Quentin Stevens's The Ludic City adds, I think, a useful wrinkle to thinking about urbanism and city planning by adding the dimension of play to the mix. By play he means the kind of non-instrumental, not-directly-productive, funny, risky activity that people engage in. Walking to work is instrumental; taking a new, longer route out of a desire for adventure is a non-instrumental deviation from that instrumental action. Stevens implicitly argues, and I agree, that this kind of play, novelty, adventure, is a necessary aspect of human life, one that is perpetually being striven for and one that is, due to a number of factors, often challenged or even thwarted. From a design perspective, this means that planners should strive to build with that possibility for play in mind, which paradoxically sometimes means building in spaces that are less defined, less "built," more chaotic, weirder, provocative, and that allow people to inscribe them with their own meanings and subject them to their own practices. It means welcoming a certain risk and disorder to the urban scene.
This isn't a conventional approach for an urban planner, who is striving so often to make life "easier," by rationalizing cities, making them run smoother, making sure human needs like food/shelter/work are met. The non-instrumental play stuff is certainly in the mix, but it's more often seen as a kind of spicy, sexy topping to the food/shelter/work dish. But this approach also doesn't exactly jell with, well, capitalism or the state. Capitalism seeks instrumentality ad infinitum--faster turnaround, quicker movement of capital, leading to faster realization of profit. The state, too, supports this, especially through enforcement of laws and the generalized management or elimination of disorder, hiccups, and the unexpected. We're left, then, with a fundamental contradiction here--the human need for both instrumental and play activity, and the desire of capital to channel any non-instrumental activity into something that generates profit or eliminate the non-instrumental activity that can't be channeled.
This isn't groundbreaking stuff here--it's in many ways Marxist analysis 101 here, because the easy implication of this is that city residents will always have to organize to protect these non-instrumental aspects of their cities and lives as well as to balance this with maintenance of those instrumental aspects they rely on--and what kind of system that requires is obviously up for question. But what does this mean for planners? Well, there's a whole set of expertise v. democracy issues when it comes to the relationship between planners and residents that I don't want to get into, mostly because I don't have a good answer. But it does imply that if planners have the goal of making better cities that fulfill the range of human needs, then they will have to be active supporters of people fighting for play, for non-instrumental uses of space. Which has a whole host of fight-the-power implications. But it also implies that valuing play, and fighting for play to be valued, is a vital item on the progressive planner's agenda.
So what does that fight look like? What tactics can be used to support it?
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