Play as if it is your city
Inês Guilherme
Guilherme Silva
Coletivo Ephémero is a young, architecture-based research team created by Guilherme Silva, Inês Guilherme and Paula Freitas with a focus on dwelling, pedagogies and place-activation. We met during our architecture master degree and since then we have collaborated in different projects, sharing the interest in discussing and investigating relevant issues inherent to our contemporary mode of living.
Starting as individual interests, in the first moment, we were quick to agree that we need to collaborate and build a parallel and ongoing research that represents the reality web of transdisciplinary, that we also feel the need to stick to. In a way, creating this collective seemed like a natural and obvious step for us.
The basis of our practice is trying to work as much as possible on site, with the locals for the local, in an immersive approach to absorb all the information, concerns, and energies that cohabit in that place.
Through this methodology, we aim to question conventional norms presenting new ways of thinking and designing urbanity, as a bridge between the professionals and the community.
As our practice evolves, we hope to develop a critical material that can contribute to solving the intrinsic issues of our fields of research, with the aim of integrating different publications and exhibitions, as well as collaborating through lectures and workshops.
In the face of the climate crisis, demographic fragility, and the ongoing transformation of our cities through gentrification, tourism, and capital-driven development, urban life is becoming increasingly impersonal, fragmented, and short-lived. In response, a shift has emerged in recent years within the urban planning discourse. As traditional planning methods reach their limits, so-called "urban interventions" have opened new possibilities - an invitation to reimagine urban coexistence through participation and shared responsibility. The deeper the planning crisis becomes, the more vital it is to adopt an actor-centred approach that recognises the role of civil society as active agents rather than passive recipients.
This project starts from a simple premise: the city belongs to those who inhabit and care for it. Play as if it is your city is an attentive exercise, an effort to observe and document traces of everyday life as they become part of public space. It maps informal, spontaneous appropriations of the city, interventions that do not go through design processes, but emerge from necessity, care, and local presence. These are deeply site-specific acts that reflect the lived realities and routines of urban dwellers.
The strength of the project lies in showing that belonging does not require large-scale planning or high-cost design. Small gestures, such as a bench added under a tree, a plant placed at a corner, or children turning a courtyard into a football pitch, can foster community and transform public space. It highlights time, attention, and care as essential urban tools too often overlooked.
By giving visibility to this quiet, anonymous form of urbanism already unfolding, the project suggests a future where design begins with noticing. It argues that play is not leisure alone, but a practice of presence and an ethic of care. The city is not just infrastructure, but a shared, lived space shaped by those who truly inhabit it.