Touristic Connections and Reflections in Platanias, Crete

The project investigates how an urban incubator, capable of altering the homogeneous spatial character of mass tourism in Crete, can emerge through unexpected correlations between different types of play and suburban fragments.

All in all, the dominance of mass tourism and its homogeneity in Northern Crete are mostly based on a multiplicity of identities and therefore options that this region has to offer. If you miss your home, you will definitely find a piece of it there, at the American diner, the sushi place or the Scandinavian bar. But there, you will always have to return as a tourist: to consume and to have fun. Responding to the current condition of entertainment, we introduce the concepts of play and playfulness as tools for understanding, analyzing and partially reconstructing the aforementioned Disney’s "Theme Park". French sociologist, Roger Caillois, analyzes four types of play -competition (agôn), chance (alea), simulation (mimicry), and vertigo (ilinix)- showing us how the dominant narratives of a place can be bypassed through playfulness, how the relations between possibility and limit can be redefined. Thus, as behaviors and meanings in cities slip, in other words are always "at play", so can designing processes respectively be redefined to include the non-functional, the fleeting and the uncertain. Therefore, through unexpected correlations between types of play and suburban fragments, a new intermittent spatial mechanism emerges that (para / re) interprets the existing conditions of the site. In intermediate spaces, which currently are in a latent state in terms of functions, forms, topographies and time, critical points and paths are redefined, structural elements and landscapes are framed, composing a playful design, which either organizes the symptomatic or reverses it dialectically.