Flexing the City: Visualizing the City as a Flexible Urban Playground
Imagine a city where the rules don’t apply. By rules, I mean the most fundamental rubrics we give to the function of an object. For instance, imagine a street as a ski slope; an alleyway as a sand dune, a building as a mountain climbing wall. You see it, right? Next time you walk down the street squint your eyes just a little; reimagine everything that space could be, from the simple to the absurd. This is the challenge I have given myself the past few months and what it has unequivocally made me realize is that we take space, to put it simply, way too seriously.
174 Likes, 6 Comments - Claus Hilmar (@claushilmar) on Instagram: "@gregersped in the sunset at #downpuertovallarta"
Late one night scrolling through Instagram I came across a post from an old friend. Hashtagged #downpuertovallarta, in a minute-long video there is my childhood friend Cody with a go pro strapped to his head as though you too are about to race down the mountain peeking over his shoulders. Starting from the top of a set of stairs he begins his descent down the streets of Puerto Vallarta, a steep hillside town, through winding streets, down steep hills, through alleys, between crowds of cheering people, over ramps that they had built for the occasion, past people with groceries in their hands, sharp turns, and then it loops back to the beginning. It was this minute-long video that began months of contemplating while on walks through the city, of all the insane, yet completely reasonable potential our cities were just waiting to unleash.
The fabric of the city has long been a rigid form of comprehensive plans, implementations, codes, and street grids functioning as efficiently as possible. We design spaces for people to operate and do daily tasks competently, and hopefully, if we do our job correctly when they are in these spaces, they enjoy them.
But what if space didn’t have to be so rigid? What if a street wasn’t just a street? Or a path just a path? Well, we already do this, and we’ve been doing this for hundreds if not thousands of years. The idea of occupying spaces in the city and using them for different activities isn’t new or by any means revolutionary; think about parades, marathons, markets. It is becoming more common in design to incorporate flexible public spaces, or spaces that can easily be transformed to serve a variety of functions that they wouldn’t ordinarily.
Like the human brain, we only use about 10% of space to its potential. The spaces we occupy are unlimited playgrounds of possibility. I have always loved imagining what could be possible for a space, all the innovative ways to activate it, how people will engage with it, what the next public art installation could be, but it wasn’t until recently that I had realized all the unconventional activities urban spaces were being used for or were yet to be discovered.
After obsessively playing this “what if” game in my head I dug a little deeper into the abyss of the internet, reading endless articles about people skiing down their streets during blizzards, canoeing through their town during a flood, an alley turned sand dune (Siempre Fiesta (or Always Party) by Andrés Carretero and Carolina Klocker), and many other people transforming their urban spaces temporarily into worlds of recreation and play. The endlessness of these planned and unplanned transformations struck me as, well, brilliant.
How had I missed this? Sure, it wasn’t completely off my radar but, it definitely wasn’t in the last downtown master plan proposal I had drafted for my client nor had I seen it in others. And justly, maybe this wasn’t the place for these ideas. Maybe ideas like these are the responsibility of the people and not a plan. Or perhaps not? Perhaps as professionals, it is precisely our responsibility, not to propose the precise activity but to acknowledge that space is not static. Activities, even in the confines of our structured cities can still adapt and we should create spaces that allow for this. Imagine the possibilities if we too adapted to creating a less rigid urban fabric and saw the city as a transformative playground rather than an unchanging plan.