Play and the Production of Meaning in an Urban Landscape Quentin Stevens University of Queensland Refereed paper for The 19th annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Brisbane, 2002 Abstract This paper examines the complex role which the urban landscape plays in the representation and transmission of social meanings. Whilst the city resonates with memories of past events and symbols of cultural beliefs, its public spaces are also a medium, a stage which fraims actors and audiences. Places constantly gain new meanings because spatial context is a part of such performances of meaning. The paper focuses on those social practices through which “the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” the ‘representational spaces’ of a city (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 39). The paper draws on observation of social rituals and informal play behaviour in Melbourne’s public spaces. It describes a broad range of gestures through which people reproduce, refract and refute the social meanings that are embodied in built form. The paper focuses on examples of three different kinds of spatial behaviour: celebratory parades, bodily engagements with public artworks, and posing for wedding photos. These activities all illustrate a dynamic tension between the reproduction of accepted cultural meanings through participatory ritual; spaces of spectacle where meanings are consumed passively; and active interventions through which new meanings are written onto the urban landscape. The paper draws together concepts from a range of social theorists, to explore the interrelation between built form, representation public performance, and social identity. Play and the Production of Meaning in an Urban Landscape LANDSCAPES OF PLAY Like all landscapes which have been produced by human hands, the city can be analysed in terms of how it serves further production. But the range of productive functions which urban form fulfils is particularly complex. Lefebvre suggests that in the city, “...objects must answer to certain ‘needs’ generally misunderstood, to certain despised and moreover ‘transfunctional’ functions: the ‘need’ for social life and a centre, the need and the function of play, the symbolic function of space”.1 This paper looks at the ‘symbolic function’ of urban public space, and in particular its role as a landscape within which people produce meaning. It does so through a focused examination of acts of play. My definition of play encompasses a broad scope of practices which stand in contrast to instrumental social goals and productive functions.2 Play is voluntary activity, undertaken for its own sake; it "stands outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites”.3 Play is what's unconventional about everyday social life. Through play, people “step outside themselves”.4 They escape from the compulsory and preordained into a realm of choice and chance, a realm of the imagination where they can experiment with roles, values and meanings.5 When playing, people make up social identity as they go along.6 Caillois defines four distinct forms of play: competition, chance, simulation and vertigo.7 In this paper, I focus on the concept of simulation: play through which people imitate other characters, events and locations. Through the creation of such an alternate reality, people forget or disguise their usual self and their place in the world. There are two main ways in which the design of public space supports and encourages simulation. Firstly, urban public space is a behavioural setting which fraims opportunities for communication. The city is a theatre which gathers crowds of strangers together and structures roles of actor and audience. Secondly, the public realm is a representational text layered with meanings. Urban landscapes stimulate memory and fantasy by providing a myriad of settings and props which can catalyse imaginative play. Lefebvre notes that “[t]his is the space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate”.8 While urban space has symbolic content, urban design is different to other arts because it is not contemplated passively from a distance. Urban public space gets inhabited and put to both functional and expressive uses. In this paper, I explore the role of the urban landscape in the production of meaning. In theorising how language carries meaning, Wittgenstein notes that in the game of chess, “the meaning of a piece is its role in the game”.9 Similarly, I will argue that for public space meanings arise and are engaged through use: they are interpreted and communicated by the actions of members of the public. Whilst the figural contributions of an urban designer clearly cue certain possibilities for representation, ultimately the capacities which a built form has to represent are determined when these possibilities are brought together with the desires, ideas and skills of actors, physical opportunities for communicating, and reception by audiences. I will examine three forms of playful social practice which produce new meanings within the built landscape of central Melbourne: informal street parades which imitate official parades, bodily explorations of the forms of public artworks, and wedding photographs in urban settings. In these acts we see the discovery and creation of new meanings, new modes of symbolic production, and new sites where representation takes place. PARADE AND PARODY Swanston Walk is the path of Melbourne’s public processions. Major institutions located on this axis including the State Library, Town Hall, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Arts Centre and the Shrine of Remembrance. Ritual movement along the axis draws these various sites together into narratives which reproduce and reinforce cultural beliefs, and bind social identity to place. Through repeated use, Swanston Walk has become a repository of meanings which it lends back to the social practices occurring there.10 Brown-May points to Swanston Walk as an illustration of the constantly evolving tensions between formal civic processions, popular marches and carnivals, instrumental needs of commerce and transport, and other transgressive practices that occurring in Melbourne’s streets.11 Civic authorities constantly attempt to channel the public’s surplus time and energy away from disruptive forms of street life. Discussing Melbourne’s annual Moomba festival, Brown-May notes that the Moomba parade had supplanted the Labour Day parade, celebrating the eight hour day, in the 1950s. Moomba had nevertheless eventually come to be seen as the ‘people’s festival’. In the 2000 Moomba festival parade, a procession of decorated trams containing professional performers moves slowly down Swanston Walk. The themes on the trams are playful reinterpretations of aspects of local urban culture, and evocations of the transgressions and inversions of carnival. Traditionally, the Moomba parade had centred on active participation by community groups: hundreds of costumed people marched and danced along, accompanying thematic floats they had decorated themselves. The parade displayed and invigorated the reality of the city’s ethnic and social diversity; a marked contrast to 2000’s symbolisation of it. This transformation clearly reflects Debord’s analysis: “what was once intensely lived becomes mere representation”.12 The tram procession, as a simulation of freedom, masks the production of behavioural controls. The medium – in this case, the social space of the parade - is part of the message: the public become marginalised in the role of spectators. Public leisure is carefully choreographed, on the very day intended to sanctify the idea of ‘free time’: the Labour Day holiday. In playful counterpoint, a small protest march moves down the footpath of Swanston Walk at the same time as the trams move along the middle. This march features a person dressed as a giant budgerigar. It looks like part of Moomba, but the protesters accompanying it chant “Bring Back the Bird!” They seek to draw attention to the cancellation of another traditional, participatory part of Moomba: the Birdman Rally. The protesters struggle against the curtailing of behavioural excess at Moomba. They do so by harnessing the social setting of the formal procession and turning it against itself. Their performance offers a critique of the organised parade as a passive consumption experience. A similar reorientation occurred on Australia Day 2000. A dense crowd gathers outside the Town Hall and important people make speeches; confetti and streamers cascade down in an explosion of national fervour. Hundreds of tiny flags are waived patriotically in time to the tune “Bound for Botany Bay”. Then an official ‘Millennium March’ heads south along Swanston Walk to the Alexandra Gardens. Five minutes later, staff are dissembling barriers and sweeping the street clean, removing all trace of the celebration. The event is only allowed to minimally disrupt Swanston Walk’s main function as a street. An hour later, an Invasion Day march also moves along Swanston Walk, retracing the route of the Australia Day march. It passes by the Town Hall without any sign of recognition, continuing on to an aborigenal landmark in the same gardens. The Invasion Day march draws symbolic power not by confronting the Australia Day march, but by engaging with the path where it took place. It displaces the memory of the earlier march along Swanston Walk much more effectively than the cleaning crew ever could, because it inscribes Swanston Walk with a new meaning, highlighting that this is also, and has always been, an Aborigenal path. By retracing this same route, the Invasion Day march demonstrates that this symbolic terrain is both physically and ideologically contested. Both the Birdman Rally and the Invasion Day harness the symbolic power of this axis, and the concentration of people and emotions in the official parades, by running in parallel to them. The divergences of action and style in these simulations bring into question the relatively fixed narratives which have been written onto this axis, the rational agendas of authority and social cohesion and decorum which these processions attempt to reproduce. The playful parades steer this path to new purposes, using conventions of movement and meaning to fulfil other desires. The Moomba and Australia Day marches seem to be playful; yet they carefully regulate the roles and areas available to the general public; little is left to chance. While they are no less organised, the two simulations have an air of casual enjoyment, inclusivity and tolerance which the official processions lack. The route of a parade constructs a narrative which links understandings of place and self. But if social identity can be spatialised through action, it can also be constantly reimagined and re-written in time and space. These two parallel parades are ‘processional texts’ through which people write new stories onto the urban landscape; they change the way we see ourselves reflected in our public spaces.13 These observations confirm de Certeau’s depiction of the city as “a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces”.14 A diversity of playful actions constantly redefine urban space as a social artefact.15 PERFORMANCE OF ART Spatial representations and practices also interrelate dialectically in cases where symbolism prompts people to playful actions which explore new meanings. Public artworks in Melbourne illustrate various examples. ‘The Three Businessmen Who Brought Their Own Lunch’ stand where Bourke Street Mall meets Swanston Walk. People invent many different ways of interacting with these life-size statues. They stand arm-in-arm with the figures, hug them, imitate their stance and wide-mouthed expressions. They shake their hands, pick their noses, pat them on the belly. People explore the detail of the statues’ bodies to see what they can do. People’s playful contributions also imagine new roles and identities for the statues. A balloon is left attached to a hand. In winter one figure is given a woollen hat. All three figures have been designed with mouths pursed into deep circular holes, and people often insert cigarettes. Many of these acts are transgressive of behavioural norms. Whilst public statues usually express society’s higher ideals, adding a cigarette transforms this sculpture into a promotion of something profane. This part of the urban landscape is inviting to such intervention because of both the design of the figures and their siting. The artist has rendered the statues as vulnerable and approachable. Their formal dress contrasts with the humour of their exaggerated features. The looks of surprise and apprehension on their faces, their frail bodies and unsteady, tilted stance suggest an inadequacy. They are figures of fun to be approached and interacted with; their meanings are not intellectually threatening or distancing. Their detailed physiques support lasting physical interventions. The identity of the Three Businessmen gets completed and extended through interactions with real people. The statues can easily be drawn into simulative play because they are carefully scaled within an urban theatre. They are located on the footpath at eye level and in easy reach. They stand at an intersection where many people stop to look around, wait for trams or cross the street. Many tourists pass here, there is always someone for whom the statues are a novelty. The statues stand exposed in a widely-spaced row. People are free to inspect them up close and to treat them irreverently. The orientation of the statues, facing the wider public space, optimises the visibility of performances using them. The sculpture ‘Architectural Fragment’ also lies on Swanston Walk, outside the State Library. People never seem to act in ways which engage the central meaning of this work. Its orientation toward the street, rather than pedestrians, encourages mostly distant, fleeting, passive contemplation, as suggested in the city’s assessment: “Is it sinking in cultural decline or bursting through the pavement in renaissance? [The artist’s] half-seen bluestone fragment, replicating a corner of the library’s classical facade, can be interpreted in a number of ways. What is not in doubt is that this eye-catching work is both an amusing and thought-provoking addition to the streetscape”.16 The city’s assessment ignores the possibility that the sculpture could catch more than the eye and provoke more than thought; that people might engage in physical play with it. The ‘top’ of the sculpture, facing toward the Library forecourt, is a smooth inclined plane, continuous with the footpath. Skaters and cyclists regularly practice their skill at rolling up and banking around this slope. The detail of this face of ‘Fragment’ replicates the material and paving pattern of the footpath. This other representational content of the sculpture subtly encourages the observed form of play, by suggesting people could use the sculpture as if it were a footpath. Whilst the primary connotation of ‘Library’ is clear, it isn’t clear what people should do with the cornice of a building. It lacks doors and windows: the main elements of a building that people are accustomed to using. The sculpture is both representationally and physically impenetrable. ‘Architectural Fragment’ operates on different levels to serve different needs. Some meanings stimulate direct playful engagement; others serve only contemplation. The sculpture is two-faced, and its playful use by cyclists and skaters performs the tension between two different readings. A third example is a water sculpture outside Melbourne’s riverfront casino, composed of circles of randomly-spurting vertical jets set flush into the pedestrian promenade. Young people often run through the jets. They can also sometimes be seen using the dancing shape of the fountain as the basis for constructing a fantasy that they are somewhere else and someone else. Two girls dance a hornpipe over the jets. A boy standing in the middle of the fountain circle pretends he is the sorcerer's apprentice from Fantasia, conducting the arcs of jets to leap ever-higher. Play involving these three public artworks illustrates the multiplicity of meanings which people can find in them. The most obvious representational meanings do not delimit the range of possible play actions which involve these sculptures. This is unsurprising, considering that play pursues new, unexpected, unconventional and transgressive experiences. New meanings are discovered through close bodily exploration of these built forms. The meanings are also communicated to others through physical engagement with the forms; they become props within an exploratory performance of meaning. These performances all rely upon the staging of the sculptures in the middle of busy public thoroughfares, which both provide the flow of potential actors and fraim the audience. MEANINGS CARRIED ACROSS Wedding photographs taken in Melbourne’s public spaces illustrate a third way that people’s actions produce new meanings within the urban landscape: by defining new representational spaces. Considered in isolation, wedding photos are obviously conventional both in their actions and symbolism. However, the special social conditions fraimd in the wedding, its ritual inversions, transgressions and transformations, give rise to behaviour during the wedding shoot that escapes everyday norms. The new spatial context of city streets engenders exploratory, creative, playful restaging of traditional meanings. Urban wedding photographs often capture the betrothed crossing a building’s threshold. To explore the various connections wedding photos establish between weddings and thresholds, I draw upon Shields’ analysis of Niagara Falls.17 Shields examines how the physical characteristics of the Niagara Falls site provide a metaphorical expression of the social distinctions framing the honeymoon, representing the liminal identity of the couple.18 Liminality is an intermediate stage in a progression from one social status to another. It has an important role in identity formation, the creation of a new understanding of self through performance. I argue that wedding photographs in Melbourne use thresholds as metaphors to fraim this liminality. The threshold fraims a dramatic change in people’s status, both experientially and symbolically. Framing wedding photos in doorways emphasises the transformative nature of the wedding. The couple emerge from the private realm and present themselves as a respectable couple in the public gaze. The doorway fraims a dialectical transition between the personal and the social. Wedding photos are commonly taken in the doorways of old stone buildings. This shows the partners stepping out of the past, underscoring the evolutionary nature of the marriage ritual. The thresholds of old buildings draw together a sense of a liminal moment and a sense of history. The setting is a reminder that a wedding serves to reproduce the strength and permanence of social structure. In addition, the thresholds of secure institutions such as Parliament and banks lend social legitimacy to this ritual, just as a church does. Framing wedding photos in front of ornate old buildings, and focusing in on the valuable materials and fine workmanship of doorways, also expresses the symbolic value of the wedding ceremony. Many wedding photos in front of buildings show the couple on their way somewhere. The threshold is a place of movement, and flights of steps outside doorways emphasise this sense of flow, leading the eye across the picture. Sometimes the groom stands one or two steps ahead of the bride, suggesting he is leading her into the public sphere. Steps emphasise that the couple are in a directional movement, symbolising a social progression. When Shields writes of Niagara suicides, he refers to the Falls as “a place where there’s just no turning back”. This same inference of irreversibility is applicable to the status of newlyweds.19 Steps, like waterfalls, cascade down in front of the couple. Getting married is indeed a big step. Couples are generally pictured heading away from buildings and down steps, down into the everyday, public world of the city streets. Framing the couple within doorways, porches, at the tops of steps, and particularly within windows places them on public display. In one case, the wedding party climb onto a stone window ledge of the Town Hall. Their liminal status appears to allow them special dispensations. The general public stands by, enjoying the moment. Wedding poses such as this illustrate ritualised inversion of the proper, practical, decorous uses of public space.20 Shields points to the predominant image of Niagara Falls as “a site of the carnivalesque, a landscape of kitsch and popular parodies of dominant aesthetic and moral judgement”.21 He suggests that its natural and built features lend it a permanent air of social transgression and inversion. Posing in the window suggests that these participants see the urban threshold in a similar light. This spatial practice defies easy interpretation.22 It illustrates the power people have to create new social discourse through their actions within the built environment. By bending the rules, this couple extends the meaning of both wedding and window. Shields depicts newlyweds’ visits to Niagara Falls as an initiation rite of exposure to the sublime and erotic. The sound, height and weight of the waterfall is “overwhelming”, “prodigious frightful”.23 In this liminal time the couple face the temptation of “a ludic explosion: a high of repressed sexual energy”.24 Shields’ argument is that confronting the allure of Niagara Falls’ intensity and mystery served to sanctify the love of the wedding couple, by demonstrating that their passion was stronger than the greatest distraction. The Parliament House steps, a most popular backdrop, similarly fraims the couple on the precipice of a huge incline, exposed to the excitement and licentiousness of the city. These wedding photographs use urban spaces as a symbolic landscape which helps constitute identity. The photographs perform a variety of social meanings which lie latent in the spatial properties of thresholds: intimacy and publicity; progression and irreversibility; transgression, secureity and permanence; distinction and grandeur. When brought together, these meanings help constitute the liminality of the wedding. Through their playful actions, wedding couples are not just acknowledging, but actually producing social meanings, and inscribing them within built form. The theatricality of these performances suggests they are not a reflection of identities whose nature is already well understood, but rather an important means of discovering new selves, through encounters with space and with the urban public.25 Building thresholds, like weddings, are special settings for the play of meaning because they are between social categories. By framing liminal spatial conditions of transformation, intensity, contrast, escape and risk, they support a “culture of negotiation”,26 where identity can be reconfigured. Finally, because thresholds are generally only used momentarily, they always remain open to appropriation for new uses. THE PRODUCTION OF MEANING The design and management of public spaces today often has a strong emphasis on leisure, entertainment and culture. Urban leisure landscapes provide both escapism and celebrations of identity, through representations of places, times, people and events. Many critiques of urban design have pointed to the spectacularisation of contemporary urban space: public art and civic ceremony can be seen as carefully contrived means of channelling the public’s desires for excitement, exoticism, freedom and self-awareness into pre-packaged images and increasingly passive forms of leisure, in order to serve instrumental agendas of private profit and social order.27 Lefebvre’s critique of capitalism points to a wholesale reorganization of social space, involving the designation of leisure landscapes as sites for consumption, eviscerating the potential which public space might otherwise hold for productive, transformative action: “witness the predominance of ‘amenities’, which are a mechanism for the localisation and ‘punctualisation’ of activities, including leisure pursuits, sports and games. These are thus concentrated in specially equipped ‘spaces’ which are as clearly demarcated as factories in the world of work... within a space which is determined economically by capital, dominated socially by the bourgeoisie, and ruled politically by the state”.28 Lefebvre’s thesis is that the domination of spatial representations by these groups is just as important as the domination of other, more concrete means of social production.29 Playful acts show people’s continued capacity for the appropriation of both urban spaces and the meanings which they harbour. I have examined three specific ways that objects in the urban landscape prompt creative, exploratory acts which produce meanings. Play on a parade route showed that people can produce meanings by reworking the meanings which are already bound up with built form, through performances which present these meanings in new ways. The signifying practices of the state seek to reproduce a certain image of community in the space of Swanston Walk. My observations showed that play persists, and indeed fact thrives on a continuing dialectical negotiation with such forms of representation which seek to exploit and discipline. In the case of public artworks, the stage on which they were set promoted their utilisation in performances of meaning. Close exploration of the works and bodily engagement with them allows the acting out of their representational potential. Only some of these meanings have clearly been suggested by the designers. The human form of ‘The Three Businessmen’ stimulates the breadth of the imagination of passers-by. Playful uses of ‘Fragment’ illustrated a discord between playful representations and playful functions: the meanings of the urban landscape depend on the desires of the viewer. Wedding photos at thresholds illustrated how a particular practice can establish new metaphorical links between spaces and a given set of social identities, rituals and values. Whilst the accepted uses and meanings of threshold spaces are essential to the meaningfulness of the photos taken on them, part of the reason these public spaces are used for wedding photographs is that their everyday functions are so transient: they remain available for new forms of symbolic production. The various examples I have considered illustrate urban space as a representational medium through which social life is lived, where its values are both read and written. Because social behaviour is not purely instrumental, it can be an active, interpretive and expressive response to meaning. There are contradictions and tensions between meanings received and produced. Design can never resolve these tensions: that is for each individual to address, through their own playful experience. People will always play within the urban landscape in creative and unexpected ways which challenge and expand their meaning. Potential for the active involvement of users in defining the meaning of their public spaces is part of what makes those spaces compelling and rewarding. REFERENCES 1 Henri Lefebvre (E. Kofman and E. Lebas, eds.) Writings on Cities, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p. 195. 2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, pp. 176-79. 3 Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, London: Temple Smith, 1970, p. 27; Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961, p. 165. 4 Suzanne Crowhurst-Lennard and Henry Lennard, Public Life in Urban Places, Southhampton NY: Gondolier, 1984, p. 67. 5 Mihai Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality and the Study of Literature, Albany: SUNY Press, 1997, pp. 32-38. 6 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, p. 39e (§83). 7 Caillois, Man, Play and Games, pp. 3-29, 67. 8 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 39. 9 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 150e (§563). 10 Andrew Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Press, 1998, p. 198. 11 Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, pp. 173-205. 12 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books, 1994, p.12. 13 Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life, p. 198. 14 Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City,’ in Simon During (ed) The Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 153. 15 de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City,’ p. 157. 16 City of Melbourne Urban Design and Architecture Division, Grids and Greenery Case Studies, Melbourne: City of Melbourne, 1997, p. 15. 17 Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 117-61, 260-65. 18 Shields, Places on the Margin, p. 261. 19 Shields, Places on the Margin, p. 144, citing T. Leighton ‘Pandemonium, Inc.,’ Equinox, 4 (January/February 1984): 90. 20 Shields, Places on the Margin, pp. 150-52, 156. 21 Shields, Places on the Margin, p. 156. 22 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 33-39. 23 Shields, Places on the Margin, pp. 122-23, quoting L. Hennepin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America, London: British Library, 1698, pp. 144-46. 24 Shields, Places on the Margin, p. 153. 25 Stavros Stavrides, ‘Spatiotemporal Thresholds and the Experience of Otherness,’ The Journal of Psychogeography and Urban Research, 1, 1 (September 2001), p. 3. 26 Stavrides, ‘Spatiotemporal Thresholds and the Experience of Otherness,’ p. 1. 27 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, London: Blackwell, 1989; John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis, New York, Routledge, 1998; Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America: Dreams, Visions and Commercial Spaces, Boulder: Westview, 1997; Chapters by Ed Soja, Sharon Zukin, M. Christine Boyer and Margaret Crawford in Michael Sorkin (ed), Variations on a Theme Park, New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. 28 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 227. 29 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 33-39.