At the playground: Working for a feminist urban curriculum

This essay was commissioned by artist Shahrzad Malekian and curator Ida Højgaard for the book 2024 Breaking Ground with Play. 

Playgrounds breathe laughter and joy, liveliness and vibrancy into cities.  Playgrounds breathe order into bodies, make them move and behave in certain ways. Playgrounds are sites of play. Playgrounds are sites of work. Playgrounds are sites of freedom. Playgrounds are sites of surveillance. Somewhere between these observations began my interest in playgrounds and their significance to working toward a feminist urban curriculum. Specifically, the interest is in the modern idea of the playground, which emerged during the historical period when urbanization took command and gave rise to a new type of public space and urban infrastructure. Playgrounds, much like other dedicated outdoor public spaces such as parks, are part of the modern outdoor infrastructure of cities. Such public spaces are not only key to the critical understanding of the material making and spatial organization of urban modernity, but also to the analysis of the political economies and cultural imaginaries that shaped the modern urban condition. Today, as we inhabit the afterlife of urban modernity, which was constituted by capitalism, coloniality, and patriarchy joining forces to reorganize the conditions of life and death under the regimes of exploitation, extraction and domination, there is growing interest across the humanities and the arts to have access to subjugated histories and to more complex understandings of how modern urbanization took command of everyday life. At the same time, there is anti-colonial and queer feminist insistence to ‘take back the city’ and to envision care-full urban imaginaries in order to create and build urban realities otherwise. I propose here the notion of a feminist urban curriculum for both the critical study of the urban condition, in particular the effects of capitalist-colonial- patriarchal urban modernity and their importance to contemporary planetary urbanization, and for imagining the urban otherwise. For such a feminist urban curriculum, the playground is an excellent site to start from.

 Absent a comprehensive and comparative anti-colonial and queer feminist history of urban playgrounds, this text patches together some contemporary and historical observations to provide e a critical reflection of the playground which presents a public space and a site of gendered and racialized work that, so far, has remained largely overlooked in feminist urban theories. The notion of the urban curriculum is introduced in order to approach the meanings of the playground in relation the formation of the modern urban condition. Furthermore, this idea urban curriculum also allows to critically understood playgrounds in relation to the conditions of contemporary urban life under compulsory neoliberalism with increasing social and ecological injustice, rising wealth inequality, relentless competition in the accelerated race of capitalism, life-long debt sentences because of increasing property values caused by gentrification, imperiled health because of cuts and increasing environmental and climate threats. The urban curriculum is understood as a set of instructions operating on the level of bodies and environments of cities. The urban curriculum is embodied, which means, that it is lived and performed through the movements and behaviors of urban bodies. The urban curriculum is materialized, that is bodily, social, environmental and material.