Prefiguring the ‘city of care’: On ‘Radical Play’ as situated urban practice

At a time of widening urban inequalities, intersecting social and environmental crises and the erosion of collective life through the intensifying commodification of urban space, it becomes increasingly urgent to cultivate the relational and imaginative capacities needed to sustain more caring forms of urban living. This article introduces ‘Radical Play’ as a conceptual and methodological framework for prefiguring a city of care – one in which everyday practices of interdependence and collective responsibility are actively rehearsed as foundations for democratic urban life. Radical Play repositions play as a political and situated urban practice. Unlike instrumental uses of play in participatory planning, design or placemaking, it foregrounds play’s subversive and prefigurative capacity for reappropriating the urban as common space. Drawing on play studies, critical urban theory and political philosophy, the article argues that Radical Play mobilises the liminal ‘as if’ condition of play – through its embodied, intersubjective and affective qualities – to suspend normative behaviours and rehearse alternative modes of collective existence. In doing so, it extends prefigurative politics into the everyday, framing relationality and care as practices of collective world making. These ideas are examined through two student-led, community-based interventions in Pamplona, Spain, which reappropriated balconies as relational spaces for cooperation and urban solidarity. Together, these projects trace a shift from play as event to play as infrastructure, revealing both the potential and fragility of Radical Play. Their value lies in their pedagogical force: demonstrating how alternative forms of urban living are learned through situated practice and collective rehearsal, rather than imagined as abstract ideals.