Azzurra Cox at the Atlantic‘s City Lab website wrote recently about design students and a nonprofit theater group that “created a ‘park-in-a-cart’ to serve the fast-growing city of El Alto, Bolivia.
“One bright July afternoon in El Alto, Bolivia, a playground paraded across a busy intersection.
“In the country’s second-largest city—and, at approximately 13,500 feet, the highest major urban settlement in the world—desfiles are a frequent occurrence, even a way of life. …
“But this parade was different. Dodging a stream of minibuses, a few individuals wearing carnivalesque costumes tugged two colorful metal carts—one resembling an astroturf bee, the other an elephant—to the center of a nearby plaza.
“Working in the harsh sunlight, they set about disassembling the carts. The shell of the bee became a series of green mounds, while the elephant trunk revealed itself as a slide.
“In a matter of minutes a playground was born, and the sounds of children playing rippled across the plaza. …
“In this dense city, driven by commerce at all scales, streets, sidewalks, and communal spaces are often transformed into informal markets, where vendors and minibuses compete for real estate. While this competition brings vitality, it requires novel methods of occupying urban space for play.
“The pop-up playground aims to do just that. Over three summers, the International Design Clinic (IDC), a ‘guerrilla design’ collective, has collaborated with Teatro Trono to design and build a pair of mutable, movable playspaces …
“Toward the end of that July afternoon, the park collapsed its way back into the carts. As one mother convinced her five-year-old to take her last turn down the slide, she asked one of the designers where she could find the playground next. Megan Hoffman, who studied anthropology at Temple University, recalls a grandmother who offered the group a sleeve of crackers to express her gratitude.
“ ‘That day,’ Hoffman says, ‘our pop-up playground was a space of joy.’ ”
Photo: Megan Hoffman
The mobile park on parade in El Alto this summer. 
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