Toward a green and playful city: understanding the social and political production of children's relational wellbeing in Barcelona

Abstract

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.

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the EU H2020 ERC project GreenLULUs (GA678034). This research also contributes to the Maria de Maetzu Unit of Excellence grant (MDM-, 2015-0552) at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA). Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA). Juan de la Cierva Incorporación grant programme (IJCI-2016-31100) from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia Inovación y Universidades.