Children’s Dragon: Disrupting Air Pollution, Creating Playgrounds

The Children’s Dragon is designed to disrupt air pollution caused by cars in London. According to the London Atmospheric Emission Inventory, 2 million Londoners are living in areas with toxic air, including 400,000 children. In face of government inaction, this proposal aims to give young people a ‘manual and plan’ to reclaim clean air by taking back their streets from motor vehicles. The proposal is a landscape machine in the form of a dragon - salvaged from construction equipment, logistical transport and old cars across London - along with instructions on how to reuse the materials to make playgrounds. The machine moves along the streets breaking up the ground to create adventure playgrounds. Children are the core of the project. The landscape architecture project includes instructions on how to build the landscape machine, how to operate it and how to remake the streets for people. Using smartphone applications children direct the dragon along the streets, moving, grinding, impacting, churning, ripping, and unmaking the vehicular street and producing a playground of debris, mounds, puddles, ponds and trees. As the dragon is worn-out, broken through its own destructive process, it finally becomes part of the new playscape.

  < The studio brief was focused on designing for direct action to advance ecological justice and urban equity >