Project Description

In Pakistan, the most vibrant parts of urban life rarely happen in planned places. They happen in the gaps. On sidewalks, along boundary walls, at the edge of parks, beneath trees, beside traffic signals: life spills into the leftover spaces of the city. Every morning, street vendors begin a quiet migration. Tea sellers, fruit vendors, toy hawkers, snack carts, each pushes a small economy through the streets. Their workplaces are temporary and mobile, assembled daily and dismantled by night. They do not occupy space permanently; they borrow it for survival.

Yet this daily act of survival is often labeled as encroachment. Sidewalks narrow. Roads become congested. Vendors are pushed away in the name of order, even though they provide affordable goods, social interaction, and economic opportunity to the neighborhood. By evening, the city changes hands. As vendors leave, another group arrives. Streets transform into playgrounds. Cricket stumps appear against compound walls. Chalk lines mark hopscotch courts. Streetlights become goalposts. Laughter competes with car horns as children claim the asphalt as their only open space. This daily ritual carries a hidden danger. Many accidents occur because the street becomes the only available playground. The city calls one activity encroachment. The other, a safety risk.

Yet both are symptoms of the same absence:

A lack of designed everyday communal space.

It is not the absence of urban voids that defines our cities, but their silence. Parks and open plots exist, yet they remain open but inactive, accessible yet uninviting, present yet disconnected from daily life. Without activities that generate footfall and community engagement, these spaces fail to become part of everyday routines. While streets overflow with vendors and children, parks remain empty because nothing within them invites life to stay. The city has space but not the right kind of space.

Street vendors and children share a common condition: improvisation. One creates a workplace, the other a playground. Both adapt to whatever space they find, are repeatedly displaced, and bring life and community to the city.

This project imagines a small piece of architecture that lives two lives in a day. Placed in underused parks, the 10m³ module becomes a home for livelihood in the morning and a playful landmark after sunset. By day, it supports the everyday rhythm of street vendors, bringing commerce, conversation and movement into spaces that often remain empty. By night, once the shutters close, the same object invites children to gather, climb, touch and invent their own games, pulling play away from busy streets and into safer ground.

Guided by the Future Resilience lens, the module acts as shared civic infrastructure: compact, portable and easy to replicate across neighborhood parks. By hosting vendors, the park becomes a community market. By attracting children, the market becomes a community.

A small volume becomes a bridge between livelihood and play, between safety and vibrancy, between the city we have and the city we need. Instead of designing separate spaces for separate problems, the project creates a single structure that serves both.