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Children's Use of Public Space
Children's Use of Public Space
Children's Use of Public Space
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What is This?
Introduction
Children growing up in cities are having to cope with an urban context
which can only be described as deteriorating. The dominance of the car
together with social dangers render urban public space unattractive and dan-
gerous for children (Katz, 1995; Valentine, 1995, 1997; Ward, 1978). As a
consequence, children spend less time playing outside than they used to, and
while outside, they are chaperoned more often (Gaster, 1991; Hillman et al.,
1990; Karsten, 2002; van der Spek and Noyon, 1995). While children of
both genders are restricted, girls, in particular, experience daily constraints
on their freedom of movement (Karsten, 1998; Katz, 1993; Nissen, 1992;
Sebba, 1994).
Playgrounds are intended to compensate for the daily restrictions that
children growing up in urban environments encounter. But are playgrounds
serving girls and boys equally? Studies point out that girls use playgrounds
and other locations for playing less frequently than boys, and, if they do use
them, they tend to go to play areas that are closer to home (Cunningham and
Jones, 1991; Hart, 1979; Moore, 1989; Rijnen, 1984: van Andel, 1985;
Visser, 1991). Furthermore, females occupy less territory for their play
457
activities than males (Thorne, 1993). Other studies focus on the different
ways in which girls and boys play: boys’ activities tend more often to
revolve around physical strength, competition in sports and larger groups
(Karsten and Pel, 2000; Lever, 1978; Sluckin, 1981).
This article explores gender issues in children’s outdoor play in
Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Can gender be considered as one of the
main organizing principles in the playground, and if so what form does it
take? Do boys outnumber girls? And what can be said about gendered ways
of playing, of using space and of spending time? How does gender interact
with other structuring principles such as ethnicity and class? How do chil-
dren themselves confirm and contest gender divides? How do the design and
equipment of particular playgrounds enter into the gender dynamics of the
play? The empirical findings presented in this article come from a research
project carried out in multicultural Amsterdam neighbourhoods. Eight differ-
ent playgrounds have been studied using informal and formal observations,
extensive counting and qualitative interviews with children and parents.
Theoretical concepts
When studying playgrounds in urban environments, access is an important
issue. The public in the playground may or may not be a mirror of the resi-
dential child population. In this respect, studying public playgrounds in resi-
dential environments is different from studying ‘private’ playgrounds near
schools, daycare centres and other children’s institutions. When teachers and
other caring adults decide so, all children have to go outside and into the
playground, schoolyard or sports fields. All children have legitimated access,
be it in many different and unequal ways (Thorne, 1993). In contrast, in resi-
dential environments, some children will visit the nearby playground, while
others will not be interested, will not dare to do so or will simply be denied
access. Adults’ interference is minimal. In these ways, public playgrounds
function differently from playgrounds near institutions. In order to fully
understand issues such as access and exclusion, the literature on the use of
urban public space can be helpful.
According to Lofland (1985), inhabitants of big cities are constantly
trying to reduce the complexities of living in a world of strangers. When
urbanites are out in public, they make arrangements to maximize encounters
with the personally known. One such arrangement involves the creation of
home territories. Urbanites try to colonize public spaces. For those who suc-
ceed, the urban world becomes safer to explore, easier to understand and
more predictable. An important condition in the process of colonization is
the knowledge people have of ‘their’ urban place. When a person’s knowl-
edge about the social, cultural and physical characteristics of a public
domain increases in details and intimacy, his or her status transforms from
that of ‘just a visitor’ into that of a ‘resident’.
458
459
(Aitken, 1994; Evaldsson, 1997; James and Prout, 1990). Diversity is consti-
tuted not only by gender but also by other structuring principles, such as age,
class and ethnicity (Karsten et al., 2001). The youngest age category shows
less separation by gender in their (outdoor) play behaviour as do school-age
children (Hart, 1979). Class is an important determining factor in children’s
daily outdoor play and other out-of-school activities (Karsten, 1998; Lareau,
2000). Ethnicity is often referred to in relation to cultural variables, which
influence communication among and between different ethnic groups
(Liden, 1997). Ethnicity may as well have consequences for the inclusion or
exclusion of children in play spaces.
Barrie Thorne’s (1993) concern that studies of children tend only to
focus on the most visible and dominant groups can be considered as a plea to
situate gender in context, rather than frame it with fixed binary abstractions.
This new mode of analysis is one which feminist geographers are keen to
support. Intensive ethnographic research in different locations and at differ-
ent times is required to examine how gender actually ‘works’ and interacts
with other variables. Interactions between individuals and groups as well as
changes over time can best be studied at the places where it all happens.
Gendered identities are no longer considered to be permanent or absolute
categories (Rose, 1993). A direct focus on social processes in daily life gives
insight into the ways in which identities are constantly negotiated, contested
and reinforced.
Thorne (1993) further shows that the dominant rule of ‘girls will be
girls’ and ‘boys will be boys’ is often challenged. In this respect, she
describes the ‘deviant’ identity of ‘tomboys’ and ‘sissies’, two extremes in
the continuum of gender crossing. The concept of ‘tomboy’ alludes to girls
who behave more or less like boys traditionally do, while ‘sissies’ is a term
used in the US for boys who engage in behaviour that is traditionally associ-
ated with girls. Tomboys are often referred to as strong children, while
sissies are often considered to be weak children. This asymmetry points to
the unequal valuing of male and female behaviour in western societies. Jones
(1999) goes even a step further by arguing that girls are often termed
‘tomboys’ when they take part in what is seen as the purest expression of
childhood – strolling around in the countryside – which makes the ‘natural’
gender of childhood apparently male.
460
Key:
1. Jan Mayen Square
2. Balboa
3. Columbus
4. Mondriaan Square
5. Voorburg Street
6. Bocholt Street
7. Echtenstein
8. Gein
numbers correspond with Figure 1). The first five playgrounds are located in
multicultural lower class residential environments. Jan Mayen (1), Balboa
(2) and Columbus (3) playgrounds are situated in De Baarsjes (built
1920–40) and Mondriaan Square (4) and Voorburg Street (5) in Overtoomse
Veld (built 1950–60). In the neighbourhoods of De Baarsjes and Overtoomse
Veld the majority of the children have a Turkish or Moroccan background.
Echtenstein (7) is situated in the Bijlmer: a neighbourhood with high-rise
residential estates (built 1960 to early 1970s). The child population is char-
acterized by a mixture of many different ethnicities, including a high per-
centage of children whose parents are from Surinam. The playgrounds in
Bocholt Street (6) and Gein (8) are located in two recently built (1980s and
1990s) middle-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In these
middle-class neighbourhoods the residents also have diverse cultural back-
grounds, though Dutch Amsterdam children form the biggest group.
The Jan Mayen, Voorburg Street and Echtenstein playgrounds are
small play spaces; all the other playgrounds are bigger. The amount of play
equipment and climbing objects varies from playground to playground. The
Columbus playground is the biggest play domain and has the most diverse
461
CHILDHOOD 10(4)
2. Balboa Turkish/Moroccan Lower class + +/– –
3. Columbus Turkish/Moroccan Lower class + + +
4. Mondriaan Turkish/Moroccan Lower class + +/– +/–
462
463
Boys Girls
Diverse Diverse
T/M S/A Dutch immigrant T/M S/A Dutch immigrant Girls
Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com by Sanja Stanic on October 16, 2012
Playground Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam Total (%)
CHILDHOOD 10(4)
3. Columbus 232 28 44 13 135 28 44 7 531 40%
4. Mondriaan 264 14 11 17 108 12 5 1 432 29%
464
Total 870 156 247 136 395 105 151 43 2103 33%
T/M: Turkish and Moroccan;
S/A: Surinamese and Antillian;
Diverse immigrant groups: children from China, Sudan, Ghana, Pakistan, etc.
KARSTEN: CHILDREN’S USE OF PUBLIC SPACE
465
466
design of playgrounds than are boys. A Dutch Amsterdam girl at the Balboa
playground told us: ‘I don’t come here very often. You cannot do many
things. Only the climbing frame is nice, but now it is broken.’
We also found that gender patterns varied with the time of day. At the
end of the afternoon, one girl after another would leave the playground,
while boys tended to continue their play until dark or even later. As one of
the researchers recorded in her field notes: ‘When I arrive at twilight, around
12 boys have just finished their game, another group of four little boys are
still hanging on the climbing frame. Nowhere is a girl to be seen.’
The sum total of these gender divisions across presence, activities,
space and time results in the fact that boys obtain more intimate knowledge
of the playground. Compared with girls, boys are highly visible users of pub-
lic playground space, and they control much larger territories during many
more hours. Boys’ more frequent presence, duration and visibility mean that
they more often acquire the status of a resident. Resident boys communicate
in their own way. Their (backstage) language, which is difficult for ‘out-
siders’ to understand, is full of football terms (panna), popular Dutch
(drunkel, wreed) and popular Dutch/English (vet, ‘cool’), which some of
them alternate with their mother tongue. The hierarchy within male groups is
mainly based on soccer talent.
The greater diversity of girls’ activities results in many small groups
clustered around specific popular games or ways of playing. It seems that
they do not need much space for these activities and often girls play in rela-
tively hidden corners of the playgrounds. There may well be a girl leader,
but she leads a small group and thus is not very visible. Girls’ ways of play-
ing reinforce their status as a minority group. For girls, it is difficult to
become a ‘resident’ without challenging traditional gender divides.
467
468
players. But there were a few talented girls in Gein who were always accept-
ed and even invited to play. Skill was the main criterion for selection to a
team, a rule applied to both genders.
Some girls were especially gifted in playing with gender, like Ordea
(aged 8) one of the ’tomboys’3 in the Columbus Square playground. She
came to the playground almost every day and stayed until dark, like the
boys. The first time we visited the square she grabbed our attention by
cycling on a bicycle, literally crossing the gender divide between the ball
game territory and the terrain with play equipment. Although Ordea dis-
turbed the football game, no one openly complained. She had a broad net-
work of family and friends, whom she used as a resource, borrowing play
materials (such as the bicycle mentioned) and calling upon for assistance in
the event of conflict. But she did not encounter many conflicts. Ordea’s posi-
tion as one of the residents of the playground was not often challenged. One
of her favourite places was the sand and water corner. She loved to manage
groups, giving orders to build big waterworks.
Boys do not play with gender as much as girls do in playground activi-
ties and they less frequently challenge gendered behaviour. The main activi-
ty of the boys we observed was playing soccer. However, this was not the
only game they played, nor was it the main activity for all the boys observed.
In playgrounds with a diverse range of play equipment, boys played tag4
around the climbing objects or built sand castles and roller-skated on the
asphalt. While some girls indicated that they wanted to play boys’ games
with the boys, it was much less common to hear a boy saying that he wanted
to play a girls’ game, although younger boys sometimes became involved in
girls’ play as in the example from Jan Mayen Square. On the whole, it seems
to be more attractive for girls to behave like boys than the other way round.
That probably means that traditional female ways of playing will never
become the dominant way. These are for girls only and not even for all girls.
Boys who play with girls in a female way are rare and called watje or eitje
(comparable to ‘sissy’), a status no one seems to want.
However, some boys seemed to be rather happy in female company.
Charles was one of them. He was a Dutch Amsterdam boy aged 9 who lived
in Gein and was very friendly with Sandra and Ming (same age, Dutch and
Chinese background respectively). He told us that he loved to play with girls
because ‘girls know a lot of nice games’. He was a little afraid of the big
boys, especially one neighbour, Richard, whom he described as ‘a son of a
bitch’. With his girl friends, Charles played a wide variety of games. But, as
he admitted, he has a strong preference for games which were not particular-
ly labelled as ‘girls’’ or ‘boys’’ play, such as playing tag, building a hut,
cycling and roller-skating. Some of these activities are only possible in quiet
green surroundings where there are many foot and cycle paths. This may be
one of the reasons that we only encountered boys with female play friends in
Gein and Bocholt Street, where there are easily accessible green surround-
469
ings and many asphalt cycle paths, clearly separated from the roadway.
In Columbus Square, there were some small groups of boys who
apparently did not participate in the dominant boys’ scene. Dutch
Amsterdam Jan, African Amsterdam Mike and Turkish Amsterdam Ahmed
loved each others’ company and shared the same ideas about ‘playing nice-
ly’. We never saw them playing football on the asphalt. They could ‘hang
about’ near the play furniture for long times, just talking and looking.
Sometimes, we saw them playing with a ball near the climbing objects. Their
game was similar to hit ball 5 and several girls played with them.
Furthermore, they often frequented the water and sand corner. It is striking
that their games lacked the element of scoring. In that respect, these activi-
ties were similar to games that girls tend to play. However, in contrast to
most girls, these boys were not keen on improving their skills. While girls
would be continually trying to improve their performance, i.e. making their
gymnastics more complicated, these boys were not inclined to exercise at all.
Many children experimented with their gendered identities from time
to time. There were examples of girls who played in a very girl-like way,
only to suddenly demonstrate sturdy behaviour; or boys who played football
with the other boys, only to then accept an invitation from their little sister to
push her on the swings. When one first notices these gender ‘deviations’,
one is inclined to treat them as ‘exceptional’; it was only after more exten-
sive observation at the playgrounds that we came to acknowledge this gen-
der-blending as an essential part of children’s play. Ordea, described earlier,
is not only the stoere meid, or tomboy. Ordea played vigorously, in activities
and with a leadership style more typical of boys. But she also, seemingly
without effort, combined this leadership with caring for her little brothers
and sisters. Sandra, who loved to play with Charles, told us enthusiastically
about figure-skating on ice, a typical female sport. The three boys of
Columbus Square who never played football were ardent supporters of Ajax,
a professional soccer club in Amsterdam; they often talked about Ajax and
wore Ajax shirts. Perhaps they wanted to prove that they were ‘just like the
other boys’.
Conclusion
The results of our research on children’s presence and interactions in eight
public playgrounds in Amsterdam both confirm patterns reported in the liter-
ature and add new insights. It is useful to distinguish three dimensions of the
gendered character of playground interactions. First, girls are somewhat
marginalized in public playgrounds, assuming the status of a ‘minority
group’ (Cunningham and Jones, 1991; van Andel, 1985). Turkish and
Moroccan Amsterdam girls, in particular, were underrepresented compared
with their male peers of the same ethnicity. Boys outnumbered girls not only
in frequency of participation but also in duration of time and in the size of
470
the network and territory they controlled (Lever, 1978). This helped boys to
obtain intimate knowledge of the playground which – in turn – reinforced
their more frequent status of ‘resident’. Girls as a group were less visible,
which made it more difficult for them to obtain this status.
Second, while general patterns can be discerned, there is much variety
across space and time and by activity (Holloway and Valentine, 2000).
Gender identities are contextually constructed and reinforced by the physical
characteristics of the location, the time of day and the activity that is under-
taken. Physical boundaries also demarcate gendered boundaries (Thorne,
1993). The same applies to time schedules: when twilight arrives in the pub-
lic domain, it becomes a male domain. And, while some activities are almost
exclusively defined as male (playing soccer) or female (doing gymnastics),
other games are open to both genders (playing tag/cycling) (Lever, 1978).
Third, while both boys and girls challenge traditional gender divides,
girls do it more often. In addition, experimenting with gendered behaviour
occurs most often in locations with a substantial number of girls. In places
where girls are represented in very small numbers – a phenomenon which is
related to the spatial configuration of the playground – girls and boys do not
experiment very often with crossing the gender divide.
These conclusions underline the importance of urban space for the
gendered development of children. Playgrounds are the first arenas in which
girls and boys learn to negotiate their behaviour in public. Thus far, play-
ground experiences tend to be more negative for girls than for boys. In order
to encourage the full participation of women in the public domain, we may
want to begin by encouraging girls to play outside. It could be worthwhile to
pay more attention to the seemingly trivial issue of children’s leisure
(Messner, 1990) and the quality of public playgrounds.
From this Amsterdam study, some recommendations can be derived
for the design of playgrounds that can serve both boys and girls equally. This
study makes clear that playgrounds have to be big enough to facilitate play
by both boys and girls. That means that the terrain for play equipment
(slides, bars, swings, climbing structures, sand boxes, water places) should
take up as much territory as the area for ball games. To keep girls interested,
there should be high standards of regular maintenance and renovation of
play equipment. Both girls and boys appreciate speeding along on cycles and
skates, playing with sand and water and climbing on high objects. Creating
these play opportunities may help children to cross rigid gender divides as
and when they want.
Acknowledgement
The author gratefully acknowledges the efforts of participating students: Marieke
Geljon, Anne Hofstede and Eva Pel. She would also like to thank Barrie Thorne for
the close reading of this article.
471
Notes
1. Playing elastics entails playing with an elastic cord spanned on either side. Girls play
complex jumping and skipping games with the cord.
2. For the safety of pedestrians, many small bollards demarcate the line between footpaths
and parking places. There are so many in Amsterdam that they are called Amsterdammertjes
which means literally ‘little Amsterdammers’.
3. The word ‘tomboy’ does not exactly exist in the Dutch language. Different words are
used for girls such as Ordea: wildebras or stoere meid (big, sturdy girl).
4. ‘Playing tag’ entails a tagger chasing and trying to touch (tag) other children. If he or
she succeeds, the one tagged becomes the tagger, and so on.
5. One of the players has to hit the others with a ball. The one who is hit starts the game
again, and so the game continues.
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