Ben Highmore - Playgrounds as Social Architecture

Ben Highmore
Playgrounds as Social Architecture

In this talk, Prof Ben Highmore looks at how we have ended up with the globally standardized playground: a demarcated space reserved for children and fitted out with slides, swings, seesaws and climbing frames. Such spaces have recently been described as ‘custodial cages for kids.’ This is a playground aimed at producing certain kinds of pleasures (minor vertiginous experiences, distracted forms of attention, and so on) within a space dedicated to safety and durability. In looking at other kinds of play spaces – the Junk Playground, the Adventure Playground, the Play Park, the Creative Playground – Highmore suggests that playgrounds are forms of social architecture that produce a range of moods, forms of attention, and modes of experience. The talk will argue that today we need to increase the imaginative resources we have for thinking about children’s play provision.
Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Sussex. His most recent books are The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (Yale University Press) and Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation, and Cultural Politics (Routledge), both published in 2017. His book In Good Taste: How Britain’s Middle Classes Found Their Style, will be published in 2022 by Manchester University Press.