Brinquedo e brincadeira: fabulações entre criança, cidade e urbanismo

Abstract

The research proposes to oppose two urban narratives from the relationship amongchildren, the city and urbanism: photographs of children playing on the streets of London by photographer Nigel Henderson, used by the architects Alison and Peter Smithson in grille for the Urban Reidentification Project during CIAM IX (1953) and Le Corbusier’s book Le Maternelles vous parlous: pour une pedagogie plus humaine, published in 1968. Narratives, participants at the same time in the recent history of modern urbanism, but each one belonging to a place a field of knowledge and to different time cuts. These narratives represent above all two important events within the field of Modern Urbanism: the end of CIAM with the emergence of Team X and the construction of the Unité d’Habitation from Marseille. Two images of thought (toy and play) are listed and used not as categories of analysis but in order to allow play and to shuffle similarities and differences between them, seeking to assume a critical historiographical construction about modern urbanism and it allows asking some questions: How are these stories told? What tools are used for it? Who tells them? Why and how do children appear? Is it possible to penetrate History - like the child in its play and worldly fables - and discover gaps that lead to fantastic and surprising journeys?