ABSTRACT
Scholars use the term ‘play’ to convey and explore disparate aspects of urban experience and to underpin varied arguments about social life (Sutton-Smith 1997). Three broad perspectives on play emphasize different social needs it can fulfil: its practical value as developmental learning; its cultural significance as luxurious, wasteful activity consciously separated from immediate practical needs; and its dialectical role as a lived critique within urban social life. The playfulness of any given social practice can be characterized by particular actions, aims and situations of its application. While play is often considered in opposition to work, seriousness and order, it also resists the dualism of Western thinking. It slips between categories and contexts, and studying it presents both conceptual and practical challenges. No definitions of play easily tie it down, but all are useful in thinking differently (indeed, playfully) about how people act and why they gather together in cities. In contemporary urban theory, play is often a rubric for the multifarious aspects of urban life that are not easily reducible to the rationalities and conventions of productive work, commodified leisure and social conventions. The theory and practice of play explore the experiential, social and psychological potentials and constraints that urban concentration and heterogeneity afford, through unplanned exposure to unfamiliar people, experiences and actions. This thinking finds application across a variety of disciplines and contexts.
