Despite early playgrounds and parks being important for how play came to be spatially structured within the city, play as a subject has largely been neglected within urban planning research. One aim of this thesis is to investigate how play has been conceptualised within planning to draw lessons for planners. A second aim is to find strategies that challenge unjust hierarchies by combining perspectives on play and planning. Starting from three questions, I perform a discourse analysis on written documents situated in the planning system of Stockholm, Sweden to describe and compare between the time periods: 1970-1980 and 2010-2024. I further use critical theories of space, play, and planning to ask how we might challenge current conceptualisations of play within planning, and to investigate the potential towards an egalitarian planning by learning from play theory. The results show a current conceptualisation of play focused on children, external benefits, and a depoliticisation of pleasure. For planners it is therefore important to engage with play ethically to not control individual playing frames. I conclude that the emergent qualities in play may be a way to centre planning as an institution of explorative social change which contrast the instrumental purpose of planning today.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-231412 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Belloni Lidbrink, Marinn |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Kulturgeografiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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