The Social Potential Of Play

Frank Kirimi: Kenya/Nairobi

Franklin Kirimi as a Senior Design Associate at Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) Kenya. Since 2006 KDI has partnered with residents of informal settlements to transform unsafe and under-used sites into `Productive Public Spaces`. KDI brings together local grassroots design and technical knowledge to combat poverty and environmental degradation. Their first public space was built on a trash dump on the shore of the highly polluted Nairobi dam; it was the pilot in a network of 11 such ´productive public spaces` providing self-sufficient community amenities. 

When walking through any of Kibera’s neighborhoods - crisscrossed by the streams and tributaries of the Ngong River - one is struck by the haphazard and dilapidated conditions that prevail there. While older children make their way to the football pitches located further away from their homes, the younger ones are left to their own devices and so invent their games. Playgrounds in Kibera range from open-air areas and dusty fields to tiny alcoves between the streets and beneath roof eaves.

The technical team at KDI works closely with the community and engages children in the design process to meet their priorities. The community playgrounds give children the opportunity to hone their social, emotional, cognitive and physical skills in a safe space. 

The description of playgrounds in Kibera highlights the resourcefulness of the community in utilizing locally available materials like timber posts, concrete, recycled car tyres, and repurposed oil drums to create play spaces for children.

The Kounkuey Design Initiative is part of Gabriela Burkhalter's exhibition on the history of playgrounds presented at Radical Playgrounds, which exemplifies the political significance of play as a community-building measure and crisis management.

Sreejata Roy: India / New Delhi 

Over the last ten years, Sreejata Roy has been working on the development of a socially engaged art practice in New Delhi, India. She has explored the concept of collective play with different social groups in the working class neighborhoods of the metropolis. Roy's practice-based research focuses on the representation of social phenomena through artworks created in collaboration with communities in the physical spaces of urban neighborhoods. Her research is part of Gabriela Burkhalter's exhibition on the history of playgrounds presented at Radical Playgrounds, which exemplifies the political significance of play as a community-building measure and crisis management.

Sreejata Roy will share her experiences and outline approaches, articulations and interventions of this research. Her artistic interventions are primarily concerned with young people and women from disenfranchised, multi-ethnic migrant communities in three working class sites in New Delhi: a resettlement colony, two adjacent urban villages in South Delhi and a government-run shelter for homeless women and their children in Old Delhi.