Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the social and poltical processes in which the making/unmaking of children's socio-natures shape urban equity and children's spaces, as a set of socio-material relations that enable practices associated with personal, social and environmental benefits.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines recent municipal interventions to create urban green amenities directed toward children and families, and brings a novel understanding of the ways in which the making/unmaking of children's socio-natures through such interventions shape urban equity and children's wellbeing. We ask: How does the political and social production of green-playful-child-friendly amenities shape children's wellbeing? This work draws on ethnographic and archival analysis of two new parks - Poble Nou and Nou Barris - in Barcelona. We find that planning processes and visions; urban development goals; and neighbourhood socio-material structure moderate the effect of green-playful-child-friendly amenities on wellbeing by directing how these spaces are used. This finding points toward the importance of accounting for processes that generate what we call "relational wellbeing", as a feature of the socio-material relations that arise within a space and that enable practices associated with personal, social and environmental benefits. These processes are often reflective of broader economic agendas of urban transformation designed to extract value, control space, and/or legitimize speculative urban development - while sometimes eroding local socio-material conditions - to the point of producing green spaces of privilege, exclusion and control. The connection between relational wellbeing and green-playful-child-friendly interventions highlights the importance, within the urban environmental equity literature, of reconceptualizing pathways of wellbeing and health beyond questions of green space's socio-spatial distribution.