ICCP Conference paper 2012

Vibrant spaces: re-configuring adults providing play

Starting with Colin Wards assertion that children will play anywhere and with anything, this
presentation will challenge the notion of adults providing play. Underpinning this phrase are
numerous interconnected assumptions about play, space, adult and child that work collectively to
produce a particular form of relationship between these elements based on separation: children are
apart from the adult world and need specific attention and space to be a child-becoming-adult. It
assumes a dominance that not only positions children as subordinate but also by implication situates
adults as providers for and protectors of childrens separateness in the special spaces and
institutions of childhood.
Drawing on research and observations from adult designed spaces (schools, playwork settings,
museums) the presentation will consider how an alternative understanding of playing, as moments
in which the limits of the real world are temporarily set to one side, reveals other ways of producing
space/time and by doing so opens up the possibility of re-visioning ways of being adult and child.
Paying attention to such vibrant moments offers a chance to reconstitute the institutions of social
life as co-produced spaces where adults and children can simply get on and go on together.

Stuart Lester Senior Lecturer in Play and Playwork, University of Gloucestershire, UK

slester@glos.ac.uk
The University of Gloucestershire Post-Graduate Play and Playwork distance learning programme
provides a range of professional development modules for all those involved in supporting
time/space for childrens play. Full details are available at:
http://www.glos.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/plp/Pages/default.aspx

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Introduction
Along with the recognition that children play everywhere and with anything, which should stand as
the first thought for any adult involved in working to support childrens play, Colin Ward (1979:86)
tellingly observes that the provision that is made for their needs operates on one plane, but
children operate on another. It is this notion of separate planes between adult desire for children
and childrens desire for playing that this paper addresses.
The Conference title, Providing Play, could be seen as deliberately provocative, inviting a range of
challenges to the essentialist notion that somehow play can be provided. But the suspicion is that
there remains a strong feeling that somehow adults can and should provide play. At a superficial
level, this may seem like an exercise in semantics; what we intend by this phrase is not providing
play per se but rather making time/spaces available in which children can play. If that is the case,
then this paper has already served its purpose by raising this issue and calling for a more considered
use of language from providing play to providing play spaces.
But there is a deeper and more fundamental concern here that questions the common-sense
assumptions we make about play, space, childhood and by inference adulthood (recognising that
questions of what it may mean to be adult certainly do not figure as prominently as the gaze and
attention we bring to meanings of child). It is these interrelated themes that are critically
introduced and briefly explored here to so see what else might emerge. It adopts a playful stance to
the dominant ways of thinking about providing for play. Playful, in this context, refers to the
continuous problematizing of the order of things, a what if approach that is at the heart of
playing, to see what more may be possible. It will also draw on recent and on-going experiments in
institutional space to illustrate some of these possibilities.

Common-sense production of childhood, space and play

There is a danger in such a short paper of reducing complex ideas to a series of general and
simplistic assertions, and while wary of this, this opening section will present some of the dominant
approaches to the issue of providing play. As a starting position, the ways in which play is defined
and valued in any society is part of the wider construction of childhood. In the minority world, and
increasingly spreading across the globe, childhood is marked as a period of separation in which
adult rationality and autonomy hold value as the most desirable qualities; not to be in possession of
these qualities places children as separate from and lacking (Lee, 2005). Separation arises from
difference, used in this context as a way of placing childhood as a unitary and universal category
that while being a different state from adulthood, is defined by its subordinate relationship to it
(Dahlbeck, 2010: 1). Thus children, because of their immaturity, hold a special place: adults are
burdened with responsibilities while children are carefree (Cunningham, 1995) Constructed as
carefree, childhood is part of a utopian vision in which children are redemptive angels; they hold
the promise of a better tomorrow if only this promise can be actualised. Increasingly, therefore, the
task of supporting children to achieve their full potential has fallen to the institutional spaces of
childhood (nursery, kindergarten, school, playground, health centre and so on). The ways in which
these institutions are planned and used is a reflection of the values which any society (or the
dominant powers within society) places on space and time. It marks the construction of childhood
as a privileged domain of innocence, spontaneity, play, freedom and emotion in opposition to a
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public culture of culpability, discipline, work, constraint and rationality (Aitken, 2001: 7). Everyday
spacings and spatial routines situate children, not only controlling and guide their actions but by
moral pronouncements enjoin children to commit on-going acts of self-regulation to conform to
adult expectations. Spaces are designed to progress children from immature to mature, irrational
to rational. Accompanying the increasing institutionalisation of childhood is a reduction in
childrens ability to gain access to public space. Childrens presence may be at odds with the
dominant design principles of order, safety, predictability, visibility, and ease of (adult) movement
which invariably situates children as out of place.
The tracings of childhood and space briefly introduced here find further expression in the way that
play is currently valued. Sutton-Smith (1997) observes we have all played and may well remember
the feeling of playing, but when it comes to making theoretical statements about play we may fall
into silliness. Children appear to know intuitively that what they are doing is play, yet it continues
to create conceptual problems for adults (Lester and Russell, 2010). For most adults there is a
deeply held and cherished belief in the relationship between play, learning and development. Play
represents childish behaviours that can be purposefully channelled into progress, i.e. the
development of the requisite skills for becoming adult (rational, independent, and productive). It
becomes an instrument to be used to ensure children grow up and out of play. From this
perspective the institutions of childhood feed off play for their own purpose by promoting nice
play while at the same time closing out the possibilities and potential other forms of playful
behaviour may offer. While adults may see play as the defining feature of being a child, with
associated images of freedom and imagination, they are discomforted by childrens less innocent
creative acts and sanction any form of disorderly behavior for fear that play will become dangerous,
trivial, nonsensical and unproductive. Sutton-Smith (1997: 111) comments the adult progress
rhetoric [of play] has actually disguised the understanding of what childhood is about as a way of
maintaining adult power over children.
Adult designed spaces for play invariably produce a bounded space filled with purposeful equipment
and playthings, setting apart playing children from the rest of the world. Such spaces follow a fairly
predictable pattern and generally make a causal connection between what is offered in these sites
and what children are expected to do. Anything that contravenes designed and promoted use of
space is often censured and seen as deviant behaviour. By their very design traditional playgrounds
and adult managed play provision may be spaces that seek to normalize play behaviours by
providing for play, an adult production of space that represents a wider construction of childhood
as a period of innocence, play, and a time to be in nature. While adult designed play spaces may be
valued as part of a mosaic of community spaces these acts of providing play obscure a greater issue
around play and space, as discussed in the following section.

Thinking differently about playing and space

Colin Ward (1979) reminds us that no matter what adult plans intend, children will seek ways of
changing and challenging the dominant orders that seek to suppress their urges. Adult productions
of space can never establish full control or finality over childrens desires; there is always an excess
and space for lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988), moments in which intense affects enable
a movement away from becoming the same, a momentary different production of time/space.

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In brief, the argument presented in this paper suggests that the distinctive features of playing its
as if quality, spontaneity, tenor of pleasure, unpredictability and the ways in which children
collectively maintain control over being out of control represent brief moments in which children
can appropriate time/space for their own collective desires. Childrens play, rather than being an
exercise in progress towards autonomy and rationality (the adult construct of play) becomes
momentary space/time that marks the potential to create and work with difference. Aitken and
Plows (2010:332), citing the work of Benjamin (1978), note that play, rather than mere imitation,
marks the capacity to affect and be affected by the world; as such, young peoples capacity to play is
also a capacity to re-conceive history and geography, which in turn creates a moment of
revolutionary possibility. It is the ability to affect and be affected that is of importance here as it
opens up the possibility to move away from humanistic and individual accounts of agency to a
position in which agency may be seen as the collective desire of bodies and materials to assemble
and co-create time/space in which there is a greater capacity to act, and by doing so to simply create
a more joyous state of being.
Such acts of playing are not transcendental or major events, but are marked by their very
ordinariness, brief fleeting moments woven into the fabric of mundane routines. It is relatively
straightforward to think of everyday examples: children walking on walls rather than pavements, not
stepping on the cracks between the paving stones, balancing along the kerbstones, teasing and
chasing each other. Observations of children as they come out from school reveals the jostling,
shouting, and other expressions of exuberance following their release from the constraints of the
school classroom. And even in highly regulated educational spaces, playing will emerge, for example,
when the teacher has their back turned to the class or leaves the room; children doodle, pass
notes, whisper, make faces, giggle, mock and satirise adults (Sutton-Smith, 1997: 111). The inbetween spaces of adult order also offer moments of playing, for example children pass each other
in the school corridor and tag, hit, joke, make funny faces at each other and so on. They are
moments when playing erupts simply to enliven the practicalities of everyday life and produce a
different form of utopian hope which says that things can be different, that life can be momentarily
better and can simply go on, producing greater satisfaction in being alive and maintaining a sense of
optimism about the near-future (Sutton-Smith, 2003). Yet while they appear as ordinary events they
contain potentially magical properties; through playing children enhance biological and social
systems that support their capability to look after themselves and cope with the demands of an
uncertain world (Lester and Russell, 2008).
Lester (2011) elaborates on this theme to suggest that such everyday moments might be seen as
minor political acts. Children playfully reconfigure the existing order of the world to satisfy their own
desires; moments in which they resist, conform and negotiate on their own terms, even if these
struggles and negotiations do not and cannot be carried out in official political arenas or follow
conventional political modes (Kallio, 2009:6). The focus on play as minor politics invites a broader
perspective that shifts focus from adults seeking to provide for play as something apart from the
everyday to understanding that play is a vital sign of childrens full participation in democratic
processes, as active citizens and not passive consumers of adult plans and intentions. The focus on
participation also highlights that moments of playing are inherently spatial. Play spaces are not fixed
or provided but are always created; they are the product of relational achievements and as such are
always highly variable and constantly shifting. Space is the product of interrelations, co-created by

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interactions operating at multiple levels of analysis (Massey, 2005). It is always a sphere of possibility
brought about by the co-existence of many bodies and materials, each with their own force and
trajectory; it is always being produced and reproduced through everyday encounters. But what this
also suggests is that spaces are sites in which power is exercised as dominant forces seek to establish
control and order. The very idea of providing play may be a reflection of such power arrangements
as adults seek to impose their version of what constitutes good play upon the design and control of
space. Is it possible for adults to adopt a more playful, what if stance to spatial productions, to
momentarily imaginatively disturb space on behalf of children (Jones, 2008)? Posing this question
invites adults to pay less attention to children and more focus to disturbing their adult rationality
and knowingness and by doing so create the possibility of different forms of spatial relations and
productions.

Implications for providing play: an experiment

What may be apparent from this brief analysis is that providing play is something more than
designating spaces and times as play spaces. Play is not a subsidiary and separate process set apart
from the real world. Given the everyday, spontaneous nature of the formation of playful moments,
accounting for play in causal terms is obviously not possible or desirable. It should also be clear that
given the nature of playing as discussed in the previous section, there can be no template or
blueprint for play provision. Attention switches not to providing play, but rather to the conditions
under which playfulness may thrive. This is an important distinction as it pays attention to more
general conditions under which social, affective and material resources may facilitate the expression
of childrens playful desires, what may be referred to as play enabling spaces or the playful feel of
space. While a full discussion of this is beyond the scope of this paper, a glimpse of what this might
mean is presented by a brief exploration of an experiment Playful Surprises - being carried out by
Manchester Museum (MM) as part of a wider Happy Museum project1. The use of the term
experiment is again deliberate, but not in the sense of controlling all parameters and variables, as
in a scientific experiment, to produce a truthful or rational account. Rather, as with play itself, a
creative form of experimentation pays attention to that which is not yet known, it concerns that
which comes about through moments of nonsense and because of this demands an approach that
respects the very qualities of play itself. From this perspective governance and planning are
deliberately speculative, outcomes are volatile, and problems are not solved once and for all, but
are rather constantly recast and reformulated (Hillier, 2005). Questions become issues of
problematisation, of continuously asking what if rather than seeking neat solutions, which are
generally only neat in terms of their own internal logic.
Strategic spatial planning as strategic navigation is a performance of risk-taking, of
not being in total control and of transcending the technicalities of planning practice
to create an open reading frame for the emergence of unprecedented events
(Rheinberger, 1997: 31).
MM are currently working to establish a more playful space for children and families. However,
rather than provide dedicated and segregated space or interactive exhibits for childrens play
1

For more details about this programme see: http://www.happymuseumproject.org/

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activities (which is a common feature of many cultural institutions) the Museum have taken a bold
step to think about how the entire museum space may be more playable. This involves thinking
differently about childrens presence in institutional space and to invite children and their families to
use museum space in more playful and creative ways. The connection between happiness and play
is well-established (see for example Lester and Russell, 2008); playing may be distinguished by a
tenor of pleasure as the limits of the real world are temporarily set to one side by asking the
question what if and responding with behaviours that are marked by as if. It is a process of
problem creation, the probing and placing of space, bodies, materials, and so on in novel formations
to see what more they can do. Strange juxtapositions and surprises in space may initiate moments
of playfulness, different sensations may provoke novel movements, humour is generated through
incongruity and so on. The term feel of space is important here as it recognises that museum space
is more than a physical environment displaying objects. As a Victorian (and protected) space,
children largely move through the museum as passive observers of artefacts and information. The
experiment has sought to open up more possibilities for playful engagement with space, materials
and other bodies. Following some initial workshop sessions with gallery staff, a series of what if
disturbances have been injected into the space, not with any pre-determined outcomes, but simply
to see what happens. Thus, in one gallery, a member of staff simply laid a length of kitchen roll along
the middle of the floor and stood back. One child wandered alongside, asking his father what is this
for and receiving a reply I dont know. Shortly afterwards, another child started to walk along the
roll, careful to both stay on the paper and also not to tear it. More children followed, and as they
reached the end turned around and started to walk back. This of course created a further challenge
as children moving in opposite directions now had to negotiate their way past each other. At one
point the length of paper was torn, and the children quickly moved in to tearing up the remainder of
the length of paper with their feet, leaving fragments of kitchen roll scattered across the floor. In
another gallery, a member of staff had taped out a hopscotch grid, and this immediately invited
children and adults to move through this space differently, creating moments of playful lingering as
children played together. Numerous other examples of disturbance have been attempted, all with
the same approach of wondering what might happen if.. But not only has this started to change
the ways in which children (and adults) move through the museum, it has aroused a sense of
curiosity among the staff and an increased sensibility and alertness to the ways in which children can
develop moments of playfulness as they move through the space.

Conclusion
What is suggested here is that traditional ways of thinking about providing play may miss the very
point about this form of behaviour. Our preoccupation with the deliberate creation of segregated
and purposeful spaces for play glosses over the nature and benefits of children playing anywhere
and everywhere. Rather than paying direct attention to play, a focus on conditions that might
support playfulness may offer a more promising stance and by doing so begin to formulate
approaches to spatial design (both public and institutional) that acknowledges childrens full right to
participate as active citizens. Spatial design, in this sense, does not relate simply to the physical
conditions of space, but also to the feel of space and the ways that adults and children may initiate
and share playful moments of being together and apart. But there are further benefits from this
process; the injection of disturbance into spaces may surprise, and open adults up to a greater
sensibility of what it might mean for children and adults to get on together. Childrens play reminds
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adults that it is always possible to expose the common-sense productions of space to critical
scrutiny, to make the everyday more vibrant, and by doing so reveal that there are other ways of
being in the world (Lester, 2012).

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