Puppet psychogeography: play as participatory approaches to urban futures

This project brings together expertise in puppet interventions, playful geographies and co-creative architecture to interrogate the use of play as a participatory tool for urban design. It centres on a one-day Practice as Research (PaR) event for exploring urban living with the local community. Throughout the day the public – particularly, although not exclusively, families and children from will be invited to use a bespoke ‘city design toolkit’ to imagine what a future cityscape may look like. Playful construction will be punctuated by set time performances where puppet surrogates explore the imagined city provoking questions about the built environment and urban living.
The event aims to:
· capture the public’s questions, concerns and thoughts about urban living;
· critically question the use of a play as a participatory tool for researching urban living;
· create an experimental space where disciplinary knowledges/practices around urban living are opened up to critical examination.

Working in this participatory, interdisciplinary manner enables us to ask critical questions about: the ‘playful turn’ across urban planning, policymaking and design; the extent to which participatory approaches can function as democratic tools; the current direction of urban futures research.
This project pilots a participatory ‘toolkit’ developed through a collaboration by the applicants with the specific brief of using cross-disciplinary conversations to raise and address critiques of extant disciplinary practice. For example, within urban design value is placed on a particular kind of aesthetic, exemplified by visual products that are devoid of real people. By combining puppetry from a performance perspective with a block-based construction kit from architectural practice, our toolkit seeks to embed empathy within the participatory process, provoking additional questions about the built environment and urban living than might otherwise be the case.
Furthermore, the PaR event is designed to not only create an experimental space in which to engage the local community with questions of (future) urban living, but, also to ask critical questions of the participatory process itself.