Building cities, building worlds: cities in play

From building blocks, to Lego kits, to the placing of hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane in the game of Monopoly, cities have always featured in children’s play. Often the largest, most desired and most expensive items in a toyline, playsets, playmats and model villages enable children to play as adults. They become architects and planners of secondary worlds to protect and destroy, that make the lounge room, the bedroom and the playroom urban topoi where the city itself becomes both an atmospheric and symbolic protagonist in play. Focussing on a sample of the toys that enable such theming of space to occur, this paper explores the representation and meaning of cities in play and the ideas of acquisition, urbanity and panopticism they carry with them. In this way it is argued that the cities of play function as allegories of postmodernity, toys that mobilize the old iconography of the city for new purposes.