Ok to Play

3 January 2025

Can resident-led, creative action address barriers to children’s outdoor play and mobility in urban neighbourhood environments? This research aims to co-design hyper-local approaches to transform underused threshold spaces (doorsteps, pocket parks, pavements, residential street space) into playable, social spaces and sites of everyday creativity and connection within an urban community in Bristol.

Seedcorn 2024/2025

Physical activity and outdoor time are crucial for children’s health and wellbeing and contribute to emotional and social resilience (Torkar et al., 2017). As well as their physical, cognitive and social development (Dankiw et al., 2020). However, children do not engage in sufficient physical activity or outdoor play, particularly in urban areas (Dodd et al., 2021)

This project will build on previous academic research by exploring children’s perspectives of threshold spaces in an urban area of Bristol and, with families, how these spaces can be improved to promote play and creativity.

The research will address four research questions:

What is the geographical, cultural and contextual history of neighbourhoods for children and families?
How do children in the community perceive their environment and threshold spaces regarding play and physical activity?
What narratives exist around play, safety and community in the neighbourhood and how are these shared across generations and communities?
What individual creative actions can encourage cultural shifts in using threshold spaces and the wider neighbourhood?

What will the project involve?

This project will reflect upon materials from the Welfare State International Archive, in particular their:

methods for engaging communities to reflect critically on a theme and for creative expression of same
processes for creating new stories that draw on local distinctiveness and place-responsive narratives
tactics for activating and integrating everyday creativity in communities of place

The research team will undertake participatory arts-based research methods with children and families through walkalong interviews that incorporate storytelling to communicate intergenerational differences, sharing archival material, interactive journaling and workshops. The process will be facilitated to inspire imagination, creativity and action about re-purposing threshold spaces in ways that work towards creative play signalling, pro-social behaviour and re-storying.

Finally, using the archive material the team will work collaboratively with families to assemble their learning into a community ‘toolkit’ for enhancing/enchanting threshold spaces.

Who are the team and what do they bring?

Lydia Collison (School of Policy Studies, University of Bristol) brings expertise in behaviour change, particularly in children’s physical activity behaviours, and using creative qualitative methods to access children’s voices and perspectives on health and social issues.
Jessica Roy (School of Policy Studies, University of Bristol) brings expertise in the sociology of childhood and how children’s rights inform policy and practice. She has experience of archive-based research and qualitative research methods with children and families, particularly around what could be described as sensitive or distressing issues.
Jennifer Crane (Human Geography, University of Bristol) works at the intersection of history, geography and the sociologies of health. She brings expertise in childhood in contemporary Britain and experience of using creative and collaborative research methods.
Amy Rose and Jenny Sanderson (Bocadalupa) come from a background of popular performance and have play as a unifying strand in all their work. Amy is the co-founder of Playing Out, and an associate of Puppet Place and Play:Disrupt. Jenny is a qualified Forest School leader and creator of interactive playscapes for Harbourside Festival. Together they have created playful, interactive events for public spaces, including domestic living rooms, residential streets, parks, schools, festivals and more.