The Urbanimals – winners of this year’s Playable City Award – will be projected into various overlooked Bristol locations in an effort to engage residents with environments which often get ignored

Visions of the future city from the 1920s and 30s brought us ambitious foresight of flying cars, weather-regulating domes and post-apocalyptic dystopias void of any of human activity. Even today, forward-thinking ideas seem to plan for urban efficiency by removing citizens from city streets, or by reducing everyday interaction to a world of self-checkouts, driverless cars and touch-screen communication. But as we drift towards a life with our head in the cloud, Bristol’s Playable City Award is trying to bring us back down to earth.

“We are not just users of the city. We are also its creators,” says Anna Grajper and Sebastian Dobiesz of Wrocław-based LAX (Laboratory for Architectural Experiments). Selected from 197 applicants as winners of the £30,000 award, LAX are a key part of the movement to make cities around the world more exciting, engaging and liveable. And for LAX, this starts with a rabbit, a kangaroo, a beetle and a dolphin.



Over the next two months, these four Urbanimals will be appearing in various locations across Bristol, created using a series of projectors and sensors set up to engage with the built environment and those who pass through it. “The Urbanimals unlock the places that are often overlooked as people travel through the city,” says Dobiesz. “They reactivate the space between the buildings to engage people with the environments they often ignore.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Urbanimals were created on the Unity game development platform. Photograph: Paul Blakemore

As cities seek to become more seamless and efficient by integrating technology into the environment through innovations such as data-collecting bins and parking sensors, the “playable city” thinks about the city on a more human level. Contrary to the big-money projects and “smart city” buzzwords, playability strives to make places more inclusive and habitable – to create cities for people.

This playability movement is booming in Bristol, with pioneering ideas such as Luke Jerram’s Park and Slide, which had citizens hurtling through the centre of town on a 30-foot slip-and-slide, Hello, Lamp Post!, a previous Playable City Award-winner that enabled Bristolians to communicate with street furniture and the resident-led temporary street closures that allow children to run wild and free (now active in London).



“Urbanimals are an attempt to address the more human issue of habituation in the city, both sociologically and physically,” says Grajper. “People can get stuck in a routine that prevents them from experiencing the city. Urbanimals present the opportunity for people to stop and take the time to look around, and maybe see something in the city that is otherwise invisible.”

Of course, playable ideas can still rely on the internet of things or cloud technology, but this operates on a personal level to connect citizens, rather than to streamline municipal services. “We can design technology that gets people to interact with the city, but we want to see interaction between participants too,” says Dobiesz. “Obviously, we can’t design person-to-person interaction, but hopefully the animals will bring this out, and we can discover different aspects of contemporary human needs.”

Ahead of releasing the animals into the wild this week, LAX have been working closely with Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio, a community of artists, technologists and academics exploring creative technologies to develop digital projects, many of which focus on the experience of the city.

Playability strives to make places more inclusive and habitable – to create cities for people

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hello Lamp Post won the 2013 Playable City Award

The collaborative nature of the studio means that residents make a commitment to be “professionally interrupted” at any point during the day. So walking past a desk surrounded by multiple remote-controlled cranes, I took advantage of my permission to pry. The toys, I was told, are strict research apparatus for choreographer Laura Kriefman’s latest project, Crane Dance. Kriefman’s work will see city skylines come alive through a dance routine performed by industrial cranes, first waking up Bristol’s historic dockland machinery, before turning her attention to a mammoth performance using all of London’s Zone 1 cranes, temporarily uniting citizens with the infrastructure that lies out of reach behind construction hoardings.

For Clare Reddington, creative director of Watershed, it’s ideas such as these that really get under the skin of cities to shake things up. “The projects engage people and can create a sense of civic pride,” she says. “While £30,000 can’t fix the problems of a city, it can start a conversation.” While many of Bristol’s playable projects are only present in the city for a few months, the long-term effects are apparent.

“One thing to think about is how civically engaged people are around these spaces, and does this change how they engage with each other in the long term. Community groups can use it as a leverage tool or platform, long after the intervention is gone,” explains Reddington.



Playable Cities: the city that plays together, stays together Read more

Since setting up the projection boxes for Urbanimals, Hilary O’Shaughnessy, Playable City producer has already felt a change. “We can’t put a ladder up anywhere without someone stopping us and getting excited. We’ve already found groups who would like to do projects around it.”



After curating fun in the European green capital for the last three years, Watershed is now taking Playable City on the road to kickstart a conversation about what playability can do for other cities around the world. So far, the concept has travelled to Recife and Tokyo, with preparations for a new chapter in Lagos under way. “It’s very interesting to see how different places react to playability,” says Reddington. “We create these analytical projects and you don’t know what they’re going to reveal until people actually start using them. There’s no easy measurement, and it’s such early days. We’re looking at things such as how public art has been evaluated in the past, and the same with urban planning, and then we can fuse those measurements together.”

Scorned as silly science by some, the enthusiasm towards playability sits firmly alongside other future visions of the city as something designed for the people, by the people. This light-hearted movement might not be rolling every civic service into one handy smartphone app, but playable interventions engage, stimulate and soften the city in a way that data-collecting bins and pollution-sensing nodes will never be able to achieve.

Urbanimals will run throughout Bristol from 15 September to 17 November. Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook and join the discussion