The public playground paradox: ‘child’s joy’ or heterotopia of fear?

Abstract

Literature depicts children of the Global North withdrawing from public space to 'acceptable islands'. Driven by fears both of and for children, the public playgroundone such islandprovides clear-cut distinctions between childhood and adulthood. Extending this argument, this paper takes the original approach of theoretically framing the playground as a heterotopia of deviance, examiningfor the first timethree Greek public playground sites in relation to adjacent public space. Drawing on an ethnographic study in Athens, findings show fear to underpin surveillance, control and playground boundary porosity. Normative classification as 'children's space' discourages adult engagement. However, in a novel and significant finding, a paradoxical phenomenon sees the playground's presence simultaneously legitimizing playful behaviour in adjacent public space for children and adults. Extended playground play creates alternate orderings and negotiates norms and hierarchies, suggesting significant wider potential to reconceptualise playground-urban design for an intergenerational public realm.

Heterotopic Place-Making in Learning Environments: Children Living as Creative Citizens

“…Children manage to engage in different ways of inverting predetermined learning sites of the curriculum into new emplaced stories about knowledge building and belonging to a community. As Pitsikali & Parnell (2019) observe in playgrounds, we find that carefully staged layouts in the kindergarten, for fair participation and proper behaviors, collapse before children's stories of heterotopic place-making. In Kindergarten 2, a teacher displayed in the center of the classroom a wooden cube with yarn webs on the sides and a knitted shawl as a roof (see figure 8).…”

“…Inquiries contest the trivialization of young people's creative productions', mainly by foregrounding heterotopic place-making in their artwork (Atkinson, 2002(Atkinson, , 2012MacRae, 2011) and urban spaces (Kernan, 2010). Heterotopology also developed a strong stance in linking play and power distribution in diverse ECE learning environments like the classroom (Adlerstein, 2017;Wild, 2011), museums (Hackett, 2015;MacRae et al, 2018), playgrounds (Pitsikali & Parnell, 2019), learning corners in kindergartens (Taylor & Ricardson, 2005) and libraries (Radford et al, 2015). All this body of work agrees on showing the juxtaposition of segregated spaces of protected leisure and learning for children; at the same time, they operate as children's places of playful denunciation.…”

“…Through this heterotopic place-making, children challenge teacher-solely defined geographies in the kindergarten. Children recognize fortuitous conditions to transgress learning areas planned for them and build their own spatialization, rather than remaining utterly confined within staged limits (Pitsikali & Parnell, 2019) Figure 3 Kindergarten 4 Source: Own source, based on documentation #1173 and teaching-learning places. With these everyday heterotopias, two and three-year-old displace binarized pedagogies (adult or child-centered) and reconfigure, along with their teachers, the prescribed curricular citizenship.…”

“…In serendipitous spatial transgressions, children unfold their unique ways of knowing and engage with others as "more-than-human multimodal meaning makers" (Hackett & Rautio, 2019, p. 1024. Children dare pedagogical objects, intended affordances, and assumed functionalities (Pitsikali & Parnell, 2019), engaging in the process of growth and ongoingness where shared meanings of place emerge.…”

La Ciudadanía Vivida en El Jardín Infantil: Heterotopías Que Empoderan a La Primera Infancia Chilena

“…La indagación de los ambientes de aprendizaje en clave heterotopológica disputa la trivialización de las creaciones infantiles, destacando las resignificaciones que hacen de lo social, en el arte (MacRae, 2011) y en los espacios urbanos (Kernan, 2010). Asimismo, han establecido una fuerte relación entre juego y distribución de poder en las aulas de la educación inicial (Adlerstein, 2017;), en museos (Hackett, 2015;MacRae et al, 2018), parques de juego (Pitsikali & Parnell, 2019), y rincones de juego en los jardines infantiles (Taylor & Ricardson, 2005). En definitiva, toda la investigación concuerda en mostrar la yuxtaposición de espacios segregados para el juego y aprendizaje protegido de los niños, y lugares que operan como espacios de los niños para la denuncia lúdica.…”