City planners are turning up the fun with audaciously imaginative attempts to improve urban environments and promote civic engagement.

Earlier this year thousands of people congregated on Park Street, one of the main thoroughfares in the city of Bristol in the UK. The event wasn’t the typical British flag-waving-and-bunting affair: they gathered to witness people hurtle face-first down a 95-metre waterslide. The Park and Slide project, which appeared overnight and remained for one day only, totally changed the character of this public space and imprinted an unforgettable image onto the collective memory.

Park and Slide was the brainchild of multidisciplinary artist Luke Jerram, who raised funds via Spacehive, a crowdfunding website for urban-based projects, to see his idea become a reality. Bristolians could enter a raffle to win tickets to ride the slide, and those lucky few became part of a larger artistic statement: by participating, these aquatic tobogganers were turned into performers, and a living centrepiece of the city.

Jerram is far from alone in his thinking. Many other projects in cities around the world are injecting moments of play into their built-up environments. The Rotten Apple project in New York, for instance, sees street furniture re-appropriated to make functional new items, such as a public chess game made from a piece of wood and chess pieces attached to a fire hydrant. At this year’s Milan Design Week, designers Claudia Dolbniak and Silvia Saure presented Beatspot, a whimsical project that allows passers-by to “play” a musical bench simply by sitting on it.

In Boston, Pulse of the City by George Zisiadis invites people to hold heart-shaped devices which convert their heartbeats into a grand symphony of public music. “In cities there’s so much happening around us, that it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening within us,” explains Zisiadis. “Amidst the chaotic rhythms of the city, I wanted to help pedestrians playfully reconnect with the rhythm of their bodies.”