Beyond the Playground. Play as a Design Tool for Contemporary Urbanscapes

Play represents a fundamental human and cultural activity that shapes how we learn, create, and inhabit our environments. From Freud’s exploration of repetition as a mechanism of mastery to Bateson’s understanding of play as metacommunication, scholars have long highlighted its cognitive, social, and symbolic roles. Furthermore, play also serves as a powerful urban force, capable of both disrupting and reconfiguring urban environments and spaces. Starting from Sicart’s categories of the carnivalesque and the disruptive, this chapter examines how ludic practices can appropriate urban contexts, unveil their hidden structures, and generate new forms of meaning and inhabiting. Ultimately, play emerges as both an activity in the world and an attitude toward the world, offering architects, planners, and citizens alike a lens for reimagining urban life. The bidirectional relationship between urban ludicity and collective well-being suggests that playful interventions can foster more inclusive, resilient, and joyful cities.