Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

The change that has characterised our society in recent decades constitutes an acceleration in educational research, in learning methods and in the idea of a space for learning. This conquest defines an advance towards continuous, participative and shared learning aimed at nurturing new possibilities, especially in terms of typological experimentation and shared functioning, as a design of the relationships between elements and processes at different scales. The forms of learning, which today are declined in different spaces and times, go beyond the educational institutions by conquering pieces of the city in which to do school. Democratic urban spaces that become opportunities for educational experience, moments of sociability and playfulness. They are theatre of actions and events linked to education in which the child – no longer a simple observer of the world – becomes an active player in a process that recognises play as a powerful trigger mechanism in the construction of the city. Playful devices, knowledge accumulators that could find place in those places that architect Aldo Van Eyck defines as “interstitial spaces” that, carved out of the urban fabric of the city, can represent a concrete attempt at playful rewriting of urban geographies (Lefaivre et al., 2002). This interpretative process reduces the distances between urban space, architecture and play, as it extrapolates through an ‘impertinent’ gaze pieces of the city that are transformed into new playful environments (Di Pietro, 2020: 19). In space we experience things within frames, but the same object, the same place, can coexist within different frames so we play more and more at the margins, and in the margins. In this relationship between play-learning-architecture these devices of movement, of creation, as well as allowing an innovative reading of the urban environment, give rise to certain social dynamics with which the citizen participates, designs and rewrites the city by playing.