Stuart Lester - International Council for Children's Play

ICCP Conference paper 2012 

Vibrant spaces: re-configuring adults ‘providing play’ 

Starting with Colin Ward’s assertion that children will play anywhere and with anything, this 

presentation will challenge the notion of adults ‘providing play’. Underpinning this phrase are 

numerous interconnected assumptions about play, space, adult and child that work collectively to 

produce a particular form of relationship between these elements based on separation: children are 

apart from the adult world and need specific attention and space to be a ‘child-becoming-adult’. It 

assumes a dominance that not only positions children as subordinate but also by implication situates 

adults as providers for and protectors of children’s separateness in the special spaces and 

institutions of childhood. 

Drawing on research and observations from adult designed spaces (schools, playwork settings, 

museums) the presentation will consider how an alternative understanding of ‘playing’, as moments 

in which the limits of the real world are temporarily set to one side, reveals other ways of producing 

space/time and by doing so opens up the possibility of re-visioning ways of being ‘adult’ and ‘child’. 

Paying attention to such vibrant moments offers a chance to reconstitute the institutions of social 

life as co-produced spaces where adults and children can simply get on and go on together. 

Stuart Lester – Senior Lecturer in Play and Playwork, University of Gloucestershire, UK 

slester@glos.ac.uk 

The University of Gloucestershire Post-Graduate Play and Playwork distance learning programme 

provides a range of professional development modules for all those involved in supporting 

time/space for children’s play. Full details are available at: 

http://www.glos.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/plp/Pages/default.aspx 

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Introduction 

Along with the recognition that children play everywhere and with anything, which should stand as 

the first thought for any adult involved in working to support children’s play, Colin Ward (1979:86) 

tellingly observes that the ‘provision that is made for their needs operates on one plane, but 

children operate on another’. It is this notion of separate planes between adult desire for children 

and children’s desire for playing that this paper addresses. 

The Conference title, ‘Providing Play’, could be seen as deliberately provocative, inviting a range of 

challenges to the essentialist notion that somehow play can be provided. But the suspicion is that 

there remains a strong feeling that somehow adults can and should provide ‘play’. At a superficial 

level, this may seem like an exercise in semantics; what we intend by this phrase is not providing 

play per se but rather making time/spaces available in which children can play. If that is the case, 

then this paper has already served its purpose by raising this issue and calling for a more considered 

use of language from ‘providing play’ to ‘providing play spaces’. 

But there is a deeper and more fundamental concern here that questions the common-sense 

assumptions we make about play, space, childhood and by inference adulthood (recognising that 

questions of what it may mean to be ‘adult’ certainly do not figure as prominently as the gaze and 

attention we bring to meanings of ‘child’). It is these interrelated themes that are critically 

introduced and briefly explored here to so see what else might emerge. It adopts a playful stance to 

the dominant ways of thinking about providing for play. Playful, in this context, refers to the 

continuous problematizing of the order of things, a ‘what if…’ approach that is at the heart of 

playing, to see what more may be possible. It will also draw on recent and on-going ‘experiments’ in 

institutional space to illustrate some of these possibilities. 

Common-sense production of childhood, space and play 

There is a danger in such a short paper of reducing complex ideas to a series of general and 

simplistic assertions, and while wary of this, this opening section will present some of the dominant 

approaches to the issue of providing play. As a starting position, the ways in which play is defined 

and valued in any society is part of the wider construction of childhood. In the minority world, and 

increasingly spreading across the globe, childhood is marked as a period of separation in which 

adult rationality and autonomy hold value as the most desirable qualities; not to be in possession of 

these qualities places children as ‘separate from’ and lacking (Lee, 2005). Separation arises from 

difference, used in this context as a way of placing childhood as a unitary and universal category 

that while being a different state from adulthood, is defined by its subordinate relationship to it 

(Dahlbeck, 2010: 1). Thus children, because of their immaturity, hold a special place: adults are 

burdened with responsibilities while children are carefree (Cunningham, 1995) Constructed as 

‘carefree’, childhood is part of a utopian vision in which children are redemptive angels; they hold 

the promise of a better tomorrow if only this promise can be actualised. Increasingly, therefore, the 

task of supporting children to ‘achieve their full potential’ has fallen to the institutional spaces of 

childhood (nursery, kindergarten, school, playground, health centre and so on). The ways in which 

these institutions are planned and used is a reflection of the values which any society (or the 

dominant powers within society) places on space and time. It marks the construction of childhood 

as a ‘privileged domain of innocence, spontaneity, play, freedom and emotion in opposition to a 

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public culture of culpability, discipline, work, constraint and rationality’ (Aitken, 2001: 7). Everyday 

‘spacings’ and spatial routines situate children, not only controlling and guide their actions but by 

moral pronouncements enjoin children to commit on-going acts of self-regulation to conform to 

adult expectations. Spaces are designed to progress children from immature to mature, irrational 

to rational. Accompanying the increasing institutionalisation of childhood is a reduction in 

children’s ability to gain access to public space. Children’s presence may be at odds with the 

dominant design principles of order, safety, predictability, visibility, and ease of (adult) movement 

which invariably situates children as ‘out of place’. 

The tracings of childhood and space briefly introduced here find further expression in the way that 

play is currently valued. Sutton-Smith (1997) observes we have all played and may well remember 

the feeling of playing, but when it comes to making theoretical statements about play we may fall 

into ‘silliness’. Children appear to know intuitively that what they are doing is play, yet it continues 

to create conceptual problems for adults (Lester and Russell, 2010). For most adults there is a 

deeply held and cherished belief in the relationship between play, learning and development. Play 

represents childish behaviours that can be purposefully channelled into progress, i.e. the 

development of the requisite skills for becoming adult (rational, independent, and productive). It 

becomes an instrument to be used to ensure children grow up and out of play. From this 

perspective the institutions of childhood feed off play for their own purpose by promoting ‘nice’ 

play while at the same time closing out the possibilities and potential other forms of playful 

behaviour may offer. While adults may see play as the defining feature of being a child, with 

associated images of freedom and imagination, they are discomforted by children’s less innocent 

creative acts and sanction any form of disorderly behavior for fear that play will become dangerous, 

trivial, nonsensical and unproductive. Sutton-Smith (1997: 111) comments ‘the adult progress 

rhetoric [of play] has actually disguised the understanding of what childhood is about as a way of 

maintaining adult power over children’. 

Adult designed spaces for play invariably produce a bounded space filled with purposeful equipment 

and playthings, setting apart playing children from the rest of the world. Such spaces follow a fairly 

predictable pattern and generally make a causal connection between what is offered in these sites 

and what children are expected to do. Anything that contravenes designed and promoted use of 

space is often censured and seen as deviant behaviour. By their very design traditional playgrounds 

and adult managed play provision may be spaces that seek to normalize play behaviours by 

‘providing for play’, an adult production of space that represents a wider construction of childhood 

as a period of innocence, play, and a time to be ‘in nature’. While adult designed play spaces may be 

valued as part of a mosaic of community spaces these acts of providing play obscure a greater issue 

around play and space, as discussed in the following section. 

Thinking differently about playing and space 

Colin Ward (1979) reminds us that no matter what adult plans intend, children will seek ways of 

changing and challenging the dominant orders that seek to suppress their urges. Adult productions 

of space can never establish full control or finality over children’s desires; there is always an excess 

and space for ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988), moments in which intense affects enable 

a movement away from becoming the same, a momentary different production of time/space. 

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In brief, the argument presented in this paper suggests that the distinctive features of playing – it’s 

‘as if’ quality, spontaneity, tenor of pleasure, unpredictability and the ways in which children 

collectively maintain control over being out of control – represent brief moments in which children 

can appropriate time/space for their own collective desires. Children’s play, rather than being an 

exercise in progress towards autonomy and rationality (the adult construct of play) becomes 

momentary space/time that marks the potential to create and work with difference. Aitken and 

Plows (2010:332), citing the work of Benjamin (1978), note that play, rather than mere imitation, 

marks the capacity to affect and be affected by the world; as such, ‘young people’s capacity to play is 

also a capacity to re-conceive history and geography, which in turn creates a moment of 

revolutionary possibility’. It is the ability to affect and be affected that is of importance here as it 

opens up the possibility to move away from humanistic and individual accounts of agency to a 

position in which agency may be seen as the collective desire of bodies and materials to assemble 

and co-create time/space in which there is a greater capacity to act, and by doing so to simply create 

a more joyous state of being. 

Such acts of playing are not transcendental or major events, but are marked by their very 

ordinariness, brief fleeting moments woven into the fabric of mundane routines. It is relatively 

straightforward to think of everyday examples: children walking on walls rather than pavements, not 

stepping on the cracks between the paving stones, balancing along the kerbstones, teasing and 

chasing each other. Observations of children as they come out from school reveals the jostling, 

shouting, and other expressions of exuberance following their release from the constraints of the 

school classroom. And even in highly regulated educational spaces, playing will emerge, for example, 

when the teacher has their back turned to the class or leaves the room; ‘children doodle, pass 

notes, whisper, make faces, giggle, mock and satirise adults’ (Sutton-Smith, 1997: 111). The inbetween 

spaces of adult order also offer moments of playing, for example children pass each other 

in the school corridor and tag, hit, joke, make funny faces at each other and so on. They are 

moments when playing erupts simply to enliven the practicalities of everyday life and produce a 

different form of ‘utopian hope’ which says that things can be different, that life can be momentarily 

better and can simply go on, producing greater satisfaction in being alive and maintaining a sense of 

optimism about the near-future (Sutton-Smith, 2003). Yet while they appear as ordinary events they 

contain potentially magical properties; through playing children enhance biological and social 

systems that support their capability to look after themselves and cope with the demands of an 

uncertain world (Lester and Russell, 2008). 

Lester (2011) elaborates on this theme to suggest that such everyday moments might be seen as 

minor political acts. Children playfully reconfigure the existing order of the world to satisfy their own 

desires; moments in which they ‘resist, conform and negotiate on their own terms, even if these 

struggles and negotiations do not and cannot be carried out in official political arenas or follow 

conventional political modes’ (Kallio, 2009:6). The focus on play as minor politics invites a broader 

perspective that shifts focus from adults seeking to provide for play as something apart from the 

everyday to understanding that play is a vital sign of children’s full participation in democratic 

processes, as active citizens and not passive consumers of adult plans and intentions. The focus on 

participation also highlights that moments of playing are inherently spatial. Play spaces are not fixed 

or provided but are always created; they are the product of relational achievements and as such are 

always highly variable and constantly shifting. Space is the product of interrelations, co-created by 

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interactions operating at multiple levels of analysis (Massey, 2005). It is always a sphere of possibility 

brought about by the co-existence of many bodies and materials, each with their own force and 

trajectory; it is always being produced and reproduced through everyday encounters. But what this 

also suggests is that spaces are sites in which power is exercised as dominant forces seek to establish 

control and order. The very idea of providing play may be a reflection of such power arrangements 

as adults seek to impose their version of what constitutes ‘good play’ upon the design and control of 

space. Is it possible for adults to adopt a more playful, ‘what if…’ stance to spatial productions, to 

momentarily imaginatively disturb space on behalf of children (Jones, 2008)? Posing this question 

invites adults to pay less attention to children and more focus to disturbing their adult rationality 

and knowingness and by doing so create the possibility of different forms of spatial relations and 

productions. 

Implications for providing play: an experiment 

What may be apparent from this brief analysis is that ‘providing play’ is something more than 

designating spaces and times as play spaces. Play is not a subsidiary and separate process set apart 

from the real world. Given the everyday, spontaneous nature of the formation of playful moments, 

accounting for play in causal terms is obviously not possible or desirable. It should also be clear that 

given the nature of ‘playing’ as discussed in the previous section, there can be no template or 

blueprint for play provision. Attention switches not to providing play, but rather to the conditions 

under which playfulness may thrive. This is an important distinction as it pays attention to more 

general conditions under which social, affective and material resources may facilitate the expression 

of children’s playful desires, what may be referred to as ‘play enabling spaces’ or the ‘playful feel of 

space’. While a full discussion of this is beyond the scope of this paper, a glimpse of what this might 

mean is presented by a brief exploration of an ‘experiment’ – Playful Surprises’ - being carried out by 

Manchester Museum (MM) as part of a wider ‘Happy Museum’ project 1 . The use of the term 

‘experiment’ is again deliberate, but not in the sense of controlling all parameters and variables, as 

in a scientific experiment, to produce a ‘truthful’ or rational account. Rather, as with play itself, a 

creative form of experimentation pays attention to that which is not yet known, it concerns that 

which comes about through moments of nonsense and because of this demands an approach that 

respects the very qualities of play itself. From this perspective governance and planning are 

deliberately speculative, outcomes are volatile, and problems are not ‘solved’ once and for all, but 

are rather constantly recast and reformulated (Hillier, 2005). Questions become issues of 

problematisation, of continuously asking ‘what if’ rather than seeking neat solutions, which are 

generally only neat in terms of their own internal logic. 

Strategic spatial planning as strategic navigation is a performance of risk-taking, of 

not being in total control and of transcending the technicalities of planning practice 

to create an open reading frame for the emergence of unprecedented events 

(Rheinberger, 1997: 31). 

MM are currently working to establish a more playful space for children and families. However, 

rather than provide dedicated and segregated space or ‘interactive exhibits’ for children’s play 

1 For more details about this programme see: http://www.happymuseumproject.org/ 

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activities (which is a common feature of many cultural institutions) the Museum have taken a bold 

step to think about how the entire museum space may be more playable. This involves thinking 

differently about children’s presence in institutional space and to invite children and their families to 

use museum space in more playful and creative ways. The connection between ‘happiness’ and play 

is well-established (see for example Lester and Russell, 2008); playing may be distinguished by a 

tenor of pleasure as the limits of the real world are temporarily set to one side by asking the 

question ‘what if…’ and responding with behaviours that are marked by ‘as if…’. It is a process of 

problem creation, the probing and placing of space, bodies, materials, and so on in novel formations 

to see what more they can do. Strange juxtapositions and surprises in space may initiate moments 

of playfulness, different sensations may provoke novel movements, humour is generated through 

incongruity and so on. The term ‘feel of space’ is important here as it recognises that museum space 

is more than a physical environment displaying objects. As a Victorian (and protected) space, 

children largely move through the museum as passive observers of artefacts and information. The 

experiment has sought to open up more possibilities for playful engagement with space, materials 

and other bodies. Following some initial workshop sessions with gallery staff, a series of ‘what if…’ 

disturbances have been injected into the space, not with any pre-determined outcomes, but simply 

to see what happens. Thus, in one gallery, a member of staff simply laid a length of kitchen roll along 

the middle of the floor and stood back. One child wandered alongside, asking his father ‘what is this 

for’ and receiving a reply ‘I don’t know’. Shortly afterwards, another child started to walk along the 

roll, careful to both stay on the paper and also not to tear it. More children followed, and as they 

reached the end turned around and started to walk back. This of course created a further challenge 

as children moving in opposite directions now had to negotiate their way past each other. At one 

point the length of paper was torn, and the children quickly moved in to tearing up the remainder of 

the length of paper with their feet, leaving fragments of kitchen roll scattered across the floor. In 

another gallery, a member of staff had taped out a hopscotch grid, and this immediately invited 

children and adults to move through this space differently, creating moments of playful lingering as 

children played together. Numerous other examples of disturbance have been attempted, all with 

the same approach of wondering what might happen if….. But not only has this started to change 

the ways in which children (and adults) move through the museum, it has aroused a sense of 

curiosity among the staff and an increased sensibility and alertness to the ways in which children can 

develop moments of playfulness as they move through the space. 

Conclusion 

What is suggested here is that traditional ways of thinking about ‘providing play’ may miss the very 

point about this form of behaviour. Our preoccupation with the deliberate creation of segregated 

and purposeful spaces for play glosses over the nature and benefits of children playing anywhere 

and everywhere. Rather than paying direct attention to play, a focus on conditions that might 

support playfulness may offer a more promising stance and by doing so begin to formulate 

approaches to spatial design (both public and institutional) that acknowledges children’s full right to 

participate as active citizens. Spatial design, in this sense, does not relate simply to the physical 

conditions of space, but also to the feel of space and the ways that adults and children may initiate 

and share playful moments of being together and apart. But there are further benefits from this 

process; the injection of disturbance into spaces may surprise, and open adults up to a greater 

sensibility of what it might mean for children and adults to get on together. Children’s play reminds 

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adults that it is always possible to expose the common-sense productions of space to critical 

scrutiny, to make the everyday more vibrant, and by doing so reveal that there are other ways of 

being in the world (Lester, 2012). 

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Stuart Lester - International Council for Children's Play

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