The City as a Playground: Rethinking Childhood Through Design

Notes from Holiday Homework, a LOAM exhibition at Method Delhi

What if the city itself became a playground—not through designated play areas, but through the spaces children encounter every day?

Reflecting on Holiday Homework by LOAM at Method Delhi, this piece explores how play can offer a different way of understanding and designing our cities. It looks beyond conventional playgrounds towards streets, courtyards, thresholds, neighbourhoods and overlooked urban spaces as places for curiosity, experimentation and collective imagination.

Rather than designing every interaction for children, the question becomes: how can we create conditions that allow children to decide how they want to play? Through open-ended materials, adaptable spaces, everyday objects and opportunities for exploration, children can become active participants in shaping their environments rather than simply users of spaces designed for them.

The City as a Playground reflects on play as a design method—one that can help us rethink ideas of autonomy, inclusion, participation and belonging, while asking what our cities might look like if children had a greater role in imagining them.