A Tripartite Conceptualisation of Urban Public Space as a Site for Play: Evidence from South Bank, London

Abstract

Public space is a feature of the urban built environment that has received increasing attention in recent years. Discussion has focused on the theoretical decline of public space, as private and institutional forces take on increasing influence. At the same time, many such “in-between spaces,” even privately owned ones, are used and experienced as public on a daily basis. Few studies, however, have explored how spaces understood as public are used and practised as such. To address this gap in the literature this paper draws upon ethnographic data collected on the “South Bank” in London (United Kingdom) to argue that “play” is a recurrent trait of sociospatial practices enacted in public space. Three interrelated typologies of playful practices in public space are discussed: child's play, plays on meaning, and play as simulation.

Keywords:

• public space
• play
• social practices
• ethnography
• London (UK)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their rigorous comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would like to thank Fran Tonkiss and Judith Green for their comments on earlier iterations of the analysis presented in this paper, and the ESRC for their generous support. I would also like to thank all of those who spared their time to be interviewed as part of this study. As ever, errors or unconvincing interpretations in the text remain the author's own.

Notes

² See http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/about-us (retrieved on 21 September 2012).

³ For example, posters displayed in London Underground stations as part of the recent “Now or Never” tourism promotion campaign for Vienna (Wien Tourismus, 2009).

⁴ After Huizinga (1970, p. 10).

⁵ For example, the film “Jump London” (Christie, 2003) which was screened on United Kingdom terrestrial television station Channel 4 had the free-runners I spoke to in the present discussion animated and certainly put South Bank “on the map” vis-à-vis free running.

⁶ See also Stevens's (2003, p. 241) discussion of “simulative play” in public space.

⁷ The Big Issue is a magazine produced by a charitable foundation and sold by homeless people as a means to give them an opportunity to earn a legitimate income, the on-street selling of which would readily identify the vendor as homeless.

⁸ As stated by the South Bank Centre's Artistic Director Jude Kelly in her interview with Emma Brockes's (Brockes, 2006).