Autor: The Urban Conga

The Urban Conga is a multidisciplinary design studio made up of a diverse group of creatives based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work is focused on sparking community activity and social interaction through open-ended play. They achieve this by working with communities to create inclusive, engaging, and site-specific work that evokes creativity, exploration, and free-choice learning within the built environment. Their work explores the idea of a “Playable City” as an ecosystem of playable opportunities intertwined within the existing urban infrastructure that doesn’t just disrupt our daily lives but adds to it. They investigate how play can begin to exist in everyday spaces and encourage people to think about these spaces that could become PLAYces: like sidewalks, bus stops, street lights, park benches, or just the everyday spaces in-between. Exploring how these often once overlooked and underutilized situations can turn into stimulating creative outlets for communal connection.  They strive to use their work as a platform for creating a stronger sense of community within the space. Creating opportunities that bridge divides and begin to break inequities within the public and private realm by bringing people together through these moments of open-ended play. Through this work, they have collaborated with organizations, businesses, governments, and universities worldwide, delivering public art, urban interventions, playable products, development plans, and public policy recommendations.