IN MEMORIUM

Selim Iltus

Selim Iltus Iltus became a great friend to the International Play Association (IPA) in the years in which we focussed our efforts to bring about a UN General Comment on article 31. Quietly and behind-the-scenes Selim Iltus was one of the most important people in making it happen.

Fittingly, IPA and Selim first came together in a wonderful urban nature playground in Rotterdam. A long-time colleague of Roger Hart at the City University New York, Selim had been roped in by Roger to assist us with a small workshop to figure out how on earth we should go about gathering evidence to persuade the UN about barriers to children’s play.

Soon, we became familiar with Selim’s habit of quietly coming back to us after reflection to say, “I think I can help.” By now Research and Evaluation Officer with the Bernard van Leer Foundation, Selim’s help took us through commissioning research, designing and running the Global Consultation Project on Children’s Right to Play (“sounds rather grand, doesn’t it?” as Valerie our co-conspirator would say with satisfaction) and, when the time came, managing the drafting of the UN General Comment on behalf of the UN Committee. Selim supported IPA’s launch of the General Comment in Geneva in 2013 along with guests from around the world, including the whole of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the then director of the BvLF, Lisa Jordan.

Through all of this Selim was a fellow traveller. Despite periods of ill health he chose to be there with IPA and to continue to listen and to help and to always bring his warmth, wisdom and wit. We were honoured that Selim joined IPA in our World Conferences in Wales in 2011 and Turkey in 2013, where we remember him, pen and notepad always in hand.

His commitment to children’s right to play made some very special things happen, that simply wouldn’t have happened without him.

Selim died 12 July 2015. We will miss him enormously and on behalf of all IPA members we send our sincere condolences to his family.

(1955 – 2015)

(1924-2014)

Brian Sutton-Smith

Remberances from a New Zealand Childhood

Beverley Morris

Professor Brian Sutton-Smith who died recently aged 90 in USA, was a New Zealand academic who was an energetic advocate for the value of play. He had a good start in his own play in the hills of Island Bay in Wellington.

In the early 1920s my mother and Brian’s mother Nita Smith, both pushing their prams, met up at the Island Bay tram terminus in the playground not far from the fore-shore. While the four-yearold Vaughan tried the slide, Brian and I were strapped into the (continued on page 38)

Febrik, Play and the Urban Context

(continued from page 19) The children go on to rearrange and combine their separate ingredients to invent new collective games. These are then tested in different sites or through participatory workshops with the community, leading to a design proposal for specific sites. In this way, the hidden topography of play is formalised through introducing architectural elements into different parts of the public realm. The ‘playground’ is fragmented into camouflaged play pockets, to be discovered through the daily journeys of walking around the camp. This new urban topography offers the ‘potential of a playground as the locus of a truly public, neighbourhood generating place’. 3

Three projects

‘Play Space’ (2005) came as a consequence of Dream Project (2003 and 2004), two projects which were carried out through workshops in Burj el Barajne. Working with the children in Dream Project made us aware of the physical and spatial conditions of the camp, as well as the children’s perceptions of them and interactions within them. Play Space looked at the way the children transform the limited camp spaces with their patterns of play; but equally the way in which this specific environment prompts the invention of new games and play spaces.

‘Play Pockets’ (2008) was developed along with the reconstruction plans of Nahr el Bared, a camp north of Lebanon partially wiped out in 2007. This tabula rasa resulted in an unusual situation in which a refugee camp could be formally redesigned. The camps were temporary spaces that became permanent through a series of political indecisions. There is an inherent contradiction: how to redesign when there was no design in the first place? Does one start anew or examine the possibilities existing in the informal, undesigned structure? Basing our work on findings from Burj el Barajne in Play Space, as well as on community input through Nahr el Bared Reconstruction Committee (NBRC), Febrik developed prototypes of architectural details intended to combine children and adults’ practices within the same public area.

‘Edge of Play’ (2009) worked with children to reveal their play habits, and their creative means of responding to the absence of play spaces in Talbiyeh. We began with a training workshop (using Play Space activity manuals) for adults inthe community, using creative tools such as photography and drawing to discover the children’s invented games. The adults became facilitators who then worked with a group of childrento find out their patterns and practices of play, producing a series of photographs, narratives and drawings. Taking these games on board, a design workshop with the children developed initial inventions through a series of collages and models. These were then developed in the design studio and in collaboration with the UNRWA team. We hope for these be tested and implemented with the community in a new part of the project. Public spaces transform from extensions of private interiors to conversation arenas, to celebration spaces, to play pockets.

Public spaces transform from extensions of private interiors to conversation arenas, to celebration spaces, to play pockets.

Regeneration

The complex institutional system within the refugee camps is made up of: the host government; intergovernmental international organisations (UN, UNRWA); civil society (NGOs, independent, donor driven, politically motivated); the community (cultural practices and beliefs); as well the collective mindset. Key ingredients of any genuine partnership are the exchange of information, the building of knowledge and communication tools. This is especially true in this context, as regeneration here aims at the community-initiated development of existing (often basic) resources as opposed to a large scale ‘makeover’ of an area.

The spatial solutions we propose – architectural furniture and planning in the public realm – thus aim to create dynamic multi-functional structures with an emphasis on play, that declare different groups’ right to the space, particularly under-represented groups such as children and young people. The structures suggest democratic sharing of the space, by marking more clearly how the different ‘owners’ will coexist.

Febrik aims to continue developing its research towards claiming public space and in turn initiating social change, seeking spatial solutions to social concerns. We will also continue to test the potential of play as a communitygenerating tool both as an educational methodology and as programmatic intervention in the new fragmented play pockets and topographies. (continued on page 38)

Febrik, Play and the Urban Context

(continued from page 37) Through its latest project in Talbiyeh camp, Febrik is exploring issues that have arisen from the formalizing of informal practices. We are looking at the complexities of appropriating public spaces that previously had certain gender and age hierarchies. We are also looking at the physical limitations, at what is sustainable structurally and socially in the camps, taking into account the value of materials and the perception of what is public property. Vandalism and the partial breaking and dismantling of structures for re-use in home reinforcement, are a persistent challenge to any design proposal. With our ‘implementation workshops’ we hope to generate a sense of collective ownership of public structures and spaces, and we are exploring ways of strengthening the ‘social play space’ as a space for democracy and community integration. l

1if-untitled.com 2Refugee camps were supposed to provide short-term shelter pending the refugees’ right of return to their homes. This right has been enshrined in UN resolutions. See http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8427987.stm 3Liane Lefaivre and Döll, (eds). 2007, Ground-Up City: Play as a Design Tool, Hall, George (trans.) Rotterdam, Netherlands: 010 Publishers.

This article originally appeared in Engage 25 Journal. It is used with permission.

Brian Sutton Smith

(continued from page 36) toddlers’ swings and baby Bill slept in his pram. Passing on to the beach, the mothers produced buckets and spades for us to dig holes and play in the sand.

As a ‘Second Year’ at Teachers’ Training College, I heard about the minor rebellious activities of Brian, then a ‘First Year’, but agreed with him that playtime was important. He insisted that play is not a sideshow – it is critical to children’s development.

Brian chose to do his probationary year in a small country school in the Wairarapa area where he had time to further his observations on children’s play in natural surroundings. He eventually achieved the first doctorate in Education in the University of New Zealand (as it was then called). His doctoral thesis was entitled “The History of Play in New Zealand.”

While teaching in primary schools in Wellington Brian wrote some stories for the NZ School Journal, drawing on his play in the Island Bay gorse-clad hills – Our Street, Smitty Does a Bunk, and The Cobbers. As the themes were about boys’ rough and tumble play, the children adored them but the parents and teachers hated them for their generous use of slang and vivid descriptions of street life.

Brian left New Zealand in 1954 on a Fulbright scholarship and became a world authority on Play. As Professor at Bowling Green University (Iowa) he began to publish theoretical books and articles about the human condition from studying play’s cultural wellsprings – most notably The Ambiguity of Play. He further studied children’s psychological development, and pursued the myriad variations of play in folk lore, toys, board games, organised sports, computer gaming and even daydreaming.

With the experience of raising five children, Brian and his New Zealand wife Shirley wrote a book for parents, How to Play with your Children and When Not To. The “when not to” reverberated with me because too often I see parents breaking up a child’s play by unwanted intervening.

Brian followed an academic career in universities in USA and was a consultant to TV programmes such as Captain Kangaroo. I met with Brian on some of his trips back to NZ, but more often at the Triennial Conferences of the International Association for the Child’s Right to Play (as IPA used to be known). He believed that play was a universal human phenomenon, involving adults as well as children, and his writings were characterised by interdisciplinary flair. He wrote many books and over 300 papers for academic journals, which are now lodged at The Strong at Rochester, New York. l

The IPA and Beyond Association teams in Lebanon Editor’s note: Ms. Morris, 91, is a long-time member and friend of IPA and still an advocate for the child’s right to play. Links to more traditional obituaries for Professor Sutton-Smith are found on ipaworld.org. He passed away on March 7, 2015.