of public space is the pedestrian and the primary transport mode walking, cycling, and public transport. The car remains important but less so than the other modes.<br />With this approach, an essential requirement of the private realm of buildings is to form the public realm by positively defining public space, for it can’t exist without the physical form of the buildings, and landscapes. The mix and location of land-uses in close proximity activate the public realm, so people can readily access the uses needed for daily life, and are invited to do so due to the quality of the urban setting.</p>

Regarding laypeople’s active participation with artefacts in the early stage of urban design, there is a certain difference between conventional urban design process and participatory urban design process. The design artefacts used in the conventional urban design process do not allow laypeople to take part actively in the early stages of the design process. Similarly, in the participatory design process, the generated design ideas remain hidden in assumption due to the lack of associated information of the artefacts and the participants perform as individual actors. The research speculates that a virtual immersive participatory design instrument can reduce the gap, where the participants can act together as a unit to produce authentic design outcomes. An Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) assisted design experiment set-up has developed for laypeople to engage in a shared and enhanced communicative platform. The article reports the procedure of developing the instrument and discusses them in terms of design communication, participation and expert’s role. It concludes with a reflection of how laypeople as co-designers can use IVE instruments to design their neighbourhood meaningfully.

Due to lack of communication tools, the non-experts in a participatory urban design process face difficulty to take part actively in the stage of design ideation and generation. Mostly, the design ideas stay in conceptual form and do not provide enough perceptual understanding to conceive the design actions fully. The research hypothesises that an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) instrument enhances layperson's urban design participation and collaboration during the early stage of the design generation. The research involves non-expert stakeholders as co-designers for a neighbourhood design in New Zealand. The paper discusses as a parallel reporting with other coming articles on how the IVE instrument facilitates successful design collaboration among fellow laypersons to design their own neighbourhood. A protocol analysis validates the success of design communication happened during non-experts design engagements. An expert evaluation is done to rank the generated design in responding to understand the ideas. In conclusion, the article speculates that an IVE assisted participatory urban design process empowers laypersons to take part actively in urban spatial design.

Due to lack of communication tools, the non-experts in a participatory urban design process face difficulty to take part actively in the stage of design ideation and generation. Mostly, the design ideas stay in conceptual form and do not provide enough perceptual understanding to conceive the design actions fully. The research hypothesises that an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) instrument enhances layperson's urban design participation and collaboration during the early stage of the design generation. The research involves non-expert stakeholders as co-designers for a neighbourhood design in New Zealand. The paper discusses as a parallel reporting with other coming articles on how the IVE instrument facilitates successful design collaboration among fellow laypersons to design their own neighbourhood. A protocol analysis validates the success of design communication happened during non-experts design engagements. An expert evaluation is done to rank the generated design in responding to understand the ideas. In conclusion, the article speculates that an IVE assisted participatory urban design process empowers laypersons to take part actively in urban spatial design.