In July 2026, we were selected for an intense month-long residency with Placemaking Europe, working in a municipality in Valencia devastated by the 2024 DANA floods.

The residency brought together a multidisciplinary team working across architecture, ecology, art and tactical urbanism: Mimi Dearing (UK), Estelle Jullian (Spain / France), Javier Molinero Domingo (Spain), Ximena Fuentes (Colombia) and Francesco Caneschi (Italy).

Our task was to transform an outdoor public space of around 1,000 m² into a temporary playground and climate shelter, creating new spaces for shade, rest, play and community use. Get It Done director and artist Mimi Dearing led the artistic direction of the site, developing nature-activated artworks, playful and gamified murals, and shade structures alongside the wider team.

Untouched for almost two years, the site was still heavily damaged by the floods. We were working outdoors in temperatures reaching 40ºC, in Spanish, with just four weeks to design and build everything. But the biggest challenge was the context itself: working in the aftermath of a climate disaster, with a community where trauma was still raw and where sensitivity, trust and meaningful collaboration were essential.

Rather than starting again, we worked with what was already there. Damaged and overlooked structures became the starting point for new uses, while planting, shade, colour and play began to shift how the space could be experienced. Our interventions were deliberately temporary and reversible, allowing us to test ideas quickly without fixing the future of the park in place.

Imagination and play was important to us all during the process. A siestódromo for resting and an umbrelarium providing mobile shade were created, alongside an aromatic garden planted with the community. Existing structures were reimagined for new kinds of play: the former skatepark became a vast sandpit inhabited by a dragon-serpent-table-slide, while the climbing pyramid was transformed into a hanging garden and den. The agora became juego infinito, an open-ended game inviting children to invent and reinvent their own ways to play, while shadows traced from elsewhere in the park came to inhabit the walls.

Children and local residents were part of the making through workshops, painting, planting and play. Their ideas shaped how parts of the site developed, while open-ended elements such as juego infinito were designed to keep changing after we left.

A month-long residency can't repair the effects of a climate disaster. Instead, the project asked what temporary, artist-led interventions can offer in its aftermath. How can we work quickly and carefully with what already exists? How can public space offer moments of joy alongside recovery? And how can play, creativity and collective making give people new reasons to gather, rest and spend time in a place again?

The finished playground doesn't erase what happened there. It is just one small layer in the site's ongoing life! A place for shade, silliness, imagination, rest and play, built from what survived and shaped with the people who will continue to use it.