Blessings and Curses

    I have opened Pandora's Box.

    I have finally found the niche in all of my research RIGHT before the preliminary proposal, and it's shifting my research question in all sorts of directions I did not have planned.

    The "ludic city" is designed to address "essential human desire for play, creative expression, exploration, adventure, and the freedom to determine the course or ones own life". Ludic urban interventions encourage spontaneous and undirected playfulness. There is an incredible amount of literature and research related to this, such as: The Ludic City by Quentin Stevens; Toward a Ludic Architecture: The Space of Play and Games by Steffen Walz; numerous papers by Gabrielle M. Donoff; traces of "the ludic" in the Situationist Movement; and contemporary notions of "the ludic" in the works of Dutch architect and artist Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys. I am overwhelmed with the amount of information that directly applies to this question I have been trying to ask for the past seven weeks that I have scrounged up merely days before the preliminary presentation.

    Despite this overload of data, one thing that I have noticed while skimming as many resources as I can, is that "the ludic city" and ludic urban interventions remains very "unnatural", as in not applying to materials like water and vegetation. So, the foundation of my question remains the same, but the method or how I am asking my question may start shifting.

    I will either choose as my preliminary proposal inquiry: How can planting design perform as a ludic component in an urban play network? or my previous question How can planting design in urban places increase playful behavior between adults and the outdoor built environment? 

    However, I want to look more in to the specific cities, parks, and examples the literature describes to have ludic components or notions, and perhaps utilize those as case studies. This idea needs to be workshopped a little more, but I wonder if it is possible to connect ludic design with post-industrial parks, especially Duisburg-Nord, and have that act as a possible case study to better understand how planting design can be implemented as a ludic urban intervention.