September 25, 2015 - 19:02
Think of a point in time within your life thus far – any time at all.
What is the first thing that comes to mind?
A place – a place is inextricably glued to that time.
Within our minds, there exists a dependency between space and time. We mark our memories of time within the context of a particular space, a location. A significant place evokes a memory of a particular time, proving how we all mark time through space; as a place changes, we mark its change as movement in time. This is how we anchor ourselves in the universe, and give purpose to places.
We define space for its particular purpose, and yet, over time, the purpose of many spaces deviates from the initial allotted function. Haabibi describes a story where her space for play was a parking lot; she states,
“Even though it looked like we were playing in a dull and dark concrete-made parking lots, in our perspective, the parking lots could have never been more flourished with laughter and excitement over making our own little spaces.”
Haabibi’s experience is a prime example of using a space for something beyond its ascribed purpose. While a parking lot is constructed for cars to be kept while the people in the cars go off somewhere else, this particular parking lot served a higher purpose. The space utilized for play was made for something other than play—it was a “smooth urban space”, and that purpose shifted completely every time Haabibi and her friends used this piece of land for their play.
In this instance, the distinction between play and non-play space blur together, clouding the separation between adult and child space, work and play space, order and disorder, productivity and unproductivity. All of these aspects attributed to the interrogation of “Understandings of Play in Spaces of Material Alterity” are brought up in by Edensor et al. The authors of that essay go through their evaluation by assessing “the material and less tangible qualities that promote numerous playful practices” (1). This is what I hope to achieve in my analysis of play.
An adult space can also be defined as adult by attributing qualities such as “work, seriousness, independence and responsibility” (Edensor et al, 8). This normative definition, most fitting of the majority’s purpose with and within a space, is surpassed through play:
“However ordered, or unordered those street spaces may be, children are able to disorder the street as adult spaces when they transgress partial and/or temporal boundaries and thereby enter a more liminal, hybrid, inbetween world” (Edensor et al, 11).
One can see in this passage that a major contributing factor to achieving play is an appreciation of timelessness. In losing this variable of time within the binary of space and time, the ascribed productivity of a space may also be relinquished. Haabibi’s non-attachment to the factor of time within her play may have lead to her transgression of the ascribed purpose of a parking lot. Haabibi and her friends were also able “to disorder the street as adult spaces” in their entrance into the “inbetween world”. This allowed her and her friends to make their “own little spaces”, therefor challenging the predicated role of the space.
The flaw of attributing purpose to space when it is constructed lies in its changing over time. Eventually, the uses of a space are exhausted, and so it is necessary for other uses to be made; some may call this repurposing a disordering. A prime example arises in the instance of children’s playgrounds. These considerably safe spaces of somewhat regulated play contain traditional contraptions that serve a single purpose such as a slide, swings, monkey bars etc. When driven to a location in which the purpose of a space is completely removed from what it is intended to be used for, creativity blossoms. Haabibi easily accessed her imagination to find a new purpose for the parking lot, saying that, “my friends and I, at the age of seven, and my brother at five, always made our journey fruitful using our infinite range of imagination.” It is only “in losing themselves in disordered spaces, children actually find their selves” (Edensor et al, 9).
Works Cited
Haabibi. “Playing in Parking Lots.” Changing Our Story 2015. Serendip. 21 Sept. 2015. Web. 25 Sept. 2015
Tim Edensor, Bethan Evans, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington and Jon Binnie. Playing in Industrial Ruins: Interrogating Teleological Understandings of Play in Spaces of Material Alterity and Low Surveillance. Urban Wildscapes. Ed. Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan. New York: Routledge, 2011. 65-79.