A handshake with the city:
an introduction to the city through the culture of play I. In a South Indian folktale, as recalled by A K Ramanjuan while introducing Folktales from India1, one dark night, an old woman was searching intently for something in the street. A passer-by asked her, “Have you lost something?” She answered, “Yes, I have lost my keys. I've been looking for them all evening” “Where did you lose them?” “I don’t know. Maybe inside the house.” “Then why are you looking for them here?” “Because it is dark in there. I don’t have oil in my lamps. I can see much better here, under the lights.” Ramanujan has used this parable to argue the cultural legitimacy of folktales alongside written text. In principle, until recently, most urban studies have been similarly conducted in “well-lit” spaces, in places we already know. And, as Ramanujan says, in these we have found many precious things. With our desire to explore [urban] ’play’, we are moving into a city’s proverbial “indoors” - into the expressive culture of the intimate, the fragile, the hidden and the ephemeral. There is a sustained allusion: the work of architecture be returned to the stuff of life. Not all elements, or even all of the structures of everyday life are always evident. They become part of our “habitus” as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu as part of the experience of lived practices. Play momentarily reveals the facade of these structures. To that extent, working with play as a methodology is akin to doing a form of archaeology. What is revealed is the enduring; a glimpse of a buried or underground river. In this, ‘play’ is difficult to capture, and is fluid in its nature. Through the practice of play, we look at revealing everyday practices fossilized by their very “everydayness”; or through sheer repetition of habit and forgotten possibilities within the built environment. Play, then, is a serious way of opening up a way of looking at cities, and those who use the cities.
1
A.K. Ramanujan. Folktales from India. Penguin Books, India. 1991.