On the concourse in between King's Cross and St Pancras train stations in London, a giant birdcage, 9 metres tall, holds an adult-sized swing. The work of French artist and architect, Jaques Rival, ‘Identified Flying Object’ has proved popular since its installation in 2011. Serving no purpose other than to invite gleeful participation and spectatorship, the swing exemplifies the increasing playfulness of contemporary cities – an upward curve of the ludic pendulum, if you will. Such objects and trajectories fascinate academic and architect Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, whose book City of Play is impressively international in scope and worthy of extended perusal.

Drawing on an array of theorists – Norbert Elias, Johan Huizinga (of Homo Ludens fame) and Le Corbusier among them – this is a sophisticated work and clearly a labour of love. Not only has the author visited a dizzying number of cities on different continents in seeking out his examples, but also alongside the analyses he offers scores of exquisite hand-drawn illustrations and intriguing photographs to buttress his arguments. What value do the insights of an architect have for urban historians? In insisting on paying close attention to the physical layout of cities, to their topography, to their planned and unplanned spaces, to their ludic potential and to the materiality of their fabric, Pérez de Arce offers a helpful reminder to ground our writing with as much pinpoint precision as we can muster, and to account carefully for local, regional and international differences. Coupled with such calls for intimate engagement, architects’ predilections to survey cities from above also allow the author to chart some macro-level shifts – that with the advent of nineteenth-century modernity, for instance, a wholesale substitution of hard for soft ground surfaces occurred, and that the process of suburbanization tended to strip out playful activities from city centres and domesticate them in private gardens and interior residential spaces.

A stated aim of City of Play is to disclose the effect – argued to be substantial – of play upon architecture and visions for city living. To address this, Pérez de Arce first considers ‘the field’ and then ‘the player’, ranging widely. Town squares, parks, sporting arenas, rooftops, alleyways and the interior layout of buildings (among many other examples) fall under scrutiny in Part One, before attention turns in Part Two to the expansive categories of the athlete, the child and the citizen as case-studies of ideal types inhabiting and manipulating urban space. Following Huizinga, playfulness is argued to be far from the exclusive concern of the young and to have shaped city spaces since pre-modern times. Beyond these central contentions, however, clearly identifiable narrative threads are hard to discern. City of Play reads instead like an unpacking of the mind of its author, and in this activity accounting for change sometimes gets lost. Nor is the utility of the various kinds of source material evaluated, or all of the relevant secondary scholarship brought to bear (perhaps unsurprising when there are so many locations under assessment).

The style of this book also will not be for everyone. Paragraphs are sometimes just a single sentence in length, the logic of paragraph transitions is often unclear (lending the work something of the feel of a catalogue) and, annoyingly, far from every reference in the main text features in the bibliography. A commendation on the reverse of City of Play describes it as offering both a ‘prospectus view’ and a ‘kaleidoscopic narrative’: well-judged comments that denote weaknesses as well as strengths in my estimation. Pérez de Arce certainly offers a fascinating and at times a captivating architectural history, but much less so the urban history of recreation and leisure that readers of this journal might reasonably expect from the book's subtitle. Nonetheless, despite these substantive caveats, City of Play is well worth dipping into for the numerous nuggets, little-known writings and original insights that it yields.