Dispatchwork by Jan Vormann
What would it take to make a city more playful? Everyone has had an experience at one time or another of encountering something strange, out of the ordinary, a seemingly serendipitous moment in a space that in turn transforms your experience and understanding of that location.
Urban interventions often aim to do just that — to shift one’s experience of a city street or infrastructure to offer a new perspective, a proposed alternate use, or to reveal complexities and power structures that are often embedded in everyday life. Interventions make a city more playful by suggesting a sense possibility, by hinting at the potential to experience place in a different way than we normally do. And really, we’re interested in those little hints, those suggestions of possibility for changing the things in front of you in an immediate way.
So, below, I’ve collected just a small handful of images of intervention work, or work that could translate to a more public space to great effect, in hopes that these things might spur some more activity here at home, though there certainly has been things happening.