Child-friendly urban practices as emergent place-based neoliberal subjectivation?

Abstract

Chinese

As city-level decisionmakers generate urban policies and spatial interventions aimed at enhancing children’s environments and increasing their health, wellbeing and participation in urban life, they also impact the types of citizens that cities produce. Yet, despite the increasing ubiquity of city plans targeting the creation of child-friendly environments, child-centred transformations within the urban built fabric have not been a major analytical theme compared to other economic, spatial and welfare aspects of city restructuring in the context of neoliberal urbanisation. In light of this need for greater empirical and theoretical exploration of child-centred urbanism, we compare and contrast how plans reorganise children’s urban social space across different neoliberalising contexts. Drawing on empirical research conducted in Amsterdam, Vienna and Bristol in 2019, including 46 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders involved in child-friendly planning, we contribute to the understanding of how place-based subjectivation processes operate within these plans. We argue that child-friendly urban plans are instrumental in the process of creating subjects that have internalised the norms of neoliberal urbanisation.

Keywords

child-friendly urban planning neoliberal urbanisation place-based subjectivation urban sustainability urban wellbeing

From the promise of childhood in urban societies to child-friendly urbanism

City-level decisionmakers in the Global North are increasingly embracing and adopting a set of urban policies and spatial interventions aimed at enhancing children’s urban environments and improving their health, wellbeing and participation in urban life (Perez del Pulgar et al., 2020; van Vliet and Karsten, 2015). Such actions restore many ideas from the 19th-century child-saving movement (Frost, 2010) and adapt them to fit the more contemporary targets of urban sustainability and liveability as well as children’s rights (to the city). Notwithstanding the increasing ubiquity of child-friendly urban plans in many cities in the Global North, child-centred urban transformations have not been a major analytical theme in the urban planning literature compared to other economic, spatial and welfare aspects of urban restructuring in the context of neoliberal urbanisation (Brenner, 2019; Brenner et al., 2010), with the exception of a few critical voices (Goodsell, 2013; van Den Berg, 2018).

This article attempts to redress this gap by exploring the extent to which and how child-friendly urban interventions and plans are reorganising urban social space across different neoliberalising contexts. We complete a comparative analysis of child-friendly urban planning processes and outcomes in Amsterdam, Bristol and Vienna, including semi-structured interviews with key decisionmakers, stakeholders and practitioners involved in the planning, provision and use of the main post-1990s child-friendly plans and programmes in each of the cities, with a special focus on the ones that are currently in place. Our analysis suggests that child-friendly urban interventions are instrumental in terms of the creation of subjects that internalise wider neoliberal norms.

Childhood public spaces and social utopia

Children’s public spaces in the Global North are one materialisation of the convergence of a distinct perspective on childhood with modernist utopian social thinking (Burkhalter, 2016; Light, 2020; Lilius, 2019; Ward, 1978) that developed in European and North American cities in the 19th century. There have been notable paradigm shifts in children’s public spaces in this context that have run in parallel to changes in the conception of desirable childhoods and collective social utopias since the early child-saving movements of the 19th century (Frost, 2010). The promotion of playgrounds was initially influenced by the moral and hygienic demands that challenged the living conditions of the urban working classes. Children were to be taken off the streets into playgrounds, where public recreational and moral programming sought to infuse values of citizenship (Laurian, 2006; Lilius, 2019), gender (Gagen, 2000), race and nation (Murnaghan, 2013), nativism (Mobily, 2021) and exercise (Gagen, 2004). The first examples took place in the European outdoor ‘gymnasiums’ and Kindergartens and filtered slowly into the playground movement in North America.

At that time, the promotion and control of the playground shifted away from a private philanthropic venture of Church groups in Europe, and other philanthropic agencies and influential associations such as the Playground Association of America and the Junior Red Cross in the USA, to one entrenched in the state (Murnaghan, 2019) and the role of local governments. By the turn of the 20th century, thousands of playgrounds had been built in towns and cities in Europe and North America, making these spaces a widely accepted feature of the public landscape (Murnaghan, 2019). In many of these playgrounds, children were often divided by sex, race and age either by time or place, a separation which became epitomised by racial segregation in the USA, which legally persisted until the 1960s (Murnaghan, 2019). In the 1950s, the suburban ideal came to represent the proper place for childhood. Families with children started to disappear from cities, first in the USA and then in some parts of Europe by the 1960s (Lilius, 2019).

The anti-establishment counterculture of the late 1960s brought about the next revolution in ideas about childhood and children’s environments. Influenced by ideals about autonomy, self-determination and advocacy planning encouraging do-it-yourself (DIY) practices, many urban communities started to take charge of the construction of playgrounds and children’s play spaces themselves, especially in the USA (Burkhalter, 2016). In Europe, state agencies maintained an important role in providing public space, mostly through adventure playgrounds, non-hierarchical structures of self-administration and the stimulation of children’s autonomous learning about their everyday environment in order to be able to navigate but also ‘sabotage’ (i.e. transform) it (Goodman, 2012; Ward, 1978).

The push towards children’s autonomy within formal play spaces took a step backwards in the late 1980s. Aligning with broader revanchism of socially conservative agendas which radically altered the general belief in social transformation and presumably also the importance of childhood as a means for such transformation, children’s needs in the urban space were neglected.

At that time, cities, especially larger ones, became increasingly car-centric and hostile to pedestrian life, with the few places reserved for children (e.g. playgrounds and areas generally considered acceptable for play) often rendered unattractive due to strict safety standards and/or commercialisation. Playgrounds became increasingly perceived as dangerous and unsafe due to a lack of investment and a generalised aversion to risk, nurtured by popular accounts of urban terror and the reconceptualisation of security in terms of people instead of states (Katz, 2001; Tochterman, 2017; Tonucci, 1997). New spaces and activities emerged for children, including commercial (indoor) playtime activities and organised after-school activities (Karsten, 2005). The version of childhood being shaped by policy morphed at this time from being a means of social transformation into a means for the transformation of the self. The idea of childhood was mobilised to further a strong expression of individual responsibility rather than a societally supported endeavour, as reflected in the middle-class discourse of the individual pursuit of excellence and upward mobility (Donner, 2017; Katz, 2008; Miggelbrink, 2020).

Rediscovering urban childhood

Against the backdrop of an increased international attention to children’s rights – epitomised in the United Nations General Assembly adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989 and UNICEF’s Child Friendly City (CFC) initiative launched in 1997 – many local governments in the Global North have started to renew their interest in parks and playgrounds as part of a commitment to enhance children’s wellbeing and address the unprecedentedly high prevalence of childhood respiratory diseases, obesity and mental disorders (Perez-Del-Pulgar et al., 2021; van Vliet and Karsten, 2015). Moreover, the return of capital and higher-income residents to the city during the first decades of the 21st century (Smith, 1979) has also had an influence on families, who started to increasingly value high-density and mixed spatial functions as a means for reconciling the demands of work and family life. This was especially the case for women, who effectively saw this as a means for replacing the confinement of suburban life with a more dynamic inner-city lifestyle (Lilius, 2019). With families increasingly staying in the city after having children, the attention to children in cities has revived and, with it, an underlying attention to what role public policy should play in shaping childhood.

New childhood paradigms are reappearing under the broader concepts of child-friendly, playful or family-friendly cities (van Vliet and Karsten, 2015), often in strong synergy with urban sustainability rationales. Most child-friendly programmes reinterpret past ideals about the suitability of suburban/rural environments for children (e.g. their need for contact with natural elements and the inappropriateness of some aspects of the city for children).

A child-friendly turn in the context of neoliberal urbanisation?

The renaissance of childhood’s significance in urban planning in the form of child-friendly urban plans is commonly understood as reflecting municipal or bottom-up ambitions to counterbalance the negative impacts of neoliberal urbanisation patterns¹ (Brenner et al., 2010) on children’s access to and participation in non-commodified urban spaces and their associated health, equity and wellbeing concerns (Karsten, 2003; Lilius, 2019).

It is much less common to find approaches to the framing of child-friendly urban plans that view them as projects integrated within – rather than working against – (concentrated) neoliberal urbanisation processes (Brenner, 2019). Exceptions include analyses relating child-friendly urban plans with processes of capital attraction and urban gentrification (Goodsell, 2013; van Den Berg, 2013).

Due to the tendency to frame child-friendly plans as counter-neoliberal programmes, analyses thus far have not interrogated the extent to which the plans themselves become an articulation of the social, political and spatial restructurings that accompany neoliberal urbanisation. This limitation obscures a complete understanding of the processes that currently shape children’s spaces in cities. In response, in this article we explore whether and how child-friendly urban plans, despite intent otherwise, are playing a role in the articulation of neoliberal urbanisation, specifically in terms of place-based neoliberal subject formation or subjectivation (Brand, 2007; Miggelbrink, 2020; Traue and Pfahl, 2022).

Urban space as a means of neoliberal subjectivation

We understand subjectivation as a set of processes that generate dispositions to feel, think and act towards others and oneself, which require and mobilise subjectivity, defined as a person’s sense of identity, morals and worldviews, including ways of feeling and thinking (Brand, 2007; Traue and Pfahl, 2022). Processes of subjectivation therefore inscribe both processes of subjection to something (e.g. an ideology) and processes of subjective agency or subjectivity, which are variously emphasised in different approaches, according to their understanding of the subject (e.g. poststructuralist (Foucault, 1980) or interpretative (Schütz and Luckmann, 1989)). Processes of subjectivation emerge within social relations, between two or more entities, and contribute to the mutual stabilisation of subject-producing societies and society-producing subjects. As such, subjectivation is considered a power effect which concomitantly constitutes and eclipses the power to resist of those being subjected (Foucault, 1980).

Processes of subjectivation are mediated by affectivity, agency and objectivation according to subjectivation research (Traue and Pfahl, 2022). Affectivity points to the emotional labour of interiorising the norms required by processes of subjectivation. Subjects do not become ‘subjected to’ a norm without learning to feel and perform according to it. Affectivity is at the core of why subjectivation is a collective and self-reproducing process, as it not only informs how subjects react to experiences and feel what is expected from them but is also at the basis of what subjects expect from others. Agency in this context refers to the fact that subjectivation is not necessarily nor always a process of pure subjection, deprived of agency. Subjection is never total and there is no such thing as a collective subject; there are rather – as mentioned above – collective subjectivations (Traue and Pfahl, 2022). Last, objectivations refer to the technologies that enable subjections and subjectivities to be communicated between interrelating entities involved in subjectivation processes. These are realised through social institutions and can be discourses, norms, laws, rights, symbols, social structures or spatial orders (amongst others).

In this context, we refer to neoliberal subjectivation as a set of processes that ‘form’ subjects disposed to feel, think and act towards others and oneself in ways that contribute to the stabilisation of neoliberal structures (e.g. market rule, commodification and (private) accumulation through (public) dispossession) and vice versa (Donner, 2017; Miggelbrink, 2020). Among the many available objectivations or technologies through which these neoliberal subjectivations are communicated, we will focus on the ones symbolically and materially inscribed in child-friendly urban places. That is, we focus on child-friendly urbanism as a formation of urban place-based subjectivation. Urban place-based subjectivation processes, as processes promoting the constitution of a desired type of subject by modifying the built environment of individuals, have been explored as objectivations/means of neoliberal subjectivation processes in cities (Harvey, 1990; Kaika, 2010) but, to our knowledge, have not been explored in the context of child-friendly urbanism.

In response, this article explores the extent to which and how child-friendly urban interventions are articulating processes of neoliberal subjectivation, based on the discourse among those who shape the policies that determine a child’s experience of the city. This discourse generally excludes children, despite being directly impactful upon their lives. Moreover, we explore how these spatial reorganisations differ across a variety of neoliberalisation contexts in Europe in order to understand how gradients of neoliberal urbanisation relate to the top-down reorganisation of (children’s) urban social spaces introduced by child-friendly urban interventions implemented by city governments.

Methods

Research design

We designed a most-similar comparative multiple case study (Yin, 2002) by selecting three European case cities that share a historic commitment to child-centred urban planning and a recent, locally formalised emphasis on child-friendly urban planning, but differ in the modality and regulatory structures of neoliberalisation. These cities include Amsterdam (Netherlands), Vienna (Austria) and Bristol (UK). The primary dimension of Amsterdam’s neoliberal transformation is roughly characterised by state-led gentrification through housing policy and public space interventions; for Vienna, it is broadly shaped by overlapping antagonistic policy layers juggling between resisting and fostering neoliberalisation; and in Bristol’s process, it is markedly characterised by a singular focus on longstanding austerity politics and budget cuts (Table 1) (Matheney et al., 2022; Perez-del-Pulgar, 2022a, 2022b). This case selection allows us to examine the extent to which and how child-friendly urban plans are articulating neoliberal subjectivation processes and to compare how these processes are similar or different across a variety of neoliberalisation contexts.

Table 1.

Summary of main case characteristics, CFC agendas and varieties of neoliberalisation.

City	History of child-centred planning	Variety of neoliberal urbanisation
Amsterdam Most recent child-friendly urban plans: focus on healthy living, physical activity and obesity	Child-centred infrastructure: Inclusion of residents’ age-based spatial needs (e.g. in terms of housing, work/school and recreation) in the General Extension Plan (1934). Creation of numerous playgrounds (approx. 700) in the period 1947–1970, following Aldo van Eyck’s simple and low-cost design. Lapse of attention to children’s needs in mainstream planning since the 1970s (Daan et al., 2019; Draaisma, 2015; Kloosterman, 2015; Verstrate and Karsten, 2011). Welfare infrastructure: Strong tradition of social housing and public space planning policy since post-war period. Regulatory structures included: municipal ownership of land, detailed master land use plans, strong support of social housing provision, tight regulation of housing lease contracts, investment in quality public spaces (Hochstenbach, 2017; Kadi and Ronald, 2014; van Gent, 2013).	State/municipal-led gentrification: Housing and public space interventions justified from a competitiveness perspective, seeking to attract more affluent residents, capital and tourism in a context of sharp national debt reduction, especially in the aftermath of the crisis of 2008. Housing reforms: Promotion of home ownership and cutback in social housing. Share of social housing in the city decreased from 64% in 1995 to 46% in 2015, and to below 30% (legal minimum) in some neighbourhoods. Deregulations of the housing market include: implementation of generous deductions of mortgage interest taxes for homeowners; decrease of financing opportunities of housing associations and high landlord levy for housing associations (up to four months of the associations’ yearly rent incomes); liberalisation of rental prices and introduction of flexible/temporary contracts (Savini et al., 2016; van der Veer and Schuiling, 2015; van Gent, 2013).
Vienna Most recent child-friendly urban plans: Focus on basic welfare infrastructure, space provision and children’s participation.	Child-centred infrastructure: First widespread ‘Playground Emergency’ plan in 1949: stipulating that every child in Vienna should live less than five minutes away from a playground. Kunst am Bau programme in 1950: extensive art programme in public spaces aiming to combine modern sculpture with functionality. Numerous artists have designed iconic playgrounds created since the 1950s (Burkhalter, 2016; Perez-del-Pulgar, 2022b). Welfare infrastructure: Unique municipal socialism originated during the interwar period and continued developing after the Second World War, envisioning a modern, non-commodified and emancipatory city. Regulatory structures included: provision of social housing, strong regulation of housing market and land uses and socially oriented urban renewal plans (Schwarz et al., 2019).	Juggling between resisiting and encouraging neoliberal urbanisation: Since the 1990s, the municipality has been juggling between resisting a pressing neoliberal political environment and attracting headquarters of international companies, supranational organisations, international universities, abundant immigration and higher-income families to the city. Housing reforms: A set of reforms is slowly deregulating the housing sector and reinforcing the rights of ‘native’ Vienna residents (Cucca, 2019; Kadi, 2015; Kadi and Verlic, 2019; Perez-del-Pulgar, 2022b).
Bristol Most recent child-friendly urban plans: focus on the provision of palliative nature spaces for the wellbeing of targeted groups of children	Child-centred infrastructure: Rich history of children play-space provision linked to the development of the adventure playground, motivated by ideals of self-determination and children’s right to free play in the city, with strong potential to alleviate the traumatic experience of children during the Second World War. Many adventure playgrounds have opened since the 1950s, initially founded by local communities but increasingly directly run by Bristol City Council. Have gained a reputation for being a pioneering and uniquely well-funded youth service in England. Welfare infrastructure Strong social housing support since 1890 until the sharp privatisation and cutbacks of the 1970s.	Austerity politics: Political project of austerity and neoliberalisation exacerbated since 2010 within a centralised system (national regulations are the main available mechanism to guide planning in a culture otherwise characterised by loose umbrella regulations of privately proposed development). New beneficial tax schemes for property investors. Cutbacks in public space and social services which has led to the NGO-isation of urban maintenance, social support services and environmental stewardship, previously done by the public sector. ‘Rollout’ neoliberalism (Brenner et al., 2010; Peck et al., 2009) Housing reforms: Cutbacks in and selling off of social housing. Local authorities prohibited to borrow money to build social housing or invest in maintenance.

Data collection

The article draws on empirical research conducted in Amsterdam, Vienna and Bristol during April–July 2019, including 46 semi-structured interviews (19 in Amsterdam, 12 in Vienna and 15 in Bristol) with key decisionmakers, practitioners and relevant professionals in child-centred municipal space and services planning, provision and use. These actors include city officials, private and public real estate developers, activists, charity/NGO workers, children’s play workers and health professionals involved in the planning, execution and use of the most recent child-friendly urban plans in each city. Interviewees were identified through internet searches, review of local media articles and reports and snowball sampling. Interviews lasted between 30 minutes and 1.5 hours and were fully transcribed verbatim. We designed a prepared semi-structured interview guide with open-ended questions to structure the interviews and to examine the priorities, goals, motivations, strategies, timing, planning processes and political alliances underlying the specific approach to child-friendly cities, spaces and programmes of their programmes; as well as interviewees’ visions and rationale for what a child-friendly city or space was, why it was important and for whom. We gave interviewees space for elaborating on their own visions of what a child-friendly city is, without imposing any a priori definition of it. Our focus was on adults’ accounts and conceptions and on their key expertise, motivations, visions and experience related to the topic of child-friendly urbanism; children’s voices are not included in this article as we sought to uncover how child-friendly spaces are shaped relative to broader urban agendas, and not to focus on the experience of the spaces (though this would be a valuable follow-up). In particular, we sought to understand how the discourse in which children are fully excluded informs the outcomes that fundamentally shape a child’s experience of these cities. All participants provided informed consent for participation in and audio-recording of the interview.

Following a case-study approach, in addition to primary data, we collected relevant secondary data to complement our understanding of the background, child-friendly urban plans and interventions and urban development changes for each case. We identified relevant data from reports, policy and city planning documents, newspaper articles, grey literature and academic articles in order to triangulate the accounts of interviewees, to identify information that was mentioned superficially by the respondents, and to better understand the history of each city and the city planning rationales. Last, we kept a comprehensive record of fieldwork notes.

Data analysis

Using NVivo software to organise and carry out the analysis, we developed a mixed coding approach that combines deductive thematic methods and inductive grounded theory coding techniques. For this approach, we defined two levels of coding. The main level was deductive and involved the coding of our data (interviews, fieldnotes and secondary data) into a fixed coding scheme. The fixed coding scheme was based on the main conceptual and analytical categories we sought to understand related to the relationship between child-friendly urban plans and neoliberal subjectivation, which were: (a) the characteristics of child-friendly urban plans that could be related to broader city agendas, (b) the reorganisation of (children’s) urban places and (c) references to subjectivation processes. Within these main themes, we then followed a grounded approach which led to the creation of sub-codes, listed in Table 2.

Table 2.

Coding matrix.

Main level of coding:Thematic approach	Sub-level of coding:Grounded approach
Characteristics of urban plans	Approaches
	Rationales
	Beneficiaries
(Children’s) urban social spaces	Spatial practices
	Perceptions of space
	Spatial ideology (incl. social images, symbols and aspirations associated to spaces)
	Rationale of planners, and conceptions of urban space
Subjectivation process	Created exclusions
	Power relations
	Political project inherent in spatial claims
	Psychosocial implications
	Ideology of spatiality
	Object/subject of ethical superiority

Place-based neoliberal subjectivation through child-friendly urbanism

Amsterdam

Weaving the ‘mobile’ city into the urban agenda for children

Urban play spaces regained centrality in Amsterdam’s planning practice with the return of families to the city in the 2000s (Urban Planning Department, interview, 2019). The related initiatives are centred on human health and wellbeing, and in particular on childhood overweight and obesity, which affect one in five children and young people in the city (City’s Public Health Department, interview, 2019). The municipal plan Amsterdam Approach to Healthy Weight (Amsterdamse Aanpak Gezond Gewicht-AAGG (City of Amsterdam, 2017)) puts forward an ambitious schoolground regeneration strategy, the construction of new playgrounds, training programmes for families and professionals, ‘action plans’ for inactive youth and interventions for neighbourhoods with a higher prevalence of overweight and obese residents, in order to address physical inactivity and poor eating habits among children (City of Amsterdam, 2017). The Moving City Plan (De Bewegende Stad) (City of Amsterdam, 2016) extends the promotion of an active and healthy lifestyle via public space interventions to all Amsterdam residents. Launched in 2016, it conceives of a city in which movement and exercise are a natural part of everyday life. The plan advocates for including movement in the design of neighbourhoods, parks, streets and squares with the ambition ‘to move all Amsterdammers’. It envisions plenty of space for cyclists and pedestrians, sports opportunities and playgrounds in a city whose actual movements and exercise are monitored in a Movement Atlas (Beweegatlas; Open Research Amsterdam, 2016).

This tendency also reflects the irruption of the so-called ‘mobility turn’ (Sheller and Urry, 2016) in the field of urban planning, which places increasing attention on the active role of the built environment and of urban solutions in shaping healthier and more sustainable mobility dynamics. The benefits and purpose of these play and movement spaces for children are nevertheless based on vague assertions about wellbeing derived from a narrow vision of play that ignores that the logics of children’s lifestyle and movement go beyond the planned order and reduces play to physical movement or sport (municipal adventure playground staff member, interview, 2019).

Mobility as spatial ideology: Learning to be mobile through play, housing, profession and public space

Although the genuineness of the intent behind both plans to improve public health is widely recognised, some interviewees find the rationale and execution of these projects problematic. In the words of one person involved with the municipal play strategy and adventure playgrounds, ‘it’s a full social system that is not supporting play’ (interview, 2019). This person points to an underlying intent within these plans to individualise the cause and responsibility of obesity as an individual behaviour or lifestyle, which ought to be reversed by making spaces and activities that promote an active lifestyle available for these people. Although childhood weight problems and obesity affect low-income populations and ethnic minorities more than other groups (City of Amsterdam, 2017), the structural role of poverty and of neighbourhood conditions in obesity remains unacknowledged.

This individualised framing lends itself to the stigmatisation of overweight/obese people as inactive, poorly educated and lacking self-control. In contrast, people with healthy and ‘normal’ weight are praised for being active, productive and disciplined. And it is precisely this stigmatisation of ‘immobile’ racialised children and the implied ethical superiority of the healthy and mobile citizen that seems to be justifying changes in the public built environment of disadvantaged communities.

Additionally, through particular child-friendly urban plans, public agencies facilitate the monitorisation, control and discipline of disadvantaged children’s bodies to promote the acquisition of what is known as ‘doorstroming’– a Dutch word for movement or flow. This ‘doorstroming’ is used to refer not only to the dynamism in public space but also to broader transformations in Amsterdam, especially in regard to housing (Vereniging [Association] 2e Nassaustraat 8, interview, 2019). Since the 1990s, housing reform rationales prescribed ‘that everyone ought to be flexible, in constant movement and development’ and that a person’s housing career ought to be in flux along with one’s professional and social status (Vereniging [Association] 2e Nassaustraat 8, interview, 2019). These reforms have laid out a housing market characterised by a high turnover of temporary and increasingly unaffordable tenancies, for which the only exit seems to be home ownership that not everyone can afford (Hochstenbach, 2017; Kadi and Ronald, 2014; van Gent, 2013). References to the spatial ideology of ‘doorstroming’ are also present in rationales justifying public space investment in child-friendly infrastructure as a means of positioning Amsterdam as a global centre for transient high-income and creative workers, tourists and international company investments (Urban Planning Department, interview, 2019). Some local activists regard this as Amsterdam’s transformation into ‘a transit space’, with an institutional and physical architecture primarily supporting private accumulation at the expense of people’s ability to stay rooted in the city (spokesperson, neighbourhood association van der Pekbuurt, interview, 2019).

‘Who can afford to have a family under these conditions?’: Playful hypermobility at the expense of social protection

While Amsterdam might be becoming more mobile and, in a way, more playful, several respondents regret that neoliberal policies are ‘getting rid of the conditions that make it possible to raise a family (…) and actually challenging the reproduction of some groups in the city’ (De Bond Precaire Woonvormen (BPW), interview, 2019). The hyper-mobile and playful city reflects a form of ‘escapism that totally neglects the need of social protection’ (spokesperson, neighbourhood association van der Pekbuurt, interview, 2019). By constantly pushing mobility and active lifestyles in the absence of strong institutional support for rooting oneself in a home and addressing the structural conditions that make neighbourhoods unhealthy, the net effect exposes and familiarises children to greater insecurities and movement. Amsterdam was once the site of social architecture praised for its social, child- and family-friendly approach to public space and housing provision (see Table 1) but it is rapidly eliminating affordable and stable housing solutions for large families (activist and housing specialist, interview, 2019).

These play strategies thus contribute to processes of the commodification of urban space while operating as objectivations/means in the process of subjectivation of children and their families – and especially working-class and racialised minority children – into being attracted by a ‘liberty-loving, middle-class aesthetics of freedom that flirts with the idea of adventure often portrayed in idyllic, green, clean, walkable, harmonious communities’ (BPW, interview, 2019). The subjectivation process also ‘forms’ subjects disposed to feel that their identity, social mobility and power depend on their individual ability to remain hyper-mobile. In this context, low-income and ethnic minority residents mostly manage to stay put, but at a high cost for their self-worth and social identity, being increasingly stigmatised, controlled in regard to their destiny and health and even held accountable for Amsterdam’s housing affordability ‘crisis’ and increasing incidence of poor health. In this context, (social) housing and models of play in public space have morphed from engendering a universal right to the benefits of the city into a mode for subjecting non-mobile people and territories into hypermobility.

In short, some see the political project inherent in the promotion of the ethical superiority of mobility as ‘dismantling the social city’ (spokesperson, neighbourhood association van der Pekbuurt, interview, 2019) and increasingly producing what an activist called ‘flexible precarious residents being forced to move from one precarious home to another’. The subjectivation into hyper-mobility creates insecurity ‘for people who have already a lot of disadvantages in other spheres’ (BPW, interview, 2019) and whose condition becomes rather characterised by displaceability (Desmond, 2016). The ‘flexible precarious’ are ‘increasingly alienated from the land and their communities (…) because they know that they are not part of the community, only temporary’, which hinders a common political identity and possible civic mobilisation. Amsterdam’s approach to child-friendly urban plans indirectly reinforces this approach by conditioning children to expect constant mobility as the norm, while not considering children’s rights to the city and welfare issues within their main child-friendly urban plans and interventions. As well as this, Amsterdam’s approach has little to no direct engagement with children in its development. Meaningful children’s participation is notably excluded here.

Vienna

A continuing legacy of small-scale and widespread, inclusive child-friendly interventions

Since the 1990s, child-friendly planning in Vienna has developed around three dimensions: (1) increased space provision; (2) participation/co-design; and (3) mainstreaming children’s needs across all areas of planning. The goal of expanding space provision is rooted in a belief in the importance of urban public spaces for children as their first spaces ‘to grasp both physically and conceptually things, plants, people and their environment’ (Stadt Wien, 2016). These first experiences have long been acknowledged to have high relevance for children’s physical, mental and psychosocial health (Stadt Wien, 2016). Since the 1990s, rather than large projects, small-scale and continuous interventions that aim to enable a non-commodified, emancipatory and participatory urban experience for children have characterised Vienna’s approach to expanding the child-friendly urban spaces (Stadt Wien, 2020). A Municipal Department for Space Obtainment (Magistratsabteilung für Platzbeschaffung) established in 1999 has built more than 100 places since its inception (Stadt Wien, 2016). Some recent examples include the conversion of parking spaces and once grey/traffic streets into play spaces and play streets (Wiener Wohnen, interview, 2019). In addition to the pursuit of more child-friendly spaces, the municipality is committed to the maintenance and improvement of existing play spaces. In this line, the recent Children and Youth Strategy, launched in 2020 with an ambitious budget of €16.25 billion (Stadt Wien, 2020), plans to add fixtures, improve lighting, build new sports elements and add affordable or even free activities and courses requested by children (Wiener Wohnen, interview, 2019).

In addition to increased space provision, the city also emphasises participation and co-design as a route towards a more socially just and child-friendly city. Planning and design processes include the systematic observation of children’s behaviour in public space and the organisation of participatory workshops with children and caregivers (Smarter Together, interview, 2019) in order to understand what is needed and for residents to ‘know that changes are for them’ (Smarter Together, interview, 2019). Here, children are understood as social catalysers of urban transformations ‘because through the kids, you get to the parents and even to the grandparents, and so you can really reach out’ (Smarter Together, interview, 2019). In 2019, a large project of children’s active participation in planning was carried out with a large-scale participation process involving 22,500 children in about 1300 workshops in order to run an evaluation of Vienna’s nature and environment, community, connectedness and mobility (Stadt Wien, 2020). Vienna’s child-friendly urban approach has also promoted the co-design of actual play spaces with children and caregivers since 1999 (Stadt Wien, 2002).

The child-friendly urban agenda in Vienna is also a platform for extending the rights and needs of children into various domains. The most recent 2020 Children and Youth Strategy advances a paradigmatic change in child-friendly planning, leaning towards the abandonment of the strong division between children’s and non-children’s urban spaces altogether. This tendency is partly reflected in Vienna’s holistic understanding of what urban child spaces are, only a portion of which is the provision of public play spaces and facilities. For instance, the municipality included the child-friendliness of housing as an evaluation criterion – alongside other social, planning, ecological and economic criteria – in allocating land for developers. The Children and Youth Strategy also states an ambition to involve children in co-creating housing and educational buildings.

From a social infrastructure for children’s care to the questioning of the emancipatory project

The child-friendly agenda of Vienna has a broad understanding of the urban infrastructures needed for children’s care, health, wellbeing and inclusion that includes the institutionalisation of children’s structural needs (e.g. play, food, housing, education) as universal rights (Caritas Wien, interview, 2019). Key structural issues identified for their welfare and wellbeing – and especially vulnerable children and young people – include access to safe and affordable homes, support for handling ruptures in children’s educational trajectories, support for transitions out of care and affordability of and/or free access to most activities and strategies to confront ethnic-based discrimination (Caritas Wien, interview, 2019).

Children’s lived citizenship

Far from aiming to create place-specific binding rules of spatial behaviour, child-friendly approaches in Vienna seem to be driven by an understanding of urban space as co-created by children. The practice of being in contact with and shaping one’s environment is framed as a political process constituting children’s sense of citizenship (Wiener Wohnen, interview, 2019), in line with emerging research on the concept of lived citizenship in citizenship studies (Kallio et al., 2020). Children are not only present and represented in urban space (i.e. provided with space to play) but their daily actions contribute to creating the conditions for political and social change. To this end, the municipality offers real possibilities for participation in urban planning processes and has a longstanding support scheme for children and youth associations with the aim to ‘stimulate children’s understanding of democracy, to learn how to decide collectively, and to understand themselves as a group that has their own interests’ (Stadt Wien, 2016). The understanding of children as political urban subjects in terms of their city-making capacity is furthermore promoted through a spatial education programme called ‘What Creates Space’ (Stadt Wien, 2016), which since 2008 has been part of the curriculum for 10–14-year-old children in Viennese secondary schools. This unusual educational programme includes modules about space perception (Me in Space), public space (Who Owns Public Space) and urban planning (How Does the City Work?). It aims to strengthen the voice and participation of children by conveying knowledge about their surrounding built environment and encouraging them to reflect on their living spaces as social spaces and on their own responsibility and right to its creation.

In sum, rather than neoliberal place-based subjectivation, Vienna’s child-friendly rationale and departure from extended neoliberalisation trends in Europe aim to challenge children to decolonise their subjectivity (Rolnik, 2017). That is, to understand and identify dominant spatial ideologies and place-based subjectivation processes, and to appropriate space by rendering conscious how space is not something natural, given or unchangeable but rather is socially produced and involved in processes of subjectivation.

Bristol

From council-run child and youth infrastructure to a burden on volunteers and charities

Bristol calls itself a green and child-friendly city in many of its recent plans. Its green strategy – a robust cycling infrastructure, the lowest carbon footprint of any British city and over 400 parks and nature reserves (Matheney et al., 2022) – helped the city win the European Green Capital Award in 2015. It is also the only large city in England to still have a commissioned, funded youth service (municipal playworker, interview, 2019). A Bristol Child Friendly Group (http://bristolchildfriendlycity.blogspot.com/) formed in 2015, and the One City Plan, Bristol’s local plan since 2019, includes a Children’s Charter with 10 pledges that set the rights and best interests of children as a priority for municipal decision makers (Bristol City Council, 2019).

Some residents and play activists nevertheless disagree with Bristol’s reputation as a green and child-friendly city and denounce the incoherence between the extensive discursive support for child-centred and green planning and the unprecedented neoliberalisation-driven budget cuts in both domains (municipal playworker, interview, 2019). For example, the abolition of the National Play Strategy in 2010 removed any national policy regarding child-centred planning and also cut play and youth services funding in England, which has dropped by 62% since 2010 (Wood et al., 2019). In 2018, the new municipal child and youth services model called Targeted Youth Services (TYS) replaced the former Bristol Youth Links (BYL). As a result, municipal childhood and youth services’ spending was cut by 30%, the provision of play for children under 11 was completely eliminated and youth work for 11–19-year-olds was narrowed to target only those most in need (municipal playworker, interview, 2019). Moreover, the parks department budget decreased by 66% from 2013 to 2019, with parks expected to be self-sustaining after April 2019 (Matheney et al., 2022). As a result, most of the play and green spaces and services have been outsourced to local charities and friends of parks groups and many have closed because of the limited council funding they receive (municipal playworker, interview, 2019). Several playworkers warn that the future of play in Bristol is at risk.

Remaining services and play spaces mostly target children aged 11 and above, which has clear development and wellbeing impacts (municipal playworker, interview, 2019): ‘anyone who works with young people and children knows that the earlier you can intervene in the life of a young person, the better’ (psychologist at Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS), involved in an experimental project testing green space as therapeutic treatment for children and young people, in collaboration with the municipal child and youth services, interview, 2019). Moreover, focusing only on the neediest children undermines the preventive role of the intervention (municipal playworker, interview, 2019). Furthermore, due to the framing of some services as charities, some marginalised groups fear stigmatisation and as a result do not take up those services (social worker at Off the Record (OTR), a health support and information service for young people, involved in a municipal project using green space and gardening as a health and wellbeing intervention for young people, interview, 2019).

Within the different strategies to keep children’s access to play afloat within the political conjuncture of austerity localism (i.e. delegation of the maintenance of adventure playgrounds and parks to charities and community groups) (Matheney et al., 2022) and British neoliberalism, securing grant and trust funding is essential (municipal playworker, interview, 2019), especially through the combination of environmental management, child and youth services and health funds leading to the spread of nature-like palliative child-centred spaces in Bristol.

The ideology of space: Separation, fragmentation and alienation as a form of subjectivation

Nature-like, safe and therapeutic spaces are often conceived as isolated, safe and protective refuges from children’s adverse environments (OTR, interview, 2019). Children in need are nevertheless also represented by state agencies as subjects to be removed from safe community spaces (municipal playworker, interview, 2019).

The propensity towards separation is also exposed in more abstract terms in the way that the need for these therapeutic spaces is often justified in terms of children’s individual pathologies, disregarding the notion that these are frequently the consequence of children’s deprived socio-ecological conditions. As one child psychologist commented, ‘I am thinking there’s a much bigger picture here (…) the environmental stuff but also the social stuff (…) has a massive impact on physical health (…) and mental health (…) in the UK’ (psychologist at CAMHS, interview, 2019). These socio-environmental conditions are not really targeted or integrated within the vision of the play/therapeutic spaces and activities.

The separation of children’s conditions from their socio-environmental context is thus therapeutically limited and takes more of a palliative lens:

We just treat illness instead of preventing, we’re kind of at the end of the river trying to build a dam or whatever and actually there’s always a lot of talk about prevention and early intervention. But for some reason there’s not the time or the money to do that. (Psychologist at CAMHS, interview, 2019)

These temporary nature–play–support spaces cannot compensate for deeper socio-ecological ills and can even lead to a potentially harmful schism/alienation or sense of guilt and/or shame for children towards their contexts and families:

We have (…) become quite frustrated by bringing (…) incredibly underprivileged young people into these settings and then sending them back to where they’re from, without any follow-up care, and no continued relationship with the outdoors and green space and actual world, and that, for me, just felt completely odd, and actually potentially more harmful than good. (OTR, interview, 2019)

In sum, the landscape of play spaces created in Bristol reproduces a form of subjectivation that tends to separate actual socio-ecologically entangled dimensions – such as the city and the natural and child-centred play spaces, adults and children, healthy and sick/in need – in a way that forecloses addressing the socio-ecological roots of the issues. Moreover, the children’s urban space spawns a distinct mode of subjectivation, based on a perspective that the ‘normal’ integrated subject is assumed to be fully autonomous and well-functioning with no need of social protection. Subjects in need of protection or care are regarded as failures, which justifies being cared for but also separated and excluded from ‘normal’ society, institutionalising their marginal position in the social structure.

Discussion

Our three case studies of Amsterdam, Vienna and Bristol depict non-linear, complex and context-specific processes of the co-constitution of child-friendly urban practices, and subjectivities articulated within different neoliberal urbanisation processes influenced by local urban trajectories, cultural traditions and politico-economic conjunctures. We argue that the spatial transformations carried out in the context of child-friendly agendas comply with a series of characteristics, including the propensity for consensus that they inspire, their moral significance, their condition of everyday infrastructure and site of social and cultural reproduction, that make them relevant instruments of place-based subjectivation.

In Amsterdam, a planning culture that increasingly fails to address the structural care needs of children and families, especially ethnic minorities, has introduced a green and play-centred child-friendly agenda that successfully operates in favour of a restructuring of spatial practices, meanings, social hierarchies, affects and subjectivities that encourage and reward individual movement as a path to wellbeing and progress, while stigmatising stability and immobility. We have furthermore exposed how these child-friendly interventions are compatible with an underlying spatial ideology also present in other policy spheres in Amsterdam’s neoliberal urbanisation process (e.g. housing and public space), supporting entities and people with a high capacity for movement (e.g. tourists, expats, goods and capital) while displacing those with lower capacity for movement or in need of social protection (e.g. households with dependent members, children or older people, people reliant on place for their social reproduction and social bonds). Child-friendly urban interventions address greater vulnerabilities created by housing restructuring by disciplining the child and her/his family into being in movement. This feedback engenders acceptance of permanent physical and social movement while also enabling the justification of existing power structures as the result of an individual’s level of mobility.

In Vienna, we laid out how child-friendly planning, by focusing on the widespread provision of play places, on the participation of children in the making of their everyday spaces and on the structural factors affecting children’s urban life, promotes a set of spatial practices, meaning, responsibilities, affects and subjectivities that supports the recognition of the child/citizen as producer of and produced by their surrounding environment. While pressures fostering neoliberalisation are there to undo this tendency, child-friendly programmes seem to be amongst those layers promoting an inclusive, affordable and decommodified spatial order that opens up possibilities for emancipatory moments of mutual self-subjectivation where children emerge as subjecting and subjected reflexive subjects.

In Bristol, child-centred urban spaces are mostly directed at targeted groups – vulnerable, older children – and based on a palliative nature-health focus. We argue that Bristol’s organisation of child-friendly spaces is failing to address the structural causes of children’s illbeing and care needs, rather serving to promote spatial practices, meanings, affects and subjectivities that favour the institutionalisation of existing neoliberal power structures and inequities. In the absence of a recognition of the socio-environmental determinants of children’s physical and mental health outcomes, our research suggests that these palliative and stigmatising/divisive place-based interventions justify, reinforce and normalise the fully autonomous and well-functioning neoliberal subject, while institutionalising the marginal position of vulnerable children in the social structure.

Our analysis reveals that child-friendly interventions can be explored from the vantage point of their role in processes of subjectivation through children’s socialisation in specific environments and practices, which are instrumental to neoliberal urbanisation processes. Although often relegated to technical or universal design prescriptions, child-friendly interventions embody and reproduce power. Although no space imposes specific subjects or actions (Lefebvre, 1974; Löw, 2008), child-friendly initiatives can be interpreted as entry points into a condensed and affectivity-laden version of the dominant and desired societal values and principles. In our three case studies, we found that the belief systems and structures by which urban children’s spaces are sustained and spatial practices are fostered, and the rules through which children are supposed to feel, think and act towards others and oneself, are often versions of the structures by which ‘adults’ organise and sustain fundamental access to power, authority and resources in each of the cities.

When comparing all three cases, we found that the different neoliberal urbanisation contexts of our case studies are articulated in the modes of child-friendly place-based subjectivation. Subjectivation processes in Amsterdam and Bristol, where neoliberal governance is strongest, reinforce the reproduction of certain children’s subjectivities that are more compliant with the demands and restrictions – including budget restrictions – of the neoliberal city. Both cities sustain practices and perspectives by which the ‘normal’ integrated subjects are assumed to be fully autonomous and well-functioning with no need for social protection, and subjects in need of protection or care are regarded as failures. In Amsterdam and Bristol, child-friendly place-based subjectivation processes are hierarchical in that they more strongly dictate the status of subjects according to broader neoliberal ideological principles applied also in other policy spheres. Furthermore, despite the emphasis on child-friendly urban planning, none of the child-centred municipal plans in these two cities appear to include attention to issues related to children’s participation. In this sense, the main international programmes framing local engagement with children’s welfare, rights and participation – epitomised in the United Nations General Assembly adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989 and UNICEF’s Child Friendly City (CFC) initiative launched in 1997 – do not seem to be a source of inspiration for these local agendas. Rather, Amsterdam and Bristol seem to have different inspirations and local priorities which are not so much about welfare, rights and participation as about infrastructural provision.

In contrast, while child-friendly interventions in Vienna also reproduce a certain subjectivity (and process of subjectivation), an active participation of children in these collective subjectivation processes is fostered, incurring in processes closer to mutual self-subjectivation. Children are subjected as subjects of rights, who enter into negotiation with the constituted spatial order on the basis of social relations of self-subjectivation between equals.

In sum, place-based subjectivation is inherent to any place creation or planning and to everyday experiences (Brand, 2007; Gabriel, 2014). In the case of planning for children, the subjectivation process is especially relevant but paradoxically goes largely unnoticed by planners and users, which renders its potential to subject even more powerful. Therefore, we argue that the politics of the production of everyday children’s spaces is a prime site for the exercise of political power through subjectivation, especially in Amsterdam and Bristol. Seeing child-friendly initiatives as functional or unimportant as ‘play’ infrastructure increasingly implies their instrumentalisation and incorporation to the demands of neoliberal subjectivation processes.

Strengths and limitations

In this article, we explore whether and how child-friendly urban plans are playing a role in the articulation of neoliberal urbanisation, specifically in terms of place-based neoliberal subjectivation. Given that planning is an empirical discipline that by default approaches the city and its problems in a techno-scientific way, the selected object of study (i.e. child-friendly plans and interventions projected on the urban space) is a priori predetermined to entail some degree of instrumentality. This limitation is furthermore supported by the selection of adult planners and practitioners as interviewees, which further pre-determines our conclusion of the instrumentality of child-friendly plans. This limitation could be contrasted in future studies with more phenomenological approaches to the concrete, lived social spaces created by these plans through a direct engagement with children and their families.

That said, the strength of this article does not lie in disclosing the instrumentality of child-friendly urban plans, but rather in unpacking processes by which these instrumental place-based urban plans are enmeshed within convincing, attractive and emotionally embodied subjectivation processes that create the disposition of subjects to feel, think and act in ways that might seem to contravene the self-interest of subjects, while supporting the structure and needs of neoliberal urbanisation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge that the case study of Bristol was based on field work performed together with Galia Shokry and written case summary analysis completed together with Austin Matheney and Galia Shoky, which are published in full form as .

Declaration of conflicting interests

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

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the GREENLULU’s Project under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework [grant number 678034]; the NATURVATION Project under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework [grant number 730243]; and the María de Maeztu Program for Units of Excellence of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [grant number CEX2019-000940-M]. The sponsors had no role in the design or analysis of this study.

ORCID iDs

Carmen Perez-del-Pulgar

Isabelle Anguelovski

James JT Connolly

Notes

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