Play to Plan: mobile games to value street-level trade
Adriana Valdez Young
Editor’s note: In the last post of the Stories to Action edition, urban research designer Adriana Valdez Young @thepublicagency tells us how she used stories gathered from ethnographic research to design a game for architects and planners. Her “action,” a game called Arrivalocity, allowed users to access stories from her fieldwork. Although not all “actions” turn out as we expect. Adriana shares with us how she would approach this process if she were to do this again. All designers and researchers can learn from her very open and honest reflection.
Adriana Valdez Young makes creative learning and research platforms that engage people with their city. She is the co-founder of English for Action in Rhode Island, helped launch KARAJ in Beruit and is the co-editor of Betta, an architecture zine on lifestyle and conflict.
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An individual storefront subdivided from 1 to 8 businesses over the course of 3 years.
(Courtesy of Nicolas Palominos & LSE Cities 2012)
Introduction
One day in Eindhoven for a lighting workshop. The next day, back to London for a one-hour walk down the street, followed by six hours drawing plans for a boutique hotel, art cinema, and food market to present to city officials. This is how a group of architecture firms spent two days in the spring of 2012 shaping a gentrified vision for Rye Lane (Olcayto 2012).
Designers, planners and developers shape our cities, yet they can spend little to no time in the field before delving into decision making. In the context of culturally-complex and rapidly changing streets, the results can be generic and damaging characterizations, leading to bland and detrimental designs.
As a researcher with the ‘Ordinary Streets’ project at LSE Cities, I spent several months in 2012 learning about the culture of trade on Rye Lane – a dense, multicultural high street in the neighborhood of Peckham, South London. Rye Lane is a street where businesses and shoppers regularly out-maneuver tight spaces and budgets. It is an entrepreneurial and cultural destination, where a newly arrived immigrant can rent an outdoor market stall for a daily rate of £10 – using only a mailing address and a mobile number to secure a permit; where a woman can buy exactly the same foods she cooked, hair style she wore and movies she watched in Lagos – all in the same shop; and where a refugee from Iraq manages a store that he subdivided from one to eight micro businesses – each one run by immigrants.
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