The interactive installation emerged from a desire to challenge the rigidity of controlled public spaces and redefine urban design ideals that valorize cleanliness, order, and sterility. Rooted in the exploration of ‘loose spaces,’ the installation invites the public to recognize that even the most familiar, tightly controlled environments hold latent possibilities for urban looseness, interaction, and play by drawing inspiration from the messier, more improvised, and often demeaned public spaces of cities in the Global South. These spaces - dynamic, layered, and shaped by everyday negotiations - embody a rich potential for sociability, informality, and collective authorship. The installation is both a visual provocation and a spatial suggestion, asking: What else could this place be? In doing so, it proposes a shift in how we value and design urban space - seeing potential in the “misuse” of public domains not as failure, but as a form of participatory urbanism that can loosen and humanize even the most rigid environments in developed contexts.

 

By live-projecting movement and activity from one site into another, the installation quite literally imprinted one urban context onto another, collapsing geographical and cultural distance through spontaneous and playful interaction. This overlap allows passersby to witness how a similar urban space was being animated elsewhere, sparking curiosity and subtle comparison. It aims to challenge expectations of public space and get passersby to advocate and demand for different ways of occupying, using, and engaging with streetscapes.