Playtime

“Ricreazione” in Italian means “playtime”, but in our project it also meant re-creating the conditions for an elementary school to have a playground. In 2015, ab-USO was invited by an architect to develop a project in the courtyard of an elementary school that had previously been used as a parking lot.

We organised a six-month participatory process with teachers, children, and parents and, eventually, a crowdfunding campaign to realise the project. Many unexpected suggestions came from the children, which led us to revise our initial design idea by following their lead. In the end, we built the project using the funds raised. This was probably the first tactical urbanism intervention in Florence.

The newspaper La Nazione wrote about it. Photography: Emma Verdelli, Enrico Tomassini