FEBRIK: PLAY AND THE URBAN CONTEXT

FEBRIK

Play and the Urban Context

Reem Charif, Mohamad Hafeda, joumana al Jabri

In 2003, Febrik’s team started working with children in Palestinian refugee camps in collaboration with local community institutions and UK based IF–[Untitled] architects.1 Through the use of a specific creative process the aim was to explore issues of refuge and identity with the children, in turn enhancing community participation and action within their immediate social and physical environment. The project began through a workshop in Burj El Barajne, a camp on the fringes of the densely populated city of Beirut, and continued through a series of workshops there and in other camps in Lebanon and later in Jordan. Through this process, Febrik developed a research methodology that revealed the formal and informal social practices of children and their families in the different refugee communities.

While children in cities are accustomed to confined and defined play spaces, often labeled as ‘playgrounds,’ children in these camps use the entire expanse as their play space, establishing a hidden topography of play through their creative misuse of the architectural

elements around them. This finding suggests a reinterpretation of the playground, which led us to develop proposals for fragmented play spaces and structures that could be integrated into the fabric of a dense urban environment. In this article we introduce Febrik, our aims and methodology, and offer examples of our projects to date.

Febrik

Febrik (www.febrik.org) is a not-for-profit collaborative platform for participatory art and design research projects with a focus on the dynamics and practices of public spaces and the negotiations of right of space of previously unrepresented community groups; with a particular interest in spaces of refuge and transition. Febrik has been researching social playgrounds and invented play as participatory and democratic practices that incite social dialogue and engagement. The exploration has taken place through a series of projects in Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East and art based community projects in the UK.

In the context of long-term refugee camps in the Middle East, Febrik explores creative educational methodologies that aim to develop culturally specific propositional and spatial solutions to social issues. This is achieved through facilitating dialogue for collecting, documenting and understanding the continuously changing practices within the camps, in the context of an evolving social and physical structure. Similarly, our work in schools is focused on immigrant communities in the UK. Here too, our process uses physical space as a point of departure. While Palestinian children’s experience is woven into global politics and is focused on the ‘right of return,’2 the children at a primary school in Hackney dealt with refuge on a personal scale, often feeling more at home in their new country than anywhere else. In turn our projects in schools explore the children’s identity within an interior private environment (family/home) and its public exterior backdrop (street/city). This article presents the work in the refugee camps due to its specific relevance to play and community learning.

Methodology

Febrik’s main area of concern lies in the dynamics of public spaces in relation to social and urban change. Its focus is on the use of the creative process (architecture, art, film, photography, text) to stimulate participation and action in the immediate environment. We aim to use the creative process as: a catalyst for discovering, analysing and responding to collective and personal concerns, practices, narratives, and dreams; a propositional tool for intervening in the social realm with the aim of designing change. The aim is to make a platform for creative practices that mirror and reflect contemporary life. To achieve our goals we use participatory workshops with a special focus on children, leading to site-specific installations and programmatic interventions. Our process engages children as primary contributors, who in turn engage the adults. This is particularly the case in Play Space. The context of the research was often the children’s home, in turn the parents – notably the mothers, siblings and grandparents – were a part of the games and helped in the children’s documentation and discussion. They became spontaneously part of the process during some activities. While the process did not develop around and with adults on a primary level, we found that working with one segment of a tightly knit society lends itself to the indirect engagement of all segments of this society.

In our current project, Edge of Play, we worked with adults directly by training youth centre staff and volunteers, mostly mothers or teachers. The project description that follows details this process. This project has allowed us to expand our scope from only working with children, to encouraging a more active role for adults. Our present design proposal for the Edge of Play social playground is maturing through consultations and community negotiations that work with the family at large. That said, the emphasis of our work has been developing with children as its nucleus.

Our working methodology aims to regenerate a mental process of ‘thinking while making’, which questions societal norms, promotes diversity and individuality as well as perseverance and experimentation. This differs from teaching art through traditional methods

Children in these camps use the entire expanse as their play space, establishing a hidden topography of play through their creative misuse of the architectural elements around them.

which often reproduce a single ‘reality,’ limiting the world in the child’s eye and confining her or his imagination.

The children develop an understanding of the camp through a process of research, discovery, narration and imagination. They document practices initiated by men, women, or children in the public realm of the camp (young people are rarely active users of those dense urban mazes). Their inventive use of architectural elements around them responds to the absence of designated play areas or playgrounds: a chair becomes a climbing tool, a grandmother’s interlocking washing lines become limits of cities to be crossed with paper planes, a dismantled swing allows for new swing forms and dripping water pipes inspire new ways for marking on surfaces.

With their new insights, the children contribute to changing the reading of the camps through developed propositions. This is done with maps, collages and on-site installations. Their stories, drawings and interventions reveal an awareness of the missing resources and infrastructures within the camp, and map out different ways of moving through it. The temporary alteration in the function of a space opens up new potential for that space.

Grandma’s washing plane race

Mohamad was lying on a bench watching his mother help his grandmother hang her washing on the spider web washing lines on their rooftop. Mohamad’s grandma visits every Monday. She brings her washing and spends the day with them cooking and chatting. On those days, the lines would be filled with clothes, creating small rooms as they intersect. The washing would sway and flow as the wind blew. At night, once the washing was dry, grandmother would pack it all up and go home, leaving the rooftop as one big empty space again. As he lay there watching them, Mohamad saw a boy on a rooftop a few buildings away, making and flying paper aeroplanes. He tried to make his own from his school notebook; he experimented with different shapes and sizes; after a series of trials, the shapes became a plane and the plane flew. Mohamad began to fly his planes and a game developed as he realised he could fly them over grandma’s washing lines that created boundaries with different compartments between them. He attempted to cross as many boundaries as possible, throwing a few planes at a time and seeing which one would go furthest. He tied the plane to a thread. And when he played again, he invited others to join him.

Apart from looking at how children transform the limited camp spaces with their patterns and practices of play, our process looks at the way in which specific spatial environments prompt the

invention of new games leading to different play spaces. A singlefunction urban space such as a passageway acquires new functions through the insertion of architectural elements or through the ‘misuse’ of those elements. The space becomes a field where negotiations between diverse users take place at different times of day. Physical appropriation of space gives way to a continuously dynamic exchange, removed from a dictated space use. During one day, public spaces transform from extensions of private interiors to conversation arenas, to celebration spaces, to play pockets. A window grill can become a purposely-designed rail for seated children acting as spectators, or a softball shoot for ball players. In this way, space is negotiated between different groups in the camp, especially addressing the adult/child and the female/ male dualities.

Safety, proximity to home, unscheduled play (for example on their way to school) and the limitations and possibilities offered by the adults’ use of space all play a role in prompting the children’s transformation of public spaces. From the functional to the social and poetic, the children reveal that the reuse and multiuse of architectural elements offers great possibilities of play. Play, unaccounted for in the organic growth of refugee camps, becomes a key factor in understanding this negotiated space between children and adults.

The ‘playground’ is fragmented into camouflaged play pockets, to be discovered through the daily journeys of walking around the camp.

Formalising the topography of play

The research process starts with the children documenting their inherited and invented games. Drawings, mind-maps, models, live interviews and collages are used to ‘unravel’ the ingredients of the game and explore how they are made possible. Each child produces a ‘manual of play’, a step-by-step narrative of the history of the game and how it is played. This includes describing the physical elements needed (tall wall, hiding space, an open window, etc.); the social and human elements needed for the game (the number of players: do they all know they are playing, who are they?); their age; the time of day; the location; the social practice and phenomenon it is inspired by (e.g. electricity cuts, visits from grandma); and the way the body moves in space.

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