project in Talbieh Palestinian refugee camp, Amman, Jordan 2008-2010
a partnership with the United Nations Relief Work Agency UNRWA in their camp improvement project.
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Project Overview: summary of process
The project worked with children and the community to discover, observe and record the specific practices of play in Talbiyeh and in turn initiate a series of design possibilities developed in the studio and in follow up consultations with the community and the children. The process commences with research and is resolved through their involvement in each phase including implementation.
The project worked with children to reveal their practices of play, and their creative means of responding to the absence of child and play spaces in Talbiyeh. Febrik began through a training workshop (using Play Space activity manuals) with adults in the community focused on creative participatory research tools (such as photography and drawings) tailored to discovering the children’s invented games (phase 1). The adults, now facilitators, worked with a group of children to find out their patterns and practices of play, producing a series of photographs, narratives and drawings (phase 2). Taking these games on board, a design workshop with the children developed initial inventions through a series of collages and models (phase 3). These were then developed in the design studio and in collaboration with the UNRWA team (phase 4). We hope for these be tested and implemented with the community in a new part of the project (phase 5).
Phase 1 Training and participation
Training community members and UNRWA team to conduct Play Space Workshop – part 1
Phase 2 Research
Revealing the children’s play practices (Data collection)
Analysis of Play Space Workshop – part 1findings (Data Analysis)
Site survey and drawing (UNRWA team)
Phase3 Design participation workshop - developing initial ideas with the children (Play Space workshop – part 2)
Develop site/camp specific design strategy and direction with UNRWA team
Phase 4 Design package for ‘Edge of Play’ proposal in the camp director site
Phase 5 Participatory Implementation of design package
Objectives:
The objectives of the play pocket proposal are as follows:
Reveal children’s ingenuous innovations and share their positive transformation of their direct environment.
Explore a participatory process, which develops the children’s ideas into design possibilities.
Discover and articulate the hidden and rare opportunity offered by the camp’s spatial structure
Introduce and test a new type of urban playground, able to exist within a dense setting and without the need for formalised fields of play.
Create playful social relations between adults and children as they share public spaces more effectively.
Question the functions of public spaces and playgrounds as means to enhance public claim to space (ownership and pride), democratic sharing (equal by all groups) by exploring their potential for holding a larger selection of culturally relevant social activities and practices. Playgrounds more than play spaces, they become the ‘locus of a truly public, neighbourhood generating place … connecting people to places and strengthening identity of spaces’(Lefaivre;2007)
Intended outputs:
A design package for a new play space in the camp; the package will develop and complete a working methodology that links research, participation and design as a means to create site and culture specific public spaces.
Intended Outcomes:
We aim that the completing of the project will generate a successful play space and open up a dialogue about play within a dense urban context; Play, not merely as a child activity but as a means of finding common grounds for social interaction and communication. We also aim for the project to bring attention to children’s inventive appropriation and use of spaces and the possibilities generated by this process. Finally we hope that children and their families will look at the camp’s public spaces in a new way, as a field of opportunity for further inventions of play.
