Paper short abstract:

Climate Community Street Play brings global warming to the streets. In reference to Donna Haraway, we’re playing with the trouble, to design participatory formats of public engagement that recognize multispecies, interconnected support networks and shared urban habitats dealing with climate change.

Paper long abstract:

Global warming is confronting people around the world with extreme weather conditions and devastating impacts, such as flooding, cloudbursts, storms, or prolonged droughts. But it is not only such dramatic events that keep drawing attention to the reality of this crisis. Quieter and steadily intensifying effects, such as heat stress are forcing communities to prepare for the consequences of rising temperatures. It therefore needs a greater awareness for the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman entities living in these climate conditions together, as well as speculative perspectives in imagining shared future neighborhoods.

Climate Community Street Play is developed by Myriel Milicevic and Ruttikorn Vuttikorn and brought to life with students, practitioners and scholars of diverse disciplines and backgrounds. Bringing the socio-environmental dimension of challenged urban communities together with the tradition of street games, players engage with local risks while creating awareness for surprising alliances within their communities. Iterations have been developed for Berlin, Germany, as well as Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand. Although these cities are facing different challenges, they all tell stories of people and other species coping with the impacts. The games present different scenarios, from fighting for street trees in droughts, turning heat islands into cool spaces, rescuing animals in floods, or finding the path to biodiverse spots as pollinators.

In our contribution we will talk about the potential of play, imagination, and a positive approach to difference that are needed to care for multispecies environments by documenting the processes and games that have taken place so far.