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What happens when children participate in the design, development and construction of public urban space? What are their dreams and visions for a common space when they are given the chance to imagine, build and express their ideas? What kind of pedagogical and collaborative settings emerge through the act of making? And further, what kind of impact can be gauged in relation to the local context and neighbourhood? This case study unfolds the context-based learning environment of a co-design process through developing a public space with two school classes and local stakeholders. The practice-based research project investigates participatory methods for the development of 'playable' and socially engaging urban spaces and seeks a greater understanding of co-design as an educational approach and design tool and of its relation to urban planning practice.

‘Move the Neighbourhood’ is a research project experimenting with co-designing playable installations for a public green space in Copenhagen through a design-based collaboration between children and design-researchers. We employed a co-design process to investigate whether deconstructing the rules for both play and design could trigger new ways of thinking about playable spaces. The aim was to test a participatory process in order to identify what might be meaningful in relation to both play and designing for play, along a spectrum ranging from rules to collaborative improvisation. Our fieldwork cultivated what Haraway calls ‘response-ability’ in a ‘curious practice’ that explores the unanticipated in the collaboration between children and designers. The metaphor of a ‘jelly cake’ from play-research was used to illustrate the messiness of play and to frame the discussion on collaborative design. We see play as a serious co-player that evokes collective worlds through productive, messy fields of action, and enables actors to engage in the co-design of playable public space. In this article, we investigate how play can create agency, spark imagination and open up practices in both artistic and academic processes. Drawing on Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’, we investigate design/play as a dynamic engine for exploring collaborative design practices as a dialogue between art, play and co-design.

A limited amount of research has examined the effect of changing public open spaces on active living. This paper will present the study protocol of a community-based intervention study co-designed in an interdisciplinary collaboration with community members to develop urban installations highly tailored to promote active living among children (10-13-years-old) and seniors (>60-years-old) in a deprived neighbourhood in Copenhagen. The study builds on a quasi-experimental study design with two sub-studies: 1) a children study and 2) a senior study. The interventions will be developed, designed and implemented in collaboration with local children and seniors, respectively, using different co-design tools and methods. We will evaluate the effect of the interventions on children's and senior's use of the new-built urban installations using accelerometers in combination with GPS as well as systematic observation using the System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities ...