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Play and Youth Sufficiency in Jarrow

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Spaces for Children and Young People to Play and Hang Out

Project Report

April 2026

Play and Youth Sufficiency in Jarrow – Final Report April 2026Download

This report reflects on recent research which brought together community and academic partners to explore issues of neighbourhood play and of play and youth sufficiency in Jarrow. The research started as a collaboration between Professor Alison Stenning and Paula Turner, a community artist, at Dunn St Primary School, with the active support of then executive head Alison Burden and other school staff. As the project developed, it drew in additional team members: Michelle Trotter (Dunn St Primary), Gemma Lockyer Turnbull (NE Youth), Gerard New (Tyneside Outdoors), and Jackie Boldon (independent play consultant and campaigner).

Jarrow was recently allocated £20m over 10 years from the Pride in Place programme (initially as part of the Long-Term Plan for Towns in October 2023). Jarrow Forward, the ‘Town Board’ established to manage this programme, highlighted the need for better youth and recreational provision in its earliest documents. This created an opportunity to engage decision-makers and connect provision for play and youth to wider policy debates, including poverty, inequality, health and wellbeing, physical activity, and care.

Most Play Sufficiency Assessments (PSAs) are carried out by local authorities. Such assessments generally involve a holistic review of local authority services and provision, in the context of research focused on children’s and families’ experiences of space to play.

This project was undertaken by academic and independent researchers and practitioners. Apart from as interviewees and interlocutors, local authority officers were not involved in devising or carrying out this research. As a result, this report is not a standard Play Sufficiency Assessment, but reflects detailed, rigorous research into key aspects of landscapes for play and hanging out in Jarrow, focused on qualitative, ethnographic, participatory, and observational work. It could form the foundation of, or sit alongside, a fuller Play Sufficiency Assessment.

Not Just Playgrounds: Play and Pride in Place

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In September 2025, the Starmer government launched the “Pride in Place” programme, focused on investing in and accelerating change in urban communities and developed out of two previous programmes, the “Long-Term Plan for Towns”, established by the Sunak government in 2023, and the “Plan for Neighbourhoods”, Labour’s June 2025 renaming of that scheme.

The growth and development of these programmes mean that the final roster includes around 400 UK communities. These communities are identified as some of the country’s most marginalised, “doubly-disadvantaged” by high levels of economic and social need.

The three key objectives of Pride in Place are:

  • To build stronger communities 
  • To create thriving places 
  • To empower people to take back control 

Within these objectives, the programme emphasises local relationships, sense of belonging, community cohesion, pride and safety, neighbourhood vibrancy, high-quality infrastructures, and a say in community futures.

There are lots of questions that can be asked of the initiative (and early critiques are now emerging) but this blog focuses on why play (and not just playgrounds) should be at the heart of every Pride in Place programme.

In September 2025, Play England called for these programmes to deliver on play and “to allocate a fair and proportionate share — ideally at least 20 per cent — to children’s play spaces, reflecting the proportion of children in their local population”. Play England argued for plans for play to extend beyond playgrounds, to include play sufficiency assessments that take into account “all the spaces and places where children play: formal and informal play areas, parks and open spaces, school grounds, streets, neighbourhoods, natural areas, active travel routes, supervised play settings (such as adventure playgrounds), and community recreation facilities”.

The focus on play was reinforced by the £18 million Playgrounds Fund, announced at the 2025 budget and with details shared in March 2026, “ensuring children in 66 of the most deprived communities have quality play spaces, with cash earmarked to buy new or upgrade playgrounds across the country from Tyneside to Torquay”. This fund not only coincides temporally with Pride in Place, but is also narratively connected with it; as Tom Hayes, MP for Bournemouth and chair of the relatively new All Party Parliamentary Group for Play, underlined:

“This investment is a downpayment not only on better playgrounds, but on brighter, stronger communities.”

So, why is play so important for Pride in Place work?

Here I argue that a substantive and broad play lens – reflected in approaches such as play sufficiency – matches the aims of Pride in Place extremely well, but also has the potential to push Pride in Place programmes further, in terms of centring questions of social, spatial and environmental justice.

Much of this reflects not only my research and advocacy on play on streets and in neighbourhoods over the last decade or so, but particularly on collaborative ongoing play and play sufficiency research in Jarrow since autumn 2023, before and during the town’s engagement with the Long-Term Plan for Towns (announced in late 2023) and Pride in Place.

Decades of research into play, especially neighbourhood play, underlines the power of play in revealing and tackling injustice.

Uneven geographies of play can be seen as a good indicator of neighbourhood need. Access to playgrounds, the quality and maintenance of playgrounds, the comfort and security of doorstep spaces, safe mobility around neighbourhoods between spaces for play, pollution in and around play space and associated health risks, for example, all reflect wider patterns of inequality.

Play is community development. Play supports family life and connections within communities. Research and activism around play holds “that children and their play are not separate from other aspects of community life” and that “more people playing out more of the time in more places can improve community cohesion and strengthen intergenerational relationships”. The value of play can’t be reduced to community development, but there is little doubt that play’s effects (and affects) can support the rich and healthy development of communities.

Play animates communities. It often quite literally colours them, transforming sometimes grey urban environments into spaces full of playfulness, mark-making, and the traces of play (toys, chalk, etc.), but play also makes space for emotion and care. Children’s everyday play can animate streets as they occupy pavements, gardens and driveways, alleyways, and small green spaces. Children playing out can draw adults out, as they watch, talk to, and care for their children. Where children play, adults meet.

A play-friendly neighbourhood is a neighbourhood that’s better for everyone. Policies and practices that support play – creating safe and accessible public spaces, enabling safe journeys around neighbourhoods, tackling criminal and antisocial behaviour, making space for connection, for example – also support a wider sense of accessibility, safety and community. It’s often noted that child-friendly environments are also positive for older people and for those with compromised health and mobility.

Play opens our eyes to the spaces and qualities of our streets and neighbourhoods. The very act of trying to play in our neighbourhoods enables us to see our places in detail and forces us to notice and document, implicitly and explicitly, the injustices we encounter – whether that’s about the dominance of motor vehicles, the poverty of street cleaning and maintenance, or the everyday juggling of those living on the street.

Play enables public conversations. The inherent playfulness of play enables an openness or a sense of potential that creates moments for different, perhaps more innovative kinds of thinking, opening up new ways of thinking about our public spaces and how we might use them, but also just making space for neighbours – of all ages – to share information, concerns, perspectives. Play can also enable creative ways to engage communities, that are more inviting and more accessible than meetings with council staff in community centres and online surveys. Play sufficiency approaches offer rich and valuable ways to engage substantively with children and young people about what they need from their communities.

Space for play is social infrastructure. Social infrastructures are “networks of spaces, facilities, institutions, and groups that create affordances for social connection”, and we can see how play spaces can function in this way. Play spaces – formal and informal – are sites of sociality, for children and their carers, and can facilitate encounter and care, often between generations. Playgrounds can be meeting points not only for children, but also for parents and grandparents, ball courts (MUGAs) are spaces for teenagers to meet, chat, share and have fun, and playful streets engender multiple, diverse, loose moments for connection.

Play engenders a sense of belonging, and a right to claim neighbourhood space, for play and more. For a start, “play is the principal way in which children participate within their own communities”. Play is how children engage with and make sense of their everyday spaces, how they develop connections with these spaces, and how they start to make a claim on those spaces. Children who grow up with a sense of connection and attachment to their neighbourhoods and environments are much likely to be “active in forging and maintaining community relations and engaging with others living or working locally”. Indeed, we could argue that play (broadly defined) is how children and young people develop pride in their places.

Play is prefigurative – it literally plays around with ideas and with environments, and opens up possibilities for reimagining what streets and neighbourhoods might look like or might be for, it can prefigure a different kind of urban world, reflecting the needs and desires of children, and their families and wider communities.

In all these ways, we can see play supporting – directly and indirectly – the overarching aims of Pride in Place to build stronger communities, to create thriving places, and to empower people to take back control, but also to connect to more specific intentions around skills and learning, tackling crime and anti-social behaviour, supporting a stronger sense of social safety, enabling physical activity, offering opportunities for volunteering, improving local access and mobility, and reducing the impacts of child poverty.

Some “first phase” Pride in Place programmes are already beginning to identify play as an important aspect of their work, and key actors – such as councillors and MPs – in other communities (including those in receipt of Pride in Place Impact Funds) are both championing the need for investment in play and noticing how often play arises in community conversations.

But, in many of these, the focus is on playgrounds, either investing in the redevelopment of existing, rundown playgrounds, or calling for the creation of new playgrounds where there is community need, a focus reinforced by the £18 million playgrounds fund.

Playgrounds are important, but they can never be the only spaces for play in a neighbourhood, especially one where the hope is to build stronger, thriving, connected, empowered communities.

So, what broader approaches to play might a Pride in Place programme engage with to achieve more? These suggestions emerged from our Jarrow work, and offer a combination of both ideas for engaging with play to explore the foundations of Pride in Place and possibilities for thinking more expansively about play and community.

  • Use play as lens to pay attention to the quality and safety of neighbourhood public spaces, from doorsteps, to paths, parks and town centres
  • Create neighbourhood public spaces that are safe and comfortable in all weathers and seasons, enabling them to be used in bad weather and in the dark
  • Enable safe and accessible routes between playable spaces, in turn creating good routes throughout the neighbourhood
  • Demonstrate a concern for the quality of public space by repairing and maintaining the playgrounds, benches, paths, etc. used by playing children
  • Fund playworkers and youthworkers to create more opportunities for public play and support the animation of public space by play
  • Build adventure playgrounds
  • Recognise the value of community play spaces (such as adventure playgrounds) as hubs for wider social action (safeguarding, food banks, family support, etc.)
  • Develop a play streets programme, allowing ordinary residential space to be safely reclaimed for play
  • Improve facilities such as toilets and access to drinking water to enable children and young people to play for longer more comfortably
  • Integrate play into child poverty strategies to support families, financially and in other ways, to facilitate their children’s play
  • Remove No Ball Games signs and address resident concerns about the possible negative impacts of play in other ways, including by championing the critical value of play
  • Develop a pro-play policy at neighbourhood board or council level to underline the premise that play should be permitted
  • Adopt a play sufficiency approach to map play and develop a strategy for more, better play
  • Ensure that more children with additional needs, children from migrant and refugee families, and others with protected characteristics are equally able to access space to play.

As the first Pride in Place neighbourhoods have not long submitted their plans, and the newest cohort begins the process of engagement – and each programme lasts 10 years – it’s far too early to say what might happen with play and Pride in Place, but it’s clear that there is much that could happen in this space – and I’ll be watching closely.

For more on our Jarrow work, have a look at our presentation to Jarrow Forward, the Jarrow neighbourhood board. This work was carried out with Paula Turner, Michelle Trotter, Jackie Boldon, Gemma Lockyer Turnbull, and Gerard New, with the support of various small grants from Newcastle University.

A version of the arguments I explore here was presented to the Journal of Youth Studies conference at Durham University. You can view the slides here.

Children, Young People and the Built Environment: A Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee Inquiry

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With a group of activists, professionals and academics, led by Tim Gill, Playing Out and allies, I was involved in a call for a Parliamentary Inquiry into Children and the Built Environment in spring last year. In late November, the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) Committee launched an inquiry, framing their focus as follows:

It’s important for children and young people’s mental and physical health that they have access to spaces to play and to socialise. In our inquiry, we want to find out more about how children and young people experience outdoor spaces in towns, cities and rural areas across England. What policy interventions from local and central government could help to deliver streets, estates, villages, neighbourhoods and parks that enable kids to enjoy active outdoor lifestyles and engage with others?

Over 100 people and/or organisations submitted evidence to the inquiry, and oral sessions begin next week in the House of Commons.

I joined dozens of other experts and allies, from spheres as diverse as play, children’s rights, planning, green space, architecture and housing, in a joint statement of evidence, which concluded:

Children’s needs in the built environment have been ignored by Government policy for too long, resulting in enormous damage to their health, happiness and wellbeing – and incalculable cost to society. This now needs to change. The positive impact of prioritising children’s needs in this area could be enormous. Many organisations and experts would gladly contribute to developing a new Government policy approach to children and the built environment, ensuring children can safely access the space outside their homes and across their wider neighbourhoods, giving them the free play, social contact, freedom, healthy development and physical activity they need and benefitting society as a whole.

I also submitted an individual statement of evidence, focused on the connections between play, children’s everyday geographies, and questions of community, aiming to highlight how important children’s play on streets and in neighbourhoods is not only for children’s developing sense of belonging, place attachment and everyday mobility, but also for their wider communities. I draw on my own research, but also on strong evidence from decades of playwork, geography and related research and practice, and, of course, on the experience and expertise of Playing Out (who also submitted their own evidence).

I will be giving evidence next week at the House of Commons, alongside both experts in children’s mental and physical health and activists and campaigners. These sessions will be broadcast live on ParliamentLive.TV.

All of the submitted evidence will be published as the oral sessions get started, and I’ll update this post to include a link.

Children, families, the environment and play on streets

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This brief talk [presented at the British Sociological Association’s Family, Relationships and the Environment symposium] reflects on ongoing research and activism around play streets, and play on streets, over the last 7 or 8 years. Some of this is speculative, some autoethnographic, and some derived from research on and with play streets. I’ll talk both about formal ‘play streets’ schemes (where roads are legally closed for a few hours to create space for play) and more informal, autonomous play on streets.

For most of my time researching these issues, my focus has been much more on social space and on questions of social and spatial justice, albeit with a clear commitment to thinking about the materialities of the street, but I am now working to develop a greater focus explicitly on ‘environments’, at a variety of scales and especially on questions of environmental justice and the ways in which play on streets intersects with, enables and challenges questions of environmental justice, at a variety of scales.

In the few minutes I have, I’d like to talk through five intersecting perspectives on play on streets and ‘the environment’ as a means to start to explore these issues; these perspectives connect with ongoing conversations and conceptualisations about grey spaces, common worlds, damage, repair and care, and justice.

  • Streets might be seen as archetypal grey spaces – not just made of tarmac and concrete, brick and paving (though perhaps interspersed with green space, both public and private) but also interstitial, ambiguous and undervalued; the quality of these environmental contexts varies enormously in terms of care, damage, and pollution, including the dominance of motor vehicles and their associated risks of slow and fast violence, and scales of investment and disinvestment in public and private spaces on the street. But we know that these are the spaces that children choose to play in – and have done for decades – if they are able to, over and above more distant green, blue – or plastic – spaces of play; and yet playing children themselves are often seen as pollutants, out of place in the street environment.
  • In these spaces, children develop forms of play which are entangled with the more-than-human worlds of the street, from granular engagements with the road surface, front gardens, bugs and plants, to moving at different speeds and scales – climbing, running, crawling, scooting – along, around and across the street and its trees, walls, paths, kerbs, its social and environmental affordances for play, experiencing the street in all seasons and all weathers, mapping the spaces, shapes, entanglements, and materialities of the street, and sharing experiences of play with other children of all ages, and with adults who shape and survey children’s play and perhaps remember their own play on their own doorsteps.* Children play on their doorsteps, with more-than-human ‘things’ with complex environmental histories – toys, bikes, balls, and much more. They experience the street with cars displaced (though often as obstacles) and active forms of movement – running, walking, cycling, scooting, skateboarding – valued.
  • We see that these kinds of entanglements and experiences – shared on the street and in family and community conversations about the street, both as the children play and back inside in the homes on the street – can open up ways of thinking about and valuing the street for more-than-cars, reimagining the street itself as a space for dwelling, and starting to act to reclaim, repair and care for the street through small acts of greening or litter picking, which then sometimes grow into conversations about more substantial transformations – claiming more space with planters and parklets, slowing and stopping cars with Children Playing signs, or conversations with councillors and campaigners, and imagining the street anew.
  • In some places and at some times, these microlocal conversations and actions grow further, and connect with other spaces – to think about creating active, liveable and healthy neighbourhoods where children and their families are safe from environmental and social risks, to challenge the place of cars, car culture and motornormativity, and to think about the environmental and climate questions invoked by challenging cars – emissions, air quality, net zero, for example. And in the space of the street and the community, these can connect to questions of intergenerational responsibility and action, to children’s rights not only to safe spaces for play, but also to safe futures.
  • But, as the variety of neighbourhood contexts suggests, these experiences are uneven, and may reinforce inequalities; the capacity to claim space on the street – for children and their adults – is classed, gendered and racialized, in terms both of the nature of the spaces on doorsteps, where risks, obstacles and resources are uneven, and also the very idea that children and their families can claim public space, are entitled to do so. And there are real concerns – although not always reflected in realities – that as some streets (re)claim space for play, for children and adults, the risks of vehicles and pollutants are displaced to neighbouring streets, to others, and to their entangled environments. Yet these challenges and inequalities can themselves mobilize communities for action, to engage with each other and with others locally to connect the different contexts and build bigger campaigns.

Through all these spheres, we can highlight both the complexity and the potential of engagements between children, families and their environments, doorstep and more distant, as they play on their streets.

* The focus in this paper, given the symposium context, was primarily on family relationships but many of these engagements and experiences develop with neighbours, as relationships on the street are transformed by play.

Playing Out, Relationships and Loneliness: Making Connections?

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The recent debates about loneliness and, in particular, the launch of the government’s strategy to tackle loneliness have really animated me in recent weeks and months. More and more reports which explore the experience of loneliness for groups across society, including children and young people, are heartbreaking and angry-making in equal measure. With Sarah Hall, I have argued strongly for a much more political perspective on loneliness, which takes account of austerity and the uneven impacts and burdens of loneliness, but more substantively, I’m also trying to reflect on, understand and explore alternatives to some of the social shifts that have brought us to this place.

Others are better placed and have much more expertise to theorise loneliness. My focus is on thinking about how playing out – an international movement promoting temporary residential road closures to enable children to play and neighbours to meet, involving over 800 streets in nearly 80 UK local authorities – might create the space and atmosphere for connection and present a radical challenge to the erosion of social infrastructures and community spaces, broadly defined.

Academic literatures demonstrate that play itself and spending time outdoors are critical for the formation of a sense of belonging and for relationships to wider communities (Lester and Russell 2010, Gill 2007; Prisk and Cusworth 2018); and streets have long been identified as potential spaces of encounter (Hubbard and Lyon 2018). Recent research by Playing Out (2017) suggested that these benefits are evident on streets that play out. 91% of participants knew more people on their street as a result of playing out, and 84% felt they belonged more in their neighbourhood. In pilot research carried out with streets that play out in North Tyneside, particular forms of sociability that enabled emotional, social, and material flows between neighbours and facilitated a positive reinvigoration of relationships on streets were regularly identified (Stenning 2018).

Although the government’s strategy argues that “loneliness doesn’t discriminate”, there is considerable evidence (DDCMS 2018; What Works 2018) that particular populations are more at risk, such as those with disabilities, special needs, or poor physical or mental health (and their families), new parents, carers, and those who have recently moved home (especially if in the context of bereavement or separation). There is also considerable evidence of loneliness amongst children and young people (Action for Children 2017). These are also groups that have been particularly hard-hit by cuts to benefits and to statutory services, for whom access to spaces to meet and find support are likely to have diminished in the context of austerity (Stenning and Hall 2018). Yet, these are also groups which are likely to be well-represented on streets where neighbours play out.

My research around these themes is focused on two deeply interconnected projects.

The first, developed collaboratively with Playing Out, is centred on the desire to build an evidence base around playing out and loneliness and identify strategies to develop playing out in particular ways that might alleviate loneliness. This is funded by Newcastle University’s Social Justice Fund and will be based on pilot research in Bristol in the first half of 2019.

The second is a broader – as yet unfunded – project which asks how playing out shapes residents’ attachments, material and emotional, to their streets and the people on them and how play has the potential to challenge the erosion of relationships in everyday places. It is rooted in an idea of potential space, developed from the work of Donald Winnicott and defined as “an inviting and safe interpersonal field in which one can be spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others” (Casement, 1985, 162). This part of the research seeks to think about how playing out might connect not only to the reported rise in loneliness, but also to longer-standing debates about austerity and neoliberalism and their impacts on communities and relationships. Through this, it connects to ideas about the loss of shared spaces of intergenerational encounter and community and of social infrastructures (Klinenberg 2018) and about a continuing decline in the quality of relationships in our everyday lives (Rustin 2013), including with our neighbours (The Young Foundation 2010).

Play on streets is about making connections, in all sorts of material and emotional ways, but it also offers me an opportunity to think about and make connections between lots of different literatures and ideas that excite me.

Feeling the squeeze: Towards a psychosocial geography of austerity in low-to-middle income families

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The first actually-published paper from the research in Cullercoats that initiated this blog is now available online in Geoforum. Some of the ideas were developed in my short Discover Society article, and more are forthcoming when this presentation gets properly written up, hopefully within the next few months.

If you can’t access it through the paywall, drop me an email and I can send a copy.

Potential Space? Play, Parents and Streets – A Blog of a Preliminary Paper

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[Disclaimer: This is a very early take on my ongoing research.  I haven’t yet had a chance to work in detail with the interview transcripts or fully analyse the questionnaires – this post is based on my immediate reflections on the research as it progressed and as I began to identify themes and ideas. It is based on a paper presented at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference in Cardiff in August 2018.]

Introduction

The “playing out” movement started around 2009 in Bristol, created by two mothers, Alice and Amy, on their street, in the hope that their children might have some of the same opportunities to play out, on their doorsteps, as Alice and Amy did. By July 2018, over 800 streets had started playing out regularly, across 77 UK local authority areas, including Hackney, Brighton, Leeds, Hull, Edinburgh, and North Tyneside, and the movement had also spread to towns and cities in Australia, the US, Spain, Romania, Germany and more. The playing out model rests on short, regular, licensed and stewarded road closures, giving children the chance to play safely near home and giving neighbours the chance to meet right on their streets.

The rise of “playing out”, as a movement, reflects the documented decline in autonomous street play, as the risks (Gill 2007) of cars, strangers and pollution, in particular, and growing pressures on children’s and parents’ free time (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2014, 2018) seem to have reduced parents’ inclination to allow or enable their children to play out on their streets. Within a generation or two, the possibility for children to play out freely and safely has all but disappeared in many parts of the country (though this appears to be a pattern refracted by class and by built environment, in different ways).

There has already been a considerable amount of research about the renewed playing out phenomenon, documenting the benefits for children’s levels of physical activity and health, for their friendships, for the very local environment, and for the sense of community and belonging on the streets involved. The project on which this blog post reports picks up on this final aspect in particular and shifts the focus slightly away from children and their geographies to think about adult participants too, to ask how regular playing out sessions change the nature of everyday relationships on the streets involved.

The Research Context

At the heart of this project is an idea of everyday relationships. Borrowing ideas from the British object relations school, I use a conceptualisation of relationships, with intimate and imagined others, as the environment within which we find ways of going on being. As Gomez (1997, 2) argues: “the need for relationship is primary”. In this conception, it is the relationships around us that contain and facilitate us, help us to go on being. This is an idea developed, within geography, by Steve Pile (1996, 12) who explores the building of ‘secure personal geographies’, such that a “sense of a solid, shared world and stable sense of ourselves within that world leads to psychic and physical survival”. These ideas are developed here alongside a considerable literature which highlights and explores the key connection between children, play and streets and their everyday relationships. The articulation between community and play has been the focus of series of reports by Play England in the context of their annual Play Day events, and this has been explored more and more through debates around the child- or family-friendly cities. Rather than review the literature as a whole, there are a number of ideas to draw out here:

Firstly, it is argued that there is a symbiotic relationship between play and our recognition of and participation in our everyday spaces and environments – our own streets are at the heart of our explorations of and relationships with the world and the ability to play in them is critical to our sense of belonging to and learning within them. Stuart Lester and Wendy Russell state clearly that “play is the principal way in which children participate within their own communities” (Lester and Russell, 2010, x) and Tim Gill, in a quote cited regularly in support of street play, insists that “the street is the starting point for all journeys.”

Secondly, as Bornat (2016, 115) argues, children’s presence in the street and other community spaces is seen as a generator of social space: children’s everyday play can animate streets as they occupy pavements, gardens and driveways, and move between each other’s homes. Children playing out can draw adults out, as they watch, talk to, and care for their children. Where children play, adults meet. As Sam Williams argues, in the context of child-friendly cities, there is “enormous potential for child-centred activities such as play streets to bring people and places together” (Williams, 2017). Krista Cowman’s historical work draws attention to the key role of streets as ”social and play spaces in urban environments” (2017, 234), such that “mothers … saw play street orders as the best means to preserve them as a safe social space for themselves and their children” (251, emphasis added)

Thirdly, play itself has been identified as a catalyst for community such that the space, freedom, intergenerationality and looseness of play have the potential to create the space for connection (Play England 2015); as Play Wales (2015) suggest in a review of mental health and play, play can be seen, amongst other things, as ‘connection’ and ‘taking notice’.

Lastly, there is a need to think about and tease out the importance of children and of play – are they independent catalysts of relationships – i.e. is the presence of children enough, or is play essential too? In the context of street play, is it the children or the play that has the potential to generate ‘community’?

The Research

This post is based on a small-scale, qualitative, (auto)ethnographic and participatory project, developed with the existing North Tyneside street play organisers. It integrates data from a preliminary questionnaires, with both local and national participants, interviews with seven street activators in North Tyneside, running my own street play sessions, engaging in participant observation in others, and being involved in PlayMeetStreet North Tyneside, a voluntary group promoting and developing street play in the borough. As I mentioned above, this is very much an early take on the material reflecting really preliminary analyses – I haven’t yet had a chance to work in detail with the interview transcripts or fully analyse the questionnaires – this post is based on my immediate reflections on the research as it progressed and as I began to identify themes and ideas

Donald Winnicott and Potential Space

In thinking about all of these questions, I’m working with the ideas of Donald Winnicott, a paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was profoundly engaged in ideas about space, play and everyday relationships. Potential space is defined as:

“an inviting and safe interpersonal field in which one can be spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others” (Casement, 1985, 162).

It is a liminal space, between (or perhaps across) an individual and their environment, located between or across the internal and external such that, for example, whilst at the theatre, we find ourselves simultaneously in the physical space of the theatre, in the imaginative space of the play, and in the internal, emotional space of our minds. Potential space is, of course, a space full of potential, where new relationships with ourselves and with others can be created. It is an area of experiencing, living, culture, creating – and, importantly, of relating and playing. To reiterate the quote above, it is a space in which we are “spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others”, and in this we can identify an innate connection between play and relationships in potential space. The importance of play is founded on the presence of others who can receive, respond to, facilitate, witness, join in, celebrate, remember and enjoy the play and creativity, and playfulness creates an openness to new object relationships. Winnicott saw an innate connection between play and relationships, through the idea of potential space, which he saw as a space between people – children and adults – that is playful, safe, trustful, and creative. He believed play to be vital for those of all ages, seeing adult play – in art, creativity, humour, conversation – as equally important as children’s play in creating a liveable life.

I’m now going to shift to explore some of the key themes I’m beginning to identify in my research, organised around the idea of ‘hanging out’, of ’knowing your neighbours’ and of ‘crossing boundaries’.

Hanging Out

The idea and experience of hanging out is something which has garnered considerable attention from geographers of young people (see, amongst others, Fotel 2009; Pyyry and Tani 2017; Tani 2015; Tani 2016). In these literatures, hanging out is seen as a collective practice of appropriating streets, the creation of a liminal space for socialization with peers. The spaces of hanging out are theorised as “loose spaces” (Tani 2015) which enable those hanging out to deepen relationships with the city and “rework the atmosphere of the city” (Pyyry and Tani, 2017, 5) through deeply affectual “moments of joyous togetherness” (Pyyry and Tani, 2017, 5). Yet, these are also often spaces and practices which are theorised as the rejection of adult supervision and an escape from the adult world, which challenges the possibility of adult hanging out.

During a street play session, all that is expected of parents (or other adults) is that they are present on the street. The ‘playing out’ model assumes that parents are always present and responsible for their own children. Parents may play, with their children or own their own, but part of the ethos of street play is for autonomous child-led play, such that parents often stand back, at the side, letting the children get on with playing.

So adults hang out together, perching on walls, bringing out garden chairs, or sitting on curbs. Often they cluster around one house (often that of the organiser), where there may be drinks and snacks.

Parents are brought together, they’re present together, sharing a collective, familiar, public space, in a way that is legitimised by the presence of children, and in a space that is open, loose – and, of course, playful. As Cathy, who has been running sessions on her street for more than five years, explained when describing what a street play session feels like the sense of space is key:

“Oh, it feels lovely, it feels wide, I mean that’s the first thing we all noticed the first time we did it, was how wide the street was … it’s quite a big space, normally it feels quite cramped and restrictive and dangerous. So, yeah, I think the feeling of space was the first thing.”

But parents also experience a different sense of time, a change of rhythm, a slowing down, in contrast to the routines of their everyday lives. Annie, for example, celebrated the slowed time of playing out sessions, where people can sit and chat and hang out, in contrast to the more ordinary experience:

“people are so busy, people don’t really have time for conversations, when you’re dashing to work and to school and things”

These were also spaces of play for adults too – playing with children, but playing with each other as well – scooter races, water fights, skipping, football, chalking, all of which appeared to allow for a different, looser kind of sociability than ordinary, highlighting the relationship between play and potential, play and others, and play and relationships.

As I’ve suggested, the presence of children seemed also to be key – adults were out because children were out and hanging out seemed to become problematic without children. Jenny illustrated this dilemma as she discussed how, towards the end of a street play session, she realised that her kids were no longer playing out (they’d gone to a neighbour’s) and suddenly she felt uncomfortable, being on the street, hanging out, without good reason.

Much of this resonates with Krista Cowman’s account of mid-20th century street play in which “children’s outdoor play facilitated women’s sociability and encouraged their use of the street” (p.236), enacted by women sitting on low walls, watching children play, and taking a break. In Cowman’s work and in the evidence presented here there are three key ideas: adults’ use of space; their use of time; and the presence of children.

Knowing your Neighbours

Here we turn to the question of what happens in these loose spaces of hanging out: what do the practices of hanging out do and what do they enable in the context of street play? It appears, following Tani and Pyyry (2017), that they reshape the spaces and atmospheres of the street, producing a particular kind of relationship between neighbours. In many cases, what is produced and remarked upon in questionnaire responses (see below) is a low-level notion of ‘knowing’ and ‘being known’, which appears to describe a level of recognition and familiarity of other faces on the street, between adults, between children, and between children and adults.

All sort of events, practices, moments emerge out of this knowing, but I want to focus in particular on the sense of safety experienced in this recognition. Respondents felt that they could address each other for help, of all kinds, and that their kids too would know neighbouring adults who they could approach for help. In interview, this was especially strong for those whose partners worked long hours or away, through a sense that they were known, seen, recognised on the street, and in this sense looked after, or contained. Annie explained:

“I like to know that if anybody needed, you know, help, you can go and call on anybody, my husband works long hours, I like to know that, you know, if we had some sort of emergency, I might just run down or across the street, give them a call”

In the immediate reports of change, then, a very particular kind of relationship dominated, but there were also many instances “when good neighbours become good friends” to quote a 1980s TV series. Relationships deepened, became more multi-stranded, and there was considerable socialising – between adults and children – outwith street play sessions, in homes, at the pub etc.. This step – the development of friendships – depended on and reflected much more personal connections, and was both enriching and excluding.

Crossing Boundaries

In the step between ‘knowing’ and ‘befriending’ boundaries, physical, social and emotional, became clear and flagged questions of what happens to those who aren’t included or don’t want to be? We see boundaries emerging in the delineation of friends and neighbours, but we can also see boundaries blurring and being crossed in the spaces of street play.

In a sense, we can characterise the street in this context as a micro-public space, following Amin (2002) – the street is a public space, it is not necessarily an intimate space, but it is at the same time a familiar space, an in-between, third space – between the internal and external, as Winnicott might have put it. The particular context of street play seems to make these boundaries more fluid, as there is license to move between the street and neighbours’ homes. Street play seemed to extend the publicness of the street to neighbours’ homes, to remove the barriers of invitation, but also seemed to domesticate the street by extending the atmosphere of the living room out. Living Streets (2009) describes our streets as “our extended front rooms” – street play extends our front rooms to the street and the street to our homes and gardens.

Amongst other transformations, interviewees reported:

  • A noticeable opening up even in the act of doorknocking to arrange the first session – for many, this was the first time they’d walked up the paths, knocked on the doors, of all but their most proximate neighbours, the necessity to consult immediatey appeared to create the potential for new connections;
  • Going to see neighbours extensions, gardens, renovations during street play sessions, when they had never been into each other’s houses before, and explored the resonances, the familiarity of visiting homes that were just like theirs, on terraced streets or twentieth-century semis – as Annie noted, “we have the houses in common”;
  • Children moving between the street and homes or back gardens with thresholds being loosely policed – several adults reported popping in for something only to find half a dozen children playing inside, such that activities of street play for adults and children took place across and in between homes and the street;
  • All of this activity during street play sessions extended beyond the session itself and resulted in more socialising between adult neighbours in their homes and more playdates between neighbouring children;
  • And things and favours crossed thresholds too – there was more lending, borrowing, babysitting, and house/pet/plant-checking after streets had started playing out.

There are two important provisos to all this. Firstly, the fluidity reflected the physical layout of the street and the microgeography of the playing out session – certain houses and certain families, located around a key point on the street (often the middle of the street or the organiser’s home), were more likely to flow and be the sites of flow; those who lived further away could be both protected and excluded from these boundary crossings. Secondly, the boundaries were policed: respondents noted that there were limits to how many people (children or adults) they would want crossing their thresholds and to whom – less known neighbours, more unruly children, adults with whom you didn’t click might be excluded, deliberately or accidentally.

Imagined Futures

As the discussion of crossing boundaries suggests, the effects of street play extend beyond the three-hour sessions. These can be seen not only in the extended relationships, but also through tangible and intangible affective and material transformations in the street, and in the imagination of new futures for the street.

One of the most resonant aspects of this is chalk – almost every street chalks with abandon during the sessions – we give out chalk with our playing out kits – and this can last for days or weeks after the session, depending on the weather, a reminder of the street being transformed, different, something else. And, symbolically perhaps, this can persist even longer – this for example is the Google Street View image of my street – with post-street play chalk markings recorded with semi-permanence.

Other transformations are created in the street too, beyond the closure itself, including Facebook and WhatsApp groups bring neighbours together to share knowledge, concerns, favours, offers, recommendations, news, events, celebrations – and anticipations of the next session, and forms of everyday sociability – waving, saying hello, chatting, planning, banter and jokes – as neighbours walk to school, go in and out of houses, jostle for parking spaces, garden, and walk their dogs.

These develop and translate into imagined and potential futures as the possibilities of street play are felt. In interview, Annie deliberated on her family’s future housing needs, reflecting on their conversations about the value of the relationships they’ve built since they started playing out, and concluding that they envisage a future of staying and extending rather than moving:

“So we’ve been in this huge dilemma of, do we stay or do we move, do we extend, do we just buy a house and get a bigger bedroom, err bigger, more bedrooms and things but, errm, it’s the neighbours and it’s the area and you just think well actually it’s so important, erm, so we’ll look at some point we’ll probably end up doing an extension so we can stay and so we can be here…”

Others have started to discuss collective, street futures as playing out makes a space for new possibilities, for a more fundamental reclaiming of the street. On one street during a street play session, the adults turned the conversation to the possibility of closing the street permanently to cars, or implementing a partial or temporary narrowing of the street, shifting the balance further away from cars. Reflecting this, on another street a child – without adult prompting – chalked No Cars on the closed road.Playing Out itself proclaims “a vision of streets as vibrant, playable spaces” and plans for its own obsolescence: “ultimately, our aim is for playing out to be a normal everyday activity for all children, wherever they live, rather than an organised, supervised event”.

Potential Space? Play, Parents and Streets

This paper seeks to use Winnicott’s notion of potential space and its tying together of play and relationships to explore what happens – or what might happen – when streets play out. The decision and desire to create a space for children to play on the streets appears to legitimate the creation of a space on the street that differs from the everyday and permits the presence of adults as well as children on the street. In this context, the centrality of play creates an atmosphere of space, looseness, and informality, and a different kind of rhythm or pace, which enables both children and adults to have fun, and to have fun with others.

The looseness appears to facilitate a new kind of sociability, a new kind of contact and engagement which rests on a sharing, a being together, a recognition and familiarity and creates the potential for material, embodied and affective flows across thresholds, animating the space of the street and nature and density of everyday relationships on the street.

What is more, building on common understandings of play being the means through which children and young people get to know, to connect to and to deepen their relationships with their immediate environments, I also want to argue that street play enables adults to connect to their streets too, to become more attached to their streets, to know their streets better and, thus, to experience their streets as spaces which have the potential to hold and contain them.

In this sense, street play can be seen as a radical act, full of potential, which can reshape affective atmospheres and spaces of the street

But it not without its challenges and limitations – and I just want to touch here on an important issue – a great deal of what I have discussed here is classed and gendered, at the very least. Playing out might be seen as middle class phenomenon, reflecting the different modalities of autonomous street play in neighbourhoods with different class profiles – it is not quite as simple as this (see, for example, this report on playing out in disadvantaged areas and this from Playing Out on street play on estates), but thinking through questions of class is an important part of my ongoing analysis. And secondly, much of the energy and labour invested in playing out is women’s – of 22 streets in North Tyneside that have played out over the last three years, just two street organisers are men; and, of course, Playing Out was founded by two mothers, Alice and Amy. Men and women appear to take on different roles during sessions, and are differentially engaged in what extends from the sessions into the everyday life of the street, so this is not to say that men aren’t involved nor that street play is not transformative for them, but again, a gendered analysis will be critical.

Notwithstanding these caveats, I argue that planning and doing playing out sessions reshapes everyday relationships on streets, creating the potential for new forms of sociability, care, connection, and fun, which in turn transform the space of the street to one of potential and possibility.

Playing Out and Everyday Relationships: Mapping the Psychosocial Geographies of Street Play in North Tyneside

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This new project, funded by the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, will enable me to assess the feasibility, value and relevance of a developing project of participatory, psychosocial research around the idea of ‘playing out’ (organised sessions of street play for children and families) and everyday relationships (with friends, family, and neighbours), which builds on my recent work on everyday relationships and the psychosocial geographies of austerity and extends existing work on ‘playing out’.

From around 2009, Playing Out CIC has promoted and supported the development of temporary residential street closures for play across the UK, starting in Bristol and expanding to over 400 streets in around 50 different towns and cities. Since 2015, House of Objects, an educational community interest company (CIC), has worked with Play England and Playing Out CIC to support neighbours to close their streets for play on a regular basis in North Tyneside. Ten North Tyneside streets have run one-off or regular ‘playing out’ sessions in the last two years, each attended by 15-25 children of varying ages, and their parents, grandparents and other carers. There have already been some studies of this phenomenon, in geography and beyond, but these have, not surprisingly, focused on play and on changing children’s geographies (e.g. Ferguson and Page 2015; Tranter 2016; Murray and Devecchi 2016). Attention to the wider psychosocial (social and emotional) geographies of street play have received important but incidental attention. It is commonly argued that street play supports increasing social cohesion and stronger communities, and these have become core ideas in the promotion of playing out. This project aims to interrogate this further, paying attention to ideas around security, belonging, trust, identity, attachment, togetherness, and neighbouring through a focus on street play and ‘everyday relationships’ in North Tyneside to ask if and how playing out transforms the psychosocial geographies of the streets involved. This pilot project asks the following key questions:

  • How do participants imagine, understand and experience ideas of community and neighbouring in the context of their street play sessions?
  • What changes have participants witnessed in the geographies of their streets’ everyday relationships?
  • How, if at all, have the effects of street play sessions ‘spilled over’ into the wider everyday life of the streets involved?

This will be a small-scale, qualitative, (auto)ethnographic and participatory project, developed with the existing North Tyneside street play organisers (of which I am one, through PlayMeetStreet North Tyneside), with the following key stages:

  1. Planning and preliminary meetings with key organisers.
  2. Focus group with street organisers to develop the notion of everyday relationships and street play. This will enable me to hone the focus to guide interviews and participant observation.
  3. Visit Playing Out CIC (Bristol) to interview national organisers to set research in wider context.
  4. I will join at least one street play session in each currently active street (likely to be between 5 and 8), observing and participating in the activities of both children and adults. During these sessions, I will also arrange follow-up, in-depth, qualitative interviews with participants (2 or 3 from each street) to develop responses to the key research questions.
  5. Write and present report to local and national playing out activists; present preliminary paper to internal seminar.

A reading list on the social and economic geographies of austerity in Ireland

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Sander van Lanen, currently at Groningen but formerly based in Cork, sent me this list of readings on the geographies of austerity in Ireland. I spend a fair amount of time in Ireland (mostly the west, around Galway) so I’m very aware of and interested in the Irish experiences of recession and austerity, but more from a lay perspective than an academic one.*

There are a few Irish references on my previous lists, but it’s great to have this more comprehensive list. Ireland’s experiences resonate with the British experience, but there are also some particular aspects which reflect Ireland’s very different social and economic geographies, especially around housing and property (including ghost estates), and around family and generation (an area I’m increasingly interested in), and which encourage to see Britain’s particularities too.

So, thank you, Sander!

Sander has himself worked on the impacts of Irish austerity on disadvantaged urban youth in Dublin and Cork and his recent Urban Geography paper is well worth a read.

*As an aside, one of the best novels I’ve read recently was Conor O’Callaghan’s Nothing on Earth, about Ireland’s ghost estates. It’s amazing. Read it.

 

 

Carney G.M., T. Scharf, V. Timonen & C. Conlon (2014) ‘Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt’: Solidarity between generations in the Irish crisis, Critical Social Policy, 34(3): 312-332.

Crowley, N. (2012) Lost in austerity: Rethinking the community sector, Community Development Journal, 48(1): 151-157.

Drudy, P.J. & M.L. Collins (2011) Ireland: From boom to austerity, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 4(3): 339-354.

Forde, C., D. O’Byrne, & F, Ó’hAdhmaill (2015) Community development in Ireland under austerity and local government change: Policy and practice, The changing landscape of local and community development in Ireland: Policy and Practice, Cork: Institute for Social Sciences in the 21st Century.

Fraser, A., E. Murphy & S. Kelly (2013) Deepening neoliberalism via austerity and ‘reform’: The case of Ireland, Human Geography, 6(2): 38-53.

Free, M. & C. Scully (2016) The run of ourselves: Shame, guilt and confession in post-Celtic Tiger Irish media, International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Kitchin, R., C. O’Callaghan & J. Gleeson (2014) The new ruins of Ireland? Unfinished estates in the post-Celtic Tiger Era, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(3): 1069-1080.

Kitchin, R., C. O’Callaghan, M. Boyle, J. Gleeson & K. Keaveny (2012) Placing neoliberalism: The rise and fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger, Environment and Planning A, 44(6): 1302-1326.

Mercille, J. & E. Murphy (2015) Conceptualising European privatisation processes after the great recession, Antipode, 48(3): 685-704.

Mercille, J. (2013) The role of the media in fiscal consolidation programmes: the case of Ireland, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 38(2): 281-300.

Murphy, E. & M. Scott (2014) ‘After the Crash’: Life satisfaction, everyday financial practices and rural households in post Celtic Tiger Ireland, Journal of Rural Studies, 34: 37-49.

Murphy, E. & M. Scott (2014) Household vulnerability in rural areas: Results of an index applied during a housing crash, economic crisis and under austerity conditions, Geoforum 51: 75-86.

O’Callaghan, C., M. Boyle & R. Kitchin (2014) Post-politics, crisis, and Ireland’s ‘ghost estates’, Political Geography, 42: 121-133.

O’Callaghan, C., S. Kelly, M. Boyle & R. Kitchin (2015) Topologies and topographies of Ireland’s neoliberal crisis, Space and Polity, 19(1): 31-46.

Waldron, R. & D. Redmond (2017) “We’re just existing, not living!” Mortgage stress and the concealed costs of coping with crisis, Housing Studies, 32(5): 584-612.

Waldron, R. (2016) The “unrevealed casualties” of the Irish mortgage crisis: Analysing the broader impacts of mortgage market financialisation, Geoforum, 69: 53-66.

Whelan, C.T., B. Nolan & B. Maítre (2016) The great recession and the changing distribution of economic stress across income classes and the life course in Ireland: A comparative perspective, Journal of European Social Policy, 24(5): 470-485.

 

Austerity and Everyday Relationships in Low-to- Middle Income Families in the UK

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This is a PDF of my recent presentation at the Nordic Geographers’ Meeting in Stockholm. I’m hoping to get this written up in the next few months, but in the meantime…

NGM Presentation

The paper’s abstract was as follows:

In the context of a research project which explores the experiences of austerity in a small number of ‘squeezed middle’, ‘just about managing’ (low-to-middle income) families in north east England, this paper focuses on the place of everyday relationships within and beyond the family in mediating austerity. It uses a psychosocial framing to foreground the importance, complexity and diversity of relationships in making sense of and negotiating changing socio-economic circumstances, attempting to think about and connect the psychic dynamics of families’ relationships and the social dynamics of austerity and recession, and to develop a psychosocial geography of everyday austerity. After setting out some ideas about the nature and value of relationships, the paper asks how and why relationships with family, friends, neighbours, acquaintances and wider communities have been invoked, used, challenged, remade, and imagined as families have navigated the transformations of austerity. As part of the ‘squeezed middle’, these are not families living in poverty, but they have all experienced real threats and losses in the context of austerity, redundancies, falling incomes, tightened budgets, and growing insecurities, for example. The paper explores the ways in which these shifts are connected, in families’ reflections and narrations, to the place of children and their futures in family dreams, the diverse support and demands of friends in crises, large and small, memories of earlier family lives, and everyday negotiations with partners, husbands and wives, and wider families. It seeks to map these shifting relationships, identifying the varying sites and spaces, within and beyond the family home, in which they are made and remade. In these ways, the paper connects to ongoing debates, political, popular and academic, about relationships, austerity, and neoliberalism more widely, to reflect on their diverse and complex articulations.

Thanks to Sarah Hall, John Horton and Helena Pimlott-Wilson for organising the session.