The project ‘Cidade que brinca’ is an educational platform based on playful activities whose objective is to build circuits, activities and outdoor games and thus make the city more human, walkable, healthy, safer and more joyful for everyone. It promotes interventions in the city’s public spaces always focusing on children and fun. Among these interventions there are playful circuits with games on sidewalks and urban facilities, taskforces to paint texts, cartoons and drawing from kids on façades of houses, stickers with the kids’ drawings to be placed on garbage cans, landscaping, etc.
In addition, IDIS – Institute for the Development of Social Investment – was hired to evaluate the project based on the built up indicators and consequently measure the impact of the project in the community. The goal of the project ‘Cidade que Brinca’ is to make Glicério the first neighborhood redesigned over the children’s perspective and therefore inspire other neighborhoods to do the same. Ultimately it is intended to be replicated all over São Paulo through a legislative named: Cidade Amiga das Crianças (“Children-Friendly City”).
Glicério is located in a rundown area full of old buildings and historical houses in which children live in extreme social vulnerability and violent environment. In this second phase of the project, the houses of Suiça Village and Estudantes Street will be painted in lively colors and will redefine the landscape of the region.
The project ‘Cidade que Brinca’, an arm of the main project ‘Criança fala’ (“Child speak”), is run by the NGO Cria Cidade (“Creates City”). The NGO is quite well structured and counts on heavyweight partners from private initiative, public organizations and leaders of several different sectors. It also has good relationship with journalists from mainstream media.
The project ‘Let’s Colour’ peers up with ‘Cidade que brinca’ to renew playing areas and add colors to São Paulo’s neighborhood.
Several streets of Glicério, a poor neighborhood in São Paulo’s center, were turned into sceneries named ‘narrativa brincante’ (“playing narrative”). Coral’s project ‘Let’s Colour’, in partnership with ‘Cidade que brinca’, which is headed by the NGO Cria Cidade, contributed not only by renewing playgrounds, but also by transforming the lives of entire families.
In this second phase of the project, the sources of inspiration were creatures and fantasy animals. Once again, the children of Glicério did not hesitate and in the last few weeks they set their imagination free and drew the residents of the world of dreams. Figures like Samhri, a two-tongued monster whose head is formed of geometric shapes, and Cochi, a good-hearted two-headed animal with eight arms whose body looks like an apple emerged from the kids’ beautiful minds.
To transform all the places in which the project ‘Cidade que brinca’ is present, Coral estimates that more than 600 liters of super varied shades of paint, such as blue, orange, green, purple and pink will be used, as well as painting tools (rollers, goggles, gloves, shirts, overalls).
“The project ‘Cidade que brinca’ dialogues extremely well with our mission, which is to add color to people’s lives and transform their homes and cities. And when the little ones are involved, our motivation is even greater,” says Marcelo Abreu, institutional marketing manager for AkzoNobel’s Decorative Paints business area and project leader of ‘Let’s Colour’.
Find out more about Coral in Brazil here.
