After a highly successful summer-long run in venues across Cork City, PlaySpaces comes to City Hall for Culture Night.

PlaySpaces is a multi-year participatory arts project demonstrating genuine child collaboration in civic design.

Beginning in early 2025 with creative workshops at St. Vincent’s Convent Primary School, Blackpool, children imagined child-only spaces through drawing, collage, storytelling and model-making.

The collaboration emerged from Cork Child Friendly City consultancy revealing children’s desire for spaces authentically designed for them. Led by artist Chris Finnegan in partnership with Cork Midsummer Festival, the project expanded in late 2025 to include three Múin Afterschool centres across Cork City, with accessibility consultation from the Crann Centre.

PlaySpaces demonstrates that participatory arts can fundamentally shift children’s relationship with public space and civic life – not through symbolic consultation but through sustained collaboration where young voices genuinely shape outcomes. A public trail of child-designed play spaces launched in summer 2026 across Cork Opera House, The Everyman, St. Peters, Cork City Library and The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion.

A Cork Midsummer Festival production, the project is supported by the Arts Council’s Arts in Early Learning and Childcare Scheme and Cork City Council through Creative Communities Scheme. With support from Sample Studios.