Production of the Lived Space through Playing in Urban Public Spaces Citizens’ Night Play in Bagh–Ferdows Open Space, Valiasr Street, Tehran

Introduction: Urban spaces have the capacity to spatially assemble different and even contradictory forces of the public sphere. The relationships between these contradictory forces, one dominated by power and the other exercised by people, lead citizens to take creative actions to change and transform the structure created in urban spaces. “How can the play of citizens in the public space of the city produce the lived space and what are the consequences?” is the main question of this research. In Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, space is in a process of dialectical relations between perceived space, conceived space and lived space. Power always tries to cover the merits of the perceived space by its forces and produces the conceived space. In contrast, citizens create the lived space through their creative actions. Citizens can choose the public space as their own playground (place of their play) and construct new situations beyond the formal situations of the space. The concept of play suggests an action in a specific time and place, through established rules built on the core of pleasure, which can also change the formal situation of the space by using the tools unusually and changing and reshaping the rules themselves. In this process, the nature of excitement flows through the game and makes the players return to it more and more. Therefore, the game is one of the creative actions that are able to create new orders and arrangements in the public space to construct the lived space.
Methods: The current research is based on an interpretive-critical paradigm, which is based on a phenomenological approach to explore the ways and reasons for which the citizens of Tehran choose to use the perceived space and find it. The method is a documentary study for theoretical concepts and identifying the components and configurations of the concepts. The field study in the open space at the entrance of Bagh-Ferdows includes in-depth observation by the researchers and open interviews with the citizens (the actors) who are actively present in the field and identified using the components and qualitative indicators found in the first step of the documentary study to achieve a novel interpretation of the pleasing actions as well as the critical ones.
Findings: Studies done in the case of this research show that citizens in urban spaces play in relation to one aother and the factors of that space in order to create their desired situations. This process of playing can change the territories of the space, foster the process of sociability, specify the demands of marginal groups and represent citizens’ resistance against the order of conceived space.
Concolusion: The results suggest that citizens can produce their living space in the urban public space through their games, as the process of creative playing changes the formal situation and realizes the game situation, which is similar to what people do in the production of living space through other actions. In the nightlife of the city, these actions use the possibilities of the lack of surveillance and construct the lived space. The socialization, the specification of the areas forbidden by the power (political - economic forces through the system and socio-cultural through the structure), the creation and exhibition of the desired identity by the citizens, the resistance to the formal order and the leisure are the consequences of the games observed and studied in the given public space.