Los códigos visuales asociados al deporte: una interpretación del espacio public (The Visual Codes Associated to Sport: an Interpretation of Public Space)

The article assumes that, where social networks can develop from the practice of sport in public spaces, there is a better chance of maintaining said ‘quality of life’ in the respective spaces and for those that use them.

The specific focus of the paper implements a socially responsive study, afforded through design led research (mapable to ‘discover’ and ‘define’ stages), and realised through close collaboration with social scientists, sport scientists and urban professionals and local participants, on ethnographic research and interviews. The research reveals that details or elements within given spaces, which to many people may appear as mundane or disconnected, are communicative and emotive triggers. It is through these details in public spaces that visual codes can be interpreted and defined as key ‘ingredients’ sought by different sporting activities and their associated social networks.

It locates these codes as factors of spatial affordance – the action possibilities permitted to us by our interpretation of a space. It is largely via these affordances that the practice of sport has to be facilitated or encouraged, for a social network to be able to develop in public space. In order to engage the interest of the potential sports-players, public sporting facilities most traditionally employ conventions for sporting activities, involving (a) the purposeful specification of spaces with particular three dimensional objects: (e.g. the ‘goal’), and/or (b) two dimensional frontiers (e.g. the ‘pitch’) – codes which often delimit spaces to being for specifc interpretation and use by particular sports. However, this paper considers how the spatial elements required to play a given sport can become intuitively abstracted (as interpretations by the player) from all kinds of elements found in public spaces. In these cases, institutionally-defined (‘formal’) public sporting facilities can become less popular than participant-defined or collaboratively-defined (‘informal’) spaces, where the participants (or ‘users’, in design terms) can express some of their own expertise and experience as the space can become more flexible to their own versions of different activities, often offering added value to a given environment and more diverse user groups.

Consequently, the ‘visual codes’ emitted by a space play an important part in determining if sport is ‘played’ there or not, and if so - which type(s) and between who. Designers, architects, planners and place managers need to learn from these scenarios in order to anticipate and facilitate possible ranges of activity within highly demanded city spaces, towards provisions promote growth of social networks without promoting social conflict.