City As Playground

For thousands of years, cities have served as the gathering places where humans have sought protection, experienced exploitation, taken risks, developed innovations, and met despair. Nowhere else on earth have hope and death, love, and spite, promise and catastrophe more closely comingled than in the city. We've run toward, escaped from, navigated through, circumvented, and hidden ourselves within the human city-for both good and for ill. All too often our rapidly urbanizing world is...
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For thousands of years, cities have served as the gathering places where humans have sought protection, experienced exploitation, taken risks, developed innovations, and met despair. Nowhere else on earth have hope and death, love, and spite, promise and catastrophe more closely comingled than in the city. We've run toward, escaped from, navigated through, circumvented, and hidden ourselves within the human city-for both good and for ill. All too often our rapidly urbanizing world is referred to as "the urban problem," a dynamic that only fuels inequity, environmental degradation, and the fragmenting of community cohesion. Questions loom: Is the city an accident or a necessary evil? Should we seize it, conquer it, grit our teeth and bear it? Escape it for a faraway post in some idyllic pastoral landscape, exchanging the din of car alarms for the companionable chirping of crickets? All of these possibilities depend on what metaphor you use to tell the story of cities. For over 45 years, leaders from a global movement called Leadership Foundations, working collaboratively on the toughest issues facing our world's cities, have decided to embrace a metaphor that allows for hope, innovation, creativity, and collaboration: We see the city as a playground rather than a battleground. This idea is more than just a poetic means to help us frame collaborative action in a city or community, but it can actually change the way we see and act collectively. In this anthology, academics, practitioners, thought leaders, theologians, and others engage with the idea of the "city as a playground." After examining the idea with 45+ world class thinkers, this collection features 19 essays and conversations reflecting on a different aspect of the metaphor. The essays provide a common vision for all of us that that encourages collective and collaborative action, reimagining and reshaping the way people think about cities and the people in them not as problems to be solved but as vessels for God's plan for humanity.