On September 6, 2024, Typhoon Yagi swept through Haikou. While the storm caused disruptions across the city, our community-built Playground without Walls survived completely intact. How did simple materials like rope, tape, and wire withstand a Category 17 typhoon? Beyond engineering, it was the collaboration, creativity, and resilience of our team and local children that made this possible.

This article was initially framed around Playground Without Walls as a case study. It proposes a systemic structural hypothesis: if children’s physical activity and play can be reimagined as a form of public energy production—then could play itself become a basis for reconfiguring infrastructural logics, mechanisms of benefit-sharing, and even ethics of care?

Where play meets clean energy in a 70,000 m² commercial plaza. In Haikou’s Haiken Plaza, HappyPower’s kinetic installations transform jumping, swinging, and racing into renewable energy—revitalizing urban space with joy, movement, and measurable ESG impact.

When a typhoon plunged rural Haikou into darkness, children kept laughing on a powerless playground. That moment lit a question in our...