The Playful Partnership

In middle-out strategies, cities do not only act supportively of bottom-up suggestions and initiatives, but as catalysts of a broader societal engagement, so that in a participatory and more empowering and enabling way, proposals and needs are catered for. The Municipality of Udine plays the role of social broker and mediator, facilitating networking among local stakeholders, and gently nudging their often idiosyncratic vision into a more coordinated, systematic and strategic framework.

City health diplomacy plays a crucial role in this process, negotiating different interests towards a common goal, thus also avoiding the silo syndrome.

The intersectoral participatory process is witnessed in Udine by the comprehensive programmes developed and co-created over the years, catalyzing and engaging a great number of different stakeholders. The whole-of-government, whole-of-society and health-in-all-policies approaches promoted by WHO within the Healthy Cities Movement was the inspiring principle. Results have contributed to the improvement of urban places, and to awareness about health, energy and sustainability. Programmes have been co-created by using playing as the main paradigm such as the Energy In Play annual fair.

1. Summer Blog: Waving in a Playful Summer 2018!!
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Associations from the private and public sector are engaged to co-design and raise awareness on energy efficiency, reducing CO2 emissions through initiatives in the main squares of the city. At our community centres, Move your minds CamminaMenti , university, public library, municipal Toy Library, non-profit and for-profit organizations offer music therapy, laughter yoga, anti-ageing games and creative thinking for combating cognitive decline and solitude.

Pi Day begins a little before Energy at school, healthy eating, food waste programmes: All these initiatives engage more than people per year.

In a time of colliding megatrends such as urbanisation, population ageing and climate change, cities are facing serious challenges, but also unique opportunities for achieving sustainability and enhancing the well-being and resilience of citizens. City administrations need to become more and more mediators and facilitators, improving their capacity to leverage on city health diplomacy and social innovation and to turn into health and environmental brokers.

This practice can greatly contribute to achieving this goal since it develops new innovative approaches to core issues such as health, resilience and sustainability. In this sense, it can be a significant step towards providing an answer to the above challenges, and towards the development of a more resilient, safe, sustainable, inclusive and equitable urban future.

Cities need new tools to face an increasingly complex society, such as the lengthening of generations strains, the increase of non-communicable chronic diseases, the need to tackle solitude and isolation, especially among older people, to promote social inclusion and contrasting health inequities. Many European cities have important gaming traditions which are yet unexploited. Besides the innovative and positive place-making paradigm based on games, dialogue and enjoyable participation, the good practice could be of great interest to many of them.

I like it Embedded video for The playful paradigm. For communities, it can be the key to building engagement and ownership in our shared public spaces or to addressing some of our most critical challenges.

We will have keynote speakers, lightning talks, hands-on activities and action plan time. We will convene 25 teams of individuals from neighborhoods, boroughs, and cities from across southwest Pennsylvania and West Virginia to:. And, how to define a vision, mission, purpose, and goals in the creation of your own playful community.

get involved

Learn more about transforming public spaces into community play and playful learning spaces such as hands on installations of playful learning modules. Develop action plans for infusing play in your community. How do we design communities with intention to address these challenges?

All while considering issues of equity, transportation, safety, play across the ages, community input and more. Register your team now! Each team may have members.

URBACT in your country

All team members should be from a particular neighborhood or region and members should represent different organizations or skill sets. People to consider for inclusion in your team could be: Team registrations will be given priority over individual registrations. Please note that there is a limit to teams based within Allegheny County to help balance team participation from the wider county region and northern West Virginia.

Registration is limited to the first 25 teams. When registering as a team, please send an email to Yu-Ling Cheng at conference tryingtogether. Registration preference will be given to team registrations first but if space and demand allows, we will create a team of individual registrations.