Collaging Our Way Through Playgrounds: A Visual Analysis of Children's Spaces in New York City

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Art, Aesthetics, and Aliveness: Analyzing Children's Mobility, Making, and Marking

Abstract

Through a visual analysis of playgrounds, this paper investigates the ways playground design influences children’s play. Focusing on material, cultural and social elements of the playground (e.g equipment, boundaries, signage, neighborhood demographics, funding sources), we forefront the importance of contextual landscapes—understanding the histories, politics, culture, and materiality—as integral in ethnographic research of children at play. Using Holbrook and Pourchier’s (2014) collage as analysis, we use art making to understand how children’s space is configured: how are visual elements also socially and politically constituted by media, public perceptions, urban planning, and circulating discourses of childhood? We argue that children’s mobility and social acts are geopolitically organized by how playgrounds are conceived (Soja, 1996), even before children populate those spaces.

Authors

• Amanda Reeves Fellner, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University