Urban Play: Intimate Space and Postwar Subjectivity

This chapter examines the way images of children playing were used at the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in relation to urban reform and social regeneration planning theories. In the interwar years, planners advocating urban reform used images of street play to indict the modern metropolis on the evidence of its failure to satisfy the essential biological needs of children. Emblematic in this respect is José Luis Sert’s 1942 publication Can Our Cities Survive? which exemplified the undesirable outcome of unplanned, profit-driven urbanization with photographs of children playing in slums. Sert mobilized such images to argue for the implementation of the Functional City model as a blueprint for reconstructing war-damaged cities and eliminating urban blight. However, in many postwar presentations, especially those made by Team 10 – the group of architects whose polemical stance against the Functional City led to CIAM’s eventual demise – street play in slums was, instead, used to signify the desirable qualities of urban space, and was identified as a regenerative social force. Peter and Alison Smithson’s Urban Re-identification Grille, presented at CIAM’s ninth meeting in 1953, is representative of this tendency. It deployed images of children playing on the streets of Bethnal Green, a slum district in London’s East End, as evidence nor merely specific to the discussions of modern architects at CIAM. Instead, I argue that the changing meaning of play is located in a new model of power and subjectivity. This chapter examines the status of socio-spatial categories such as the home, the street, the neighbourhood and the city as they were rethought through the discourse of the child, and frames them in relation to social policies and modes of knowledge that became dominant after the Second World War.