A blog post from Anna Tudos, one of the recipients of the Binks Hub 2022 scholarships and a graduate of the MScR Health Humanities and Arts programme at the University of Edinburgh.
It’s a very simple and swift movement. It’s done in a couple of seconds, but its effect and the adrenaline it brings lasts much longer. It starts with the minimal metal climbing structure. It used to be blue but now there’s only some chipped paint left. Its raw, rust-coloured brown metal flesh is revealed. But it doesn’t leave a mark on your clothes. It’s a cool and hard surface. There’s a cold feeling as you put your leg over the bar and it settles behind your knee. Then comes the first challenging part: you have to pull yourself up. When you are sitting comfortably on the bar you feel wobbly, out of balance, but you try and look confident and grab the bar with your hands too. Big deep breath. In the couple seconds of hesitation before you lean backwards and jump off the bars, you admire your surroundings in this little island of play: the green grass, the concrete football field, the rug beaters by the windows of the ground floor flats. Thump, you land. Dizzy.
Scratching the paint off the metal bars
Growing up, these open yards populated by metal bar playground structures represented free play for me. I loved filling up the void between the plain structures with my imagination, pretending the bars were the outlines of a building, or trees in a jungle. I spent most of my afternoons roaming my neighbourhood with other local kids, without a mobile phone or a care in the world. The immense freedom of that time; the backwards swing from the bar, the friends I made, the bodily experience of being able to take risks safely. These are the things that prompted me to explore the interconnected relations of place, play, and health.
Playing the city
Travelling forward in time, growing urbanisation and societal change seem to have worsened provisions for play. In 2024, over half of the global population lives in cities. As Tim Gill, the British prophet of child-friendly cities asserts, growing traffic transformed the public nature of streets into risk-laden environments, while the high density of homes led to a decrease in open public spaces. Growing commercialisation, poor policy implementation and austerity further contribute to the shrinking of these spaces. Even when play is considered in planning, it is often segregated and fenced in, contained in an adult concept of the playground. Urban playgrounds across the world often remain standardised, restrictive, unimaginative, and are more reflective of the adult need to contain children rather than considering children and young people’s own play wants and needs. Therefore, my main research questions centred around what playable public space beyond playgrounds might mean to young people.
Playgrounds or playable spaces?
I see playable spaces as multi-purpose, freely accessible urban spaces, such as squares, pedestrianised streets, vacant lots, green areas or basketball courts − but really they can be any place. They integrate the potential for play into public space more widely and make it accessible to a wider range of the public, not just young people. They become different things at different times, sometimes only available temporarily, such as school yards, car parks or marketplaces. Reiner Hildrebrandt-Stramann identified five pedagogical reasons for playful spaces: sensory experience, taking ownership of the environment, identity formation, healthy lifestyle, and freedom of physical movement. As their use is always negotiated with all user groups, ‘playful spaces’ contrast with Henri Lefebvre’s ‘technocratic spaces’, spaces that are strictly controlled by a specific group of elites as well as the controlled nature of modern childhood.
Where you play matters
Artist Francis Alÿs has been building Children’s Games, his collection of video scenes of children at play around the world, since 1999. The videos show children playing both organised games and engaging in loose play. They highlight the universal and unifying nature of play and games, but the collection also highlights the differences in everyday lived experiences and affordances of public space.
Children’s play is spatially and culturally bound, and young people’s access to play opportunities is strongly influenced by race, class, gender and socially constructed differences. Families with a higher income can navigate challenges such as expensive extracurricular activities or low provision of playgrounds more easily, while lower income families are often pushed into marginal urban areas, further contributing to children’s declining and unequal access to play spaces.
In a tiny room full of young boys between 12-16 years old in the Govanhill area of Glasgow, I observe how they draw a clear line between the gentrified areas marked by expensive coffee shops (“A coffee is like 5 pounds!”) and the places they inhabit locally. On the simple, hand-drawn, messy map, they feel confident to mark the fast-food joints where they always meet, the abandoned building they explored (“We were literally bored on Halloween!”) and Queen’s Park, which has “good football pitches but you have to walk 20 minutes”. These are all places they use for play, albeit differently than we might imagine. While we are busy working away on the map, on the other side of the room the others are making DIY pin-hole cameras out of mango juice cans. We will install these makeshift cameras together next week at places they marked on the map. In another session, the films were scanned and placed back on the map, creating a trail.
Playable spaces in Govanhill – according to young people
The resulting analogue photos show places that held importance for the young boys when they considered playable spaces. They agreed upon these spaces together while crafting, mapping, collaging, with additional comments from the non-participants around. The bus stop just outside the window was added after a water pistol fight that some researchers may have found to be an obstacle or a disturbance − for me, it was important data. This free-flowing methodology is in line with the principles of play-based research that promotes the mix of structured and unstructured (play) activities for capturing organically emerging data.
Some of the identified locations were captured in the participants’ images:
The healing power of playable spaces
The young people made it clear that they enjoy the ludic qualities of public space more widely than the possibilities offered by playgrounds. Multiple parks were selected, but no playground made the list. When they play, they simply hang out with friends and play physical games such as football. As they explore their neighbourhoods through play, they take part in continuous world-conceptualisation, expanding the circles around their school and home, and gradually making their image of the world more and more complex. In Govanhill, a high degree of spatial mobility equipped participants with the confidence to reappropriate public space for play and create their own intimate geographies. This, however, is paired with typical constraints on playful spaces such as low play provision, faulty equipment, busy traffic, as well as concerns for safety and feeling judged. The visual narratives created confirmed Thomson & Philo’s (2004) assertion that children prefer to play in informal spaces, away from the adult gaze. The artefacts also point out that for young people, especially those from low-income backgrounds, physical outdoor places are the main sites for developing social bonds, engaging in physical activity, and forming an identity while growing up.
On the 17th of January 2024, Scotland passed a Bill that incorporates the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into Scottish law. With this act, children’s rights, such as a right to ‘rest, leisure, play, recreational activities, cultural life and the arts’ (UNICEF 2013), became enforceable. How public authorities fulfil their ‘Compatibility Duties’ and plan in accordance of those rights will be especially important when it comes to the direct environment where children and young people spend their time.
The author would like to thank participants, the Govanhill Baths Community Trust and dissertation supervisor Dr. Emma Davidson for the invaluable help with her research. The resulting photo trail was featured in the 2023 Govanhill International Festival, supported by the Culture Collective project by Creative Scotland.
To find out more, visit Anna’s website.
