Urban Resilience: A Study of Leftover Spaces and Play in Dense City Fabric

Abstract

Cities worldwide are urgently moving towards a more resilient and sustainable future. On this quest, national, regional, and local governments apply a combination of socio-spatial tools that regenerate and transform the city’s leftover spaces. There is an abundance of community gardens, cultural centers, and large-scale urban developments that, through programmed activities, reactivate underused spaces. The bearers of this process are professionals and individuals who have become aware of their actions in the contemporary urban landscape. This paper highlights possible design strategies that domesticate leftover spaces of diverse scales by injecting creative and playful programs, using Tokyo as a paradigmatic case study. More so than other global metropolises, the city represents a living laboratory for experimentation due to its compactness and the variety of urban patterns. Its leftover spaces demonstrate how play positively affects everyday life in public spaces, and how it enables extraordinary uses. A combination of ethnographic observations and spatial analysis is applied as a trans-disciplinary method. This approach allows an understanding of how people use playfulness to transform, appropriate, and utilize leftover spaces, which serves as guidance for urban planners and designers.