Have a ball, slip-n-slide in ‘fun city’
“It must be 20 years since I went in a ball- pit — you stop wanting to go when you’re a teen, and you’re not allowed when you’re an adult. I’m not particularly into scary things and I don’t like being freaked out — I prefer happy stuff — which is why this Rainboworld game appealed.
“It’s fun, but you’re really focused and totally immersed for the 60 minutes. It’s nice to be a kid and escape reality.”
One activity that’s sure to make you feel like a kid is the slip-nslide.
According to U.S. company Slide the City, which brings its 1,000-ft inflatable slide to cities around the U.S. and Canada, adult-friendly slip-n-slides have been getting increasingly popular over the past three years.
Slide the City comes to North Vancouver on Car Free Day, August 22. The 6,000 tickets started at US$25 and sold out in a week.
A group called Slide the Main is now planning its own slip-nslide event for Main Street’s Car Free Day in 2016, but as a free community project rather than a commercial venture. They say they are inspired by grassroots projects where no one is paid, resources are crowdsourced and the whole enterprise becomes a community event.
Slide the Main was inspired by Luke Jerram, a U.K.-based visual artist who created Park and Slide — a 300-foot slip-n-slide down a street in Bristol in 2014 — as not only a place to play, but a piece of art. “There was an element of childhood fantasy — ‘ what if I could get to school by sliding down the street’ — but I also saw it as an architectural intervention. Our cities belong to their inhabitants and it’s up to us to decide to use them in different ways and imagine their futures. In performance art it’s often the performer who has the most interesting time. With Park and Slide, the participant became the performer,” Jerram says.
Jerram also saw the work as an exercise in community cooperation, with resources being crowdsourced, no profit being made, and free entry. More than 96,000 people entered a ballot to participate, and just 350 people received tickets. There were 65,000 spectators.
The Slide the Main group is now using Park and Slide as its template for next year. The first major hurdle is getting permission from the City of Vancouver.
So how likely are they to succeed?
With the standard caveats about proper, timely planning, safety, location, risk management and cost, city manager Penny Ballem says: “I think we are a fun city, and this kind of thing looks like fun.”