Grants and residencies

Research

Care spaces in times of crisis: Designing urban public spaces of play in the Global South

Application summary

The current health crisis has re-exposed one of the most important contradictions of contemporary capitalist urbanization: although cities are more powerful and populated than ever, they are also more unequal, divided and less caring for all. In the midst of this pandemic, while the privilege urban elites are generally able to pay for and access to the care, shelter or leisure they need to sustain their daily lives, for the most deprived populations of growing metropolises, especially in the global South, this is becoming more difficult or outright impossible. The rising of urban inequality is indicative of today’s crisis of care and social reproduction—a crisis highly gendered and racialized, in which people’s capacities for sustaining and replenish their lives are stretching to the breaking point. This research focuses on a little attended but crucially important site of the everyday life, especially for children: open public spaces for play—particularly in Mexico City’s growing periphery, where these spaces are experiencing a considerable shrinkage and deracination. Its aim is to investigate how open public spaces for play might be expanded and reinvented against current restrictions and the acute crisis of care and social reproduction. The research will be developed as an inquiry process in which theory and practice will be in constant dialogue. A theoretical framework will be constructed around the fields of Design, Urban studies, and Feminist Social Reproduction theory. The practice-based part will build on imaginative and participatory design methods to develop spatial interventions that will be employed as playful devices, in order to inquire the concerns and horizons regarding play as care. Through a highly interdisciplinary approach, the research will challenge the established idea that, in times of uncertainty, play spaces do not represent an alternative to the regimes of everyday inequality, particularly in the growing megacities of the global South.

Contemporary capitalism is undermining social reproduction—the life-making work that sustains everyday life. Feminist scholars have conceptualised this as a ‘crisis of social reproduction’, which the COVID-19 pandemic exposed as gendered, racialised and classed, with women, particularly poor women, carrying the heaviest burdens. At the core lies a contradiction: capitalism depends on life-making work for its own reproduction, yet systematically devalues it in the drive for profit. In urban settings, especially in the Global South, the crisis is evident in the growing inequalities faced by urban majorities in accessing infrastructures—housing, education, public space, and more—on which social reproduction depends. This research focused on one such infrastructure: public play spaces, often overlooked in urban debates despite their importance in sustaining the daily lives of children and communities. It examined these spaces in Mexico City’s poor neighbourhoods, where they are scarce or deteriorated. Developed as a dialogue between theory and practice, the research investigated how public play spaces might be created amid the crisis of social reproduction. To do so, a theoretical framework was built at the intersection of urban studies, participatory design, and feminist approaches to social reproduction. At the practice level, seven temporary playful interventions were co-created, and three play-driven participatory processes were co-developed, resulting in three permanent play spaces in poor neighbourhoods. While the interventions supported social reproduction and reclaimed play as a life-making activity, they revealed the extensive labour required to create them. Examining how this work was organised and its tensions, the research shows that creating play spaces is a terrain of struggle—a contested process exposing the central contradiction of social reproduction. Other outputs included three scientific articles, two more in progress and a forthcoming dissertation.

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