Ruins of Electric Train Turned into Terribly Cool Amusement Park in Lima

I’ve talked about the role of play in urban economic development before. I really have no idea what economic impact this project will have. In fact, this is surely more of a reaction to waste and an effort to combat decay rather than economic development (especially given Basurama’s aims). No matter the economics, how fantastic is this? You see it and the lightbulb goes on. It works on so many levels.

Ruins of Electric Train Turned into Terribly Cool Amusement Park in Lima (Photos).

This is the work of well known Spanish group Basurama, which has turned the ruins of an abandoned project for an electric train in Lima, Peru, into an amusement park.

It’s one of Lima’s most unusual spaces: a set of structures that were going to be the railways of an electric train. In 1986, the project was dropped and the construction was left as-it-was.

For years, these concrete columns and pass ways ‘adorned’ Lima’s landscape with no purpose, until this February.

Spanish group Basurama, known for projects like the ‘You are what you drop’ installation, thought this was an amazing place to make an urban intervention and came up with an amusement park.

The Ghost Train park features amazing bright colors and games made with recycled materials such as car tires, a canopy line, swings and climbing structures. All free of charge for kids, young people, and adults.

Is this the fancy-pants sort of technology that I usually talk about here? Nope. But what these people have accomplished says a great deal about the inter-relationship of humans, play, technology, and the cityscape.

Simple as it may be, this technology is put to excellent use. There’s probably a certain irony here in that the much more advanced technology of the never-completed transit system has become an amusement park (by no means Disney World, of course — maybe a very large playground better characterizes this development).

The land use jumps out at me here. This tract of land is essentially unusable for anything other than an elevated transit system (save for, perhaps, urban farming filling the strip with crops). Yet, this amusement park clearly works in this space. Perhaps play-oriented developments could help address a variety of problems in urban environments.

(via TreeHugger)