The Public Playground Paradox: "Child’s Joy" or Heterotopia of Fear?

Literature depicts children of the Global North withdrawing from public space to“acceptable islands”. Driven by fears both of and for children, the publicplayground – one such island – provides clear-cut distinctions between childhoodand adulthood. Extending this argument, this paper takes the original approach oftheoretically framing the playground as a heterotopia of deviance, examining –for the first time – three Greek public playground sites in relation to adjacentpublic space. Drawing on an ethnographic study in Athens, findings show fear tounderpin surveillance, control and playground boundary porosity. Normativeclassification as “children’s space” discourages adult engagement. However, in anovel and significant finding, a paradoxical phenomenon sees the playground’spresence simultaneously legitimizing playful behaviour in adjacent public spacefor children and adults. Extended playground play creates alternate orderings andnegotiates norms and hierarchies, suggesting significant wider potential toreconceptualise playground-urban design for an intergenerational public realm

Skateboard City: London in Skateboarding Films

London has been part of the worldwide phenomenon of skateboarding, from the early 1970s right through to the present day. Important sites in the city include the highly contested ‘Undercroft’ area of the Southbank, early purpose-built skateparks such as ‘Skate City’, ‘Rolling Thunder’, ‘Maddog Bowl’ and ‘Rom’, public spaces such as Kensington Gardens and Crystal Palace, and appropriated street sites in locations as diverse as the Shell Centre, Bishopsgate and St Paul’s. This chapter charts the documentation of skateboarding in the UK capital as caught on film, showing how these sites made up a vibrant skateboarding scene. In doing so, it also charts the dramatically changing technologies by which these film documentations occurred, from the earliest days of amateur movies and sporadic news coverage (capturing the relatively innocent arrival of skateboarding as a youthful pastime), through camcorder footage of the burgeoning street-skateboarding scene of the 1990s (raising issues of subculture, urban space and masculinity) through to today’s scene, where a plethora of art-based films, documentaries, social media clips and guerrilla-style advertising have become an integral part of a rich and pluralistic skateboard scene. Film is thus shown to not only help record different space and sites, but also to express and give voice to a changing set of social meanings over the last 40 years

Spatial Barriers and the Formation of Global Art Cities: The Case of Tokyo

This paper addresses a neglected dimension of global cities research: how the idea of economic concentration, its surplus and consequent global influence can be applied to the art world. The research presented here relates to Tokyo as a well‐known example of a global city, advancing existing understandings of Tokyo from the neglected perspective of the arts. Based on qualitative and quantitative research by the author, including cultural and spatial mapping, interviews, ethnographic observations and visual documents, the findings confirm that the role of space and materiality is overlooked in global cities research. The results demonstrate the active contribution and intervention of spatial patterns in the formation of artistic activities. A number of Tokyo's spatial features have an inhibiting effect that shifts artistic activities underground, creating asymmetries in the constitution of symbolic meanings in the city and a failure to openly stimulate artistic practices. As a consequence, Tokyo's vivid art world remains invisible not only to outsiders but to Tokyo itself