Toward a green and playful city: understanding the social and political production of children's relational wellbeing in Barcelona
This paper examines recent urban green amenities directed toward children and families and develops a novel understanding of the ways in which children's socio-natures are made/unmade through such interventions. We employ ethnographic and archival analysis in two new parks – Poble Nou and N...
| Autores: | , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión aceptada para publicación |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2020 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Pompeu Fabra |
| Repositorio: | Repositorio Digital de la UPF |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/44406 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10230/44406 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102438 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Barcelona Children-Nature-Play Urban Environmental Equity Urban Political Ecology Relational Wellbeing Environmental Justice Gentrification |
| Sumario: | This paper examines recent urban green amenities directed toward children and families and develops a novel understanding of the ways in which children's socio-natures are made/unmade through such interventions. We employ ethnographic and archival analysis in two new parks – Poble Nou and Nou Barris – in Barcelona to examine how a particular type of children's wellbeing, what we call “relational wellbeing” is shaped through the production of green-playful-child-friendly amenities. We find that planning processes and visions, urban development goals, and neighbourhood socio-material structure moderate the effect of green-playful-child-friendly amenities on relational wellbeing by directing how these spaces are used. This finding points toward the importance – for equity concerns – of accounting for the social and political processes that generate relational wellbeing. These processes are often reflective of broader economic agendas of urban transformation designed to extract value, control space, and/or legitimize speculative urban development – while sometimes eroding local socio-material conditions – to the point of producing green spaces of privilege, exclusion and control. The connection between relational wellbeing and green-playful-child-friendly interventions highlights the importance, within the urban environmental equity literature, of reconceptualising pathways of wellbeing and health beyond questions of spatial distribution of natural areas and offers a new perspective for the development of future guidelines on green-playful-child-friendly space policies. |
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