A Prefigurative Politics of Play in Public Places: Children Claim Their Democratic Right to the City Through Play

Abstract

Children have as much “right” to the city as adult citizens, yet they lose out in the urban spatial justice stakes. Built environments prioritizing motor vehicles, a default urban planning position that sees children as belonging in child-designated areas, and safety discourses, combine to restrict children’s presence and opportunities for play, rendering them out of place in public space. In this context, children’s everyday appropriations of public spaces for their “playful imaginings” can be seen as a reclamation of their democratic right to the city: a prefigurative politics of play enacted by citizen kids. In this article, we draw on data collected with 265 children in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, to consider how children’s playful practices challenge adult hegemony of the public domain and prefigure the possibilities of a more equal, child-friendly, and playful city.

Keywords

play prefigurative politics children’s rights urban public space

The increasing commercialization and privatization of public space (Engelen, Johal, Salento, & Williams, 2014) restricts citizens’ “right to the city” (Harvey, 2008; Lefebvre, 1968; Purcell, 2002), limiting civic access for adults and children alike. However, structures and practices that undergird contemporary Western cities marginalize children in particular (Fincher & Iveson, 2008). Urban spaces are typically designed to reflect adult values (Churchman, 2003; Thomson & Philo, 2004), and social, legal, and physical controls restrict children’s use of public space (Woolley, 2017). Their freedom to independently access and play in their neighborhoods has markedly declined over the decades, and they have been increasingly confined to home, school, and child-specific spaces.

Children are underrepresented in the use of urban space (Woolley, Hazelwood, & Simkins, 2011). They are losing out in the spatial justice stakes (Soja, 2010). As citizens (Haywood, 2012; Larkins, 2014), children have a right to the city (Carroll, Witten, & Stewart, 2017), yet they are often seen as out of place in the public spaces of the city (Freeman & Tranter, 2011; Karsten, 2005; Kearns & Collins, 2006; Kinoshita, 2009; Matthews, 1995; Valentine, 1996), including its streets. A default planning position largely confines provision for children’s play to child-designated areas such as parks, playgrounds, and sports fields (Freeman & Tranter, 2011). Formerly sites for play, city streets have essentially been transformed into adult-only spaces (Karsten, 2005). In addition, open spaces constructed specifically for children can be of limited play and experiential value (Woolley, 2017).

When children have been asked what would make their city a good place for them, having places to play and meet with their friends have been universal responses (Carroll, Witten, Kearns, & Donovan, 2015; Chawla, 2002; O’Brien, 2003). This has been so whether the children were of primary school age (Thomson & Philo, 2004) or teenagers (Matthews, Limb, & Taylor, 2000; Valentine, 1996). Yet safe and welcoming spaces in cities for children to play, explore, or simply hang out are often scarce. In addition, children are increasingly surveilled, supervised, and controlled (Furedi, 1997; Prout, 2000), and their freedom of movement in the public domain is restricted by design, decree, and safety concerns—particularly traffic and stranger danger (Carroll et al., 2015; Carver, Timperio, & Crawford, 2008; Freeman & Tranter, 2011; Karsten, 2005; Shaw et al., 2013; Skår & Krogh, 2009).

Research from a range of academic fields highlights the importance of access to the public domain and free play (as opposed to play activities controlled and supervised by adults) for children’s well-being (Alexander, Frohlich, & Fusco, 2012). There is a shared belief among experts that free play is an integral component of learning and child development—that is, it is important for children’s cognitive, physical, and social development; the formation of a healthy sense of identity and belonging; and for their later health as adults (Christensen, 2003; Gray, 2011; Loebach & Gilliland, 2016; Woolley, Spencer, Dunn, & Rowley, 1999). During free play children learn to overcome fears, solve problems, take control of their own lives, and make friends. Lack of access to places to play creates “significant challenges” for children’s well-being and healthy development (Loebach & Gilliland, 2016; Woolley, 2017).

Despite an overall decline in children’s presence in the city, some children continue to play and hang out anywhere and everywhere including the street. In doing so, they challenge positions and identities conferred on them by adults (e.g., Valentine’s [1996] archetypes of “angels” in need of protection or “devils” requiring containment) and utilise “adult” public space for play, subverting adult-coded purposes and bringing into being “alternative imaginings of space” (Lester, 2010, p. 3; Kearns, Carroll, Asiasiga, & Witten, 2016). In doing so, they engage in the politics of childhood (Kallio & Hakli, 2011).

Children as Citizens and Political Agents

Children’s rights as citizens are enshrined in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (United Nations, 1989), including their right to protection, their right to be included in decisions about matters of importance to them, and their right to play (Davey & Lundy, 2011). Prout (2000) and other commentators have highlighted tensions between the acknowledgement of children’s rights to protection on the one hand and the acknowledgement of their individual agency/self-realization on the other. All too often children’s rights are couched in terms of the right to protection and to preparation “for their future as adult citizens” (Fincher & Iveson, 2008, p. 109).

Concepts of citizenship—and what might constitute children’s citizenship—differ (Fincher & Iveson, 2008; Haywood, 2012; Jans, 2004; Larkins, 2014; Thomas & Percy-Smith, 2010). Jans (2004) categorizes citizenship variously as an “identity,” as a “state” (with specific rights), and as a “practice.” Thomas and Percy-Smith (2010) refer to the “dynamic process” of participation inherent in the latter. While children’s rights are recognized through the identity and state of citizenship, their citizenship is expressed through the dynamic process of participation—whether through engagement with formal political structures and processes or in their mundane embodied practices—to benefit “their own lives and their communities, and create a better future” (Thomas & Percy-Smith, 2010, p. 3).

Children are readily recognized as political actors when they participate in formal political structures such as the youth parliaments, councils, and advisory groups, which have proliferated since the widespread adoption of the UNCRC (Tisdall, Davis, & Gallagher, 2008), or are part of advocacy groups or protest movements (Percy-Smith & Burns, 2013; Shier, 2010). But they are also “political actors in their practices of everyday life.” As they interact with adults, peers, and their physical environments, their lived worlds are “potential fields of political action” (Kallio & Hakli, 2011, p. 100). Children’s everyday political acts include their play in the public domain—“their willingness to challenge positions and identities offered to them by adults [ . . . ] and abilities to negotiate and occupy unsupervised space” (Kallio & Hakli, 2011, p. 107).

Children’s propensity to play anywhere and everywhere challenges adult hegemony of the public realm. It also has the potential to prefigure a more equal, child-friendly, and playful city—a city with diverse affordances that invite play (Kyttä, 2002, 2004) and where children can feel safe and welcome, meet friends, and play.

Prefigurative Politics and Play

The notion of prefigurative politics—the term was coined by Carl Boggs in 1977 (Yates, 2015)—has been used to describe a wide range of political and social actions that have sought to embody, enact, and “prefigure” a desired future social order. These include feminist, indigenous rights and environmental movements, along with a variety of antihierarchical mobilizations (Jeffrey & Dyson, 2016), and attempts by adult citizen-activists to reshape urban space and reclaim their right to the city (Hou, 2010; Iveson, 2013). Prefiguration “forms part of a general understanding of politics as an instrument of social change” (Yates, 2015, p. 2). It seeks to model the future through a “politics of the act” (Trott, 2016, p. 266), implementing new and transformative ways of living, communicating and occupying space. Prefiguration may also extend beyond intentional social movements and established political networks and organizations to everyday practices, places, and settings (Cornish, Haaken, Moskovitz, & Jackson, 2016; Guerlain & Campbell, 2016; Williams, 2017). Cornish et al. (2016) invite us to “see emancipatory politics where we might not previously have seen them” (p. 123). Guerlain and Campbell’s (2016) analysis of a community garden project in East London is an instructive example: although the gardeners do not conceptualize their activities as political, their efforts are prefigurative, in that they “combat the multiple forms of deprivation that define their daily lives and, in the process, discover wider existential possibilities” (Cornish et al., 2016, p. 121). Similarly, children may not conceptualize their play as political. However, we consider mundane instances of children’s public play as potentially political and prefigurative in that they “enact in the present a future which is desired,” and entrain “new forms of sociality to prefigure or support the emergence of not yet knowable ‘better’ ways of living” (Cooper, 2016, p. 453)—in this instance, a fairer, more child-friendly and playful city.

In arguing for the prefigurative possibilities of children’s play, our focus is on free, or informal, play: “an activity engaged in for enjoyment and recreation . . . it is informal, spontaneous, and uses both body and mind” (Auckland Council, 2017c, Foreword). Free play is intrinsically motivated, pursued without external reward, and inspires imagination and creativity (Alexander et al., 2012). In addition, children’s free play involves “an intimate relationship or disposition to their immediate environments . . . a desire to disturb things, and to inject surprise into the mundane practicalities of everyday experiences” (Lester, 2010, p. 2). Children become creators and actors, transforming their environments. From children’s perspectives free play includes “hanging out” with friends—“‘having a laugh,’ chatting, gossiping and simply being in a place to see and be seen” (Thomson & Philo, 2004, p. 116), and also “just walking” (Horton, Christensen, Hadfield-Hill, & Kraftl, 2014). In two Canadian studies exploring children’s ideas of play, participants saw play as an end in itself, something fun and pleasurable (Alexander, Frolich, & Fusco, 2014); and almost anything or anywhere was an opportunity for play or to hang out with friends (Glenn, Knight, Holt, & Spence, 2012). In an earlier Scottish study, the “street” (which included, following Matthews et al., 2000, roads, alleyways, walkways, shopping areas, waste ground) trumped backyards and play parks as children’s preferred outdoor space for play and hanging out (Thomson & Philo, 2004).

Not only do children have a propensity for play, but they also, suggests Freeman (2017), have a propensity for happiness; and having fun is “happiness at its most evident” (Freeman, 2017, p. 90). Play, fun, and happiness are intertwined, and the spatial attributes of cities that promote play are likely to also be those that promote happiness—spaces that “support play and independence, access to other children and people, and safe environments” (Freeman, 2017, p. 94). Skår and Krogh (2009, p. 343), differentiating children’s spontaneous and self-initiated play from adult-controlled, planned, and organised activities, draw on Heidigger’s view of children’s play as a fundamental exploration of the environment, which is characterised by the “exploration of that which happens, and can be termed a ‘space’ of possibilities.”

Children’s prefigurative play points the way toward the possibility of a more playful, child-friendly city that promotes happiness and well-being. What is required is a shift from attempts to confine children’s play to a few child-specific spaces, to re-imagining streets, squares, and parks as sites for children as well as adults. This requires both conceptual and planning practice changes. In recent years, adult citizen-activists have moved to reclaim their democratic right to the city through everyday resistance, do-it-yourself urbanism and guerrilla urbanism, and insurgent citizenship movements (Hou, 2010; Iveson, 2013). While adult movements offer overt examples of prefigurative urban politics, which “critique the status quo” and suggest “radically democratic practices” for greater social justice (Cornish et al., 2016, p. 114), we argue that children’s play in public places can also be seen as a form of prefigurative politics, “opening up new possibilities of being, seeing and doing” (Guerlain & Campbell, 2016, p. 220).

Study Context

Auckland is New Zealand’s largest and fastest growing city. The population of 1.4 million—300,000 of them children—is expected to reach 2 million in the next two decades. City planners are striving to contain low-density urban sprawl and accommodate the larger part of the city’s future population in higher density housing (Auckland Council, 2012, 2017d). While stand-alone suburban houses with backyards remain the norm for families with children, increasing numbers of children are now living in apartments. Residential intensification profoundly affects children’s everyday lives and well-being, contracting private living and leisure space. This, coupled with child-blind urban planning (Randolph, 2006), is accelerating the loss of play space for children (Freeman & Tranter, 2011; Kearns & Collins, 2006). New Zealand signed the UNCRC in 1993, recognizing children as citizens with rights to participate in decisions about matters affecting them and their right to play. In 2010, the Children’s Commission questioned whether the country was meeting its obligations under the convention, noting a lack of accessible, safe public spaces for children to play (Children’s Commissioner, 2010). Eight years on, the concern is still valid.

Being out and about and playing in the public domain, once considered “a rite of passage of childhood” (Alexander et al., 2014), has decreased in New Zealand as elsewhere (Carroll et al., 2015). So has that other childhood “rite of passage”—walking to and from school (e.g., Ministry of Transport, 2009; Shaw et al., 2015). This has affected opportunities for free play as walking to and from school affords many opportunities for play along the way. The role of parental fear and societal safety discourses is clear. A 2015 survey of 2004 Auckland parents showed that while 91.5% believed that roaming independently in the neighborhood was good for children (because it helped them find their way around and allowed them to meet and play with other children), less than 50% believed that children younger than 13 years should be out and about without adult supervision if they were alone (or 11 years old, if with friends)—because of fears for their safety (Duncan & McPhee, 2015). In a subsequent 2017 Auckland Council survey of 2675 Auckland parents, 40% wanted their children to be able to play in suburban streets and close-to-home open space. At present only 23% allow this because of safety fears (Auckland Council, 2017a). Adult-supervised formal leisure activities for children are in many instances replacing informal play and “hanging out,” in Auckland as elsewhere (Carroll et al., 2015; Freeman & Tranter, 2011; Kearns & Collins, 2006). The 2017 survey identified that 77% of parents were in favor of the council introducing playful elements to the city (Auckland Council, 2017a).

Method

A total of 265 children aged 9 to 12 years living with their families in nine suburban and inner-city Auckland neighborhoods were recruited from local schools as part of a mixed-methods study exploring children’s independent mobility, physical activity levels, and neighborhood perceptions (see Oliver et al., 2011, for full methodological details). After seven days of collecting quantitative data (using accelerometers, global positioning systems, and self-report travel diaries), go-along walking interviews (Carpiano, 2009) were conducted with 140 of the children. Each child took a researcher or, in some instances, a trained young interviewer from a local school (aged 17-18 years) on a neighborhood walk, talking about where they went and what they liked to do. Parents were also interviewed about their neighborhood perceptions (Witten, Kearns, Carroll, Asiasiga, & Tava’e, 2013). Follow-up school-based focus groups with 32 of the suburban participants (see Oliver et al., 2014), and a similar number of inner-city participants (see Witten, Kearns, Carroll, & Asiasiga, 2017), further explored children’s neighborhood perceptions and play. All individual and focus group interviews were recorded, transcribed, and thematically analyzed.

Findings

Analyses of quantitative data and parent interviews previously reported on (Carroll et al., 2015; Witten et al., 2013; Witten et al., 2017) show that parental fears of traffic and “stranger danger” limited children’s ability to be out and about in the public realm, with less than half travelling unsupervised to and from school. However, unsupervised play on streets adjacent to their homes, and walking to the local dairy (convenience store) or a nearby friend’s home, remained common practices for many. The street (including pavements, verges, alleyways, car parks, shops, and malls), and stairwells and corridors in apartment buildings, were valued as play space. Children from lower socioeconomic neighborhoods were more likely to be independently out and about—and less likely to be involved in formal extra-curricular leisure and sporting activities—than children from higher socioeconomic neighborhoods. This supports Elsley’s (2004) contention that the street remains an important play space for poorer children in particular. A few children—with or without express parental permission—roamed widely in their neighborhoods and beyond.

Like Skår and Krogh (2009), we have taken a phenomenological approach in analyzing data from the go-along interviews and school-based focus groups, describing interactions between the children and the affordances (Kyttä, 2002) in their urban environments that invited play. It has not been the intention to either catalogue the types of games played (already done by researchers, e.g., Iona and Peter Opie, 1969, 1997) or quantify the numbers of children involved but rather to illustrate discrete examples of play that would be considered prefigurative. Our examples are organized into three sections, corresponding to three forms of children’s use of public city spaces, each carrying the potential to disrupt and reconfigure the dominant adult order of the public realm.

Deliberate Repurposing

Here, children actualize affordances around them (Kyttä, 2002), recruiting objects and spaces for their own “alternative imaginings.” They set about transforming and repurposing these spaces for play, disregarding—and subverting—primary, adult-coded purposes of streets, car parks, and corridors. The surfaces of footpaths and pavements became valued sites for ball games, riding bikes and scooters, and skateboarding (Woolley et al., 2011). A particularly smooth-surfaced road or pavement was valued for rollerblading, a kerb or irregularity in the pavement good for doing “tricks” on scooters or skateboards. These usages challenge the primary purpose of roads and pavements as efficient thoroughfares for pedestrian, automobile, and other through traffic.

Car parks, constructed for workers and shoppers’ cars, and integral to the commercial enterprise of the city, became courts for badminton and tennis and other ball games or spaces for bike riding, rollerblading, and scootering. Sometimes children played in between and around cars, or they waited until the workers or shoppers had gone home, leaving an open space for play.

A boy (10 years old) described learning to rollerblade in a neighborhood car park, weaving around parked cars.

Right next to my house is a Blank Electrical and there’s a car park, and my sister goes rollerblading there . . . [and] she taught me how to rollerblade.

Once workers had left in their cars, another car park with a high wall, adjacent to her apartment block, was described by a girl (11 years of age) as her favorite place to play and hang out with siblings and friends.

Once [in the weekend] we played from 10 o’clock, we had a break and then started playing again at 1 o’clock and we finished at about 6 o’clock.

Walls were no longer for privacy or demarcating private property but for climbing on or bouncing balls off. A girl spoke of a boundary wall in front of a house she passed on her way to school each day that she always climbed up on, walked along to the end of, and then jumped down from, because “it’s fun.” For one boy (10 years of age), any wall was an invitation to climb:

Ah, I only jump on walls and stuff like that if I’m with my friends and if I want to. Ah, I do it most times.

Manhole and inspection covers on city pavements, providing access to the underground services of the city, became triggers for playful action and reaction. One boy (12 years of age) explained the code: for instance, FH (fire hydrant) was “first hit” and WH (water hydrant) “whack me”; standing on a V (street valve) earned a vampire-like grip around the neck and a T (telephone equipment), a taser-like jab to either kidney (see examples in Figure 1) . Several children from the same inner-city school spoke of playing this particular game. The adult-coded function of these manhole and inspection covers was transformed by the children in their playful interactions as they walked to various destinations or hung out together on the street.

Figure 1.

Fire hydrant, also known as “first hit” and street valve, also known as “vampire.”

Children living in apartments co-opted access routes such as corridors, stairs and foyers, and service areas under stairwells as play spaces. They described playing soccer in corridors, tiggy on the stairs, and contained ball games in and under stairwells. In one instance, the space under a stairwell was popular for circling a hula hoop.

We play soccer in the hallways (boy, 10 years).

Under the stairs there is a big space [where] sometimes we play with a ball and sometimes with a hula hoop (girl, 10 years).

These playful appropriations did not go uncontested. The girl (12 years) who took the “PLEASE DO NOT PLAY IN COMMON AREA” photograph in Figure 2 lived in an inner-city high-rise apartment block:

We used to play hide and seek and tag in the corridor but then the manager had calls complaining about the noise. . . . Now there are signs on each floor telling us we can’t play there.

Figure 2.

Contesting children’s play.

Such signs discouraged children’s play but did not stop it.

Playful Presence

Here, children’s incidental play has the potential to disrupt adult purposes. Examples include the games that children played on the pavement as they walked to school and other destinations, clambering over fountains and other urban features, and climbing roadside trees. These playful activities were often opportunistic rather than deliberate, and yet they had similar prefigurative potential to subvert existing, adult meanings and purposes. On a go-along walking interview with one boy (10 years), we traversed a small green space providing a shortcut between two shopping blocks at a busy intersection. In the middle was a sculpture of large rocks, topped with a fountain. Oblivious to the flow of pedestrians, he clambered on to it. He always does, he says.

I climb up on a rock to see what I can see and sometimes I dance around. (He shows me.)

And then what?

Then I climb up on another rock and dance around.

His focus was not on getting from A to B but on the opportunities for fun and play along the way. These frequent after-school excursions in the shopping precinct were taken without parental knowledge or permission.

Many children spoke of the games they played while walking to school and other destinations. They ran, spun, and skipped; balanced on walls and kerbs; and avoided cracks and jumped over shadows.

On the way to school there’s these shadows and me and my brother used to have this thing we used to jump over, so we wouldn’t stick in the shadow. If a car would drive by there would be a shadow on the [footpath], so we had to jump over the shadow (boy, 10 years).

Yeah, and we have another thing where we don’t step on a crack (boy, 11 years).

When I walk home [from school] I just do turnarounds. I spin (girl, 9 years).

Boys in particular talked of play fighting as they walked.

I kind of play around with my friends. Ah, stuff like play fighting. Um, then that’s mostly it (boy, 11 years).

Some boys also acted out computer game scenarios, bringing virtual reality into their outdoor play.

Everyday afternoon I play Call of Duty in the computer, and at five till seven I play in the field. By myself, I’m imagining it. There’s tanks, me dying. And having another life again and again (boy, 10 years).

Trees lining streets, planted for shade and aesthetics, were especially inviting. Both girls and boys talked of climbing trees.

I like climbing trees . . . you get to see friends when you’re up in the trees (boy, 10 years).

I feel safe in the trees for some reason. Even though it’s high and I could get badly hurt from falling down, I just feel safe at the top of trees where it’s high (girl, 11 years).

Just Hanging Out

Alongside more imaginative forms of prefiguration, children also asserted their right to the city through conventionally using and hanging out in public places seen primarily as the domain of adults, such as streets and shopping malls. Streets provided opportunities to “walk and talk” with friends and to look at people, gardens, graffiti, shop displays, and cafes, just as they do for adults. Children also “just walked”—sometimes by themselves and at other times with friends. Several talked of walking around the block for “something to do.”

Sometimes if I’m really, really bored, I would just like go around the block, like this area for like fun (boy, 12 years).

I love looking in the shop windows cause they’ve always got different displays like in a month, every month . . . they’re like all themed . . . and they’ve got some cool and quirky shops here (girl, 11 years).

Shops were the most frequent destinations for children—apart from school—and the local dairy (or convenience store) their most favored one. Many of the children were allowed to go unaccompanied to their local dairy, and they often spoke of being on friendly terms with the shopkeepers (Carroll et al., 2015).

The dairy, the dairy. I go there lots . . . yeah (boy, 10 years).

Me and S go there quite a lot. We’re quite good friends with them, so, um, sometimes they give us free lollies (girl, 11 years).

The local mall was also a favourite haunt for hanging out.

It’s gangsta (boy, 10 years).

I go there three or four times every week (girl, 11 years).

Perhaps because our cohort were preteen, none of the children reported being hassled by storeowners or security guards (Matthews, 1995; Woolley et al., 2011).

Discussion

While the built environment, coupled with protectionist discourses of safety and risk (Witten et al., 2013), restricts children’s presence and play in the public domain, our findings highlight the nascent properties of play. There is always potential for it to break out anywhere and everywhere, prefiguring the playful potential of public spaces as it does so. As Woolley et al. (2011) note, children and young people use public space “in ways which were not imagined by the original designers” (p. 472), challenging adult norms and cultural forms.

In this article, we have looked beyond what might be easily recognizable as “politics” and those who might be most readily recognizable as “political actors” to what nevertheless carries the “potential for broader forms of social change” (Cornish et al., 2016, p. 120)—in this instance, how children’s play in public places might prefigure a more playful, child-friendly city. Like more overt political prefiguration, children’s play is “experimental and experiential” and children’s disturbances of the “adult” city entail the “occupation and re-composition of public spaces” (van de Sande, 2015, pp. 189-190). Through their play, children “rehearse their political selves as self-governing actors who are able to resist dominating power structures” (Kallio & Hakli, 2011, p. 100) and model a vision for the future through acts of play (Trott, 2016).

Children’s willful appropriation of public spaces and objects around them for their alternative imaginings can be seen as “deliberate repurposing”. Here, their active play subverted primary, “adult-coded” purposes of streets, corridors, and car parks. In other instances, children’s incidental play on the way to school and other destinations, and “playful presence,” had the potential to disrupt adult purposes. Alongside these more active forms of prefiguration, children also asserted their right to the city through “just hanging out” in public places seen primarily as the domain of adults, such as streets and shopping malls. These everyday appropriations of public spaces can be seen as a reclamation of children’s right to the city: a prefigurative politics of play, albeit nonreflexive (Cornish et al., 2016; Guerlain & Campbell, 2016), enacted by citizen-kids.

For children’s right to the city to be fully and formally actualized, they need adult-led processes and adult champions—that is, researchers, planners, designers, and legislators who recognize children’s right to play. Urban planning practice can be child blind and restrictive (Freeman & Tranter, 2011; Randolph, 2006; Woolley, 2017), with attempts to control children’s use of public space through design or by decree. An example here is skateboarding, where efforts are frequently made to confine it to specific areas in the community (e.g., skate parks) and to “design out" skateboarders from other areas (Woolley, 2017, p. 99). Sometimes signs also explicitly prohibit the use of skateboards, as they do other children’s play. In our own research, a participant described and photographed a sign attempting to ban children from playing in common areas in a high-rise apartment building (Figure 2). Such clashes can lead to a push and pull of rights, where adult/managerial enforcement of “no skateboarding” or “no playing” collides with children’s play.

There is a powerful prefigurative potential to children’s play at a point in time when the tide appears to be turning, and children’s right to the city recognized, at least in some jurisdictions. For instance, encouraged by the UNICEF’s Child Friendly Cities initiative (UNICEF, 2018), children are being included in the design of public space in some cities across the world (Fotel, 2009; Malone, 2015). There are a few nascent signs of this in Auckland. Planners and policymakers are beginning to look to children to explain—and to show—how spaces might be transformed for play. Dissemination of our research findings on children’s use and experience of Auckland neighborhoods (Carroll et al., 2015; Witten et al., 2013), coupled with a desire within Auckland Council to gain UNICEF child-friendly city status, led to the Council requesting a child-friendly audit of an inner-city square due for redevelopment. Through this audit process, children’s rights to access public space and their participation in public realm decision making were acknowledged and their ideas for a playful square incorporated into the final design (Auckland Council, 2017b). The initial design brief had not even considered children as potential users of the square. As a follow-on from this consultation, the authors are involved in facilitating two further co-design projects in collaboration with Auckland Council and the development of a co-design “tool kit” for planners. Auckland Council is also investigating ways some city car parks can double as “pop-up” play spaces. These nascent changes show the transformative possibilities of children’s irrepressible desire to play anywhere and everywhere.

Postscript

Donoff and Bridgeman (2017) note the “largely untapped potential for urban environments to act as play space for all.” Children’s playful practices in the public realm suggest possibilities for the creation of more playful, child-friendly cities. The authors note how our own perceptions of mundane elements of our urban environment have changed through observing and talking with children about their play in the public domain: street trees are sized up for their climbing potential, low walls might present balancing possibilities, and pavement surfaces and kerbs register as good for scooter riding and skateboarding—or not. And as we walk the city streets, the myriad manhole covers, big and small, round, oblong, and square—and hitherto largely unremarked—inevitably attract our gaze. They conjure up a whole world of play.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge all the children who contributed to this research. The research was funded by the Health Research Council (New Zealand), the Royal Society Te Apārangi- Marsden Fund, and the Massey University Research Fund.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Penelope Carroll

Author Biographies

Penelope Carroll is currently involved in studies investigating children’s well-being in cities and researching what enables the participation in community life and leisure activities of children and young people with mobility and sensory impairments. Her research interests include social policy, connections between housing, neighborhoods and health, community development, and child-friendly cities.

Octavia Calder-Dawe is currently collaborating on a project exploring how the built environment and social attitudes affect access, leisure, and inclusion in daily life for young people with mobility and sensory impairments. She is also undertaking participatory research with boys exploring gender and power in online communication. Her research is concerned with the rights and well-being of young people, particularly in relation to mental health, gender, and sexism.

Karen Witten is currently involved in exploring what enables the participation in community life and leisure activities of children and young people with mobility and sensory impairments. Her research interests center on interactions between the physical characteristics of neighborhoods and cities and the social relationships, health, and sustainability-related practices of the people living in them. Her recent studies investigate the meaning of social and recreational travel, neighborhood design determinants of walking and cycling, and exploring children’s and parents’ experiences of neighborhood environments.

Lanuola Asiasiga is currently involved in researching what enables the participation in community life and leisure activities of children and young people with mobility and sensory impairments. Her primary research interest is the well-being of Pasifika peoples, and most of her research projects have touched on some aspect of this. She has a strong interest in children’s research—including the participation of children in research.

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