Child-friendly urban practices as emergent place-based neoliberal subjectivation?

Abstract

As city-level decisionmakers generate urban policies and spatial interventions aimed at enhancing children’s environments and increasing their health, wellbeing and participation in urban life, they also impact the types of citizens that cities produce. Yet, despite the increasing ubiquity of city plans targeting the creation of child-friendly environments, child-centred transformations within the urban built fabric have not been a major analytical theme compared to other economic, spatial and welfare aspects of city restructuring in the context of neoliberal urbanisation. In light of this need for greater empirical and theoretical exploration of child-centred urbanism, we compare and contrast how plans reorganise children’s urban social space across different neoliberalising contexts. Drawing on empirical research conducted in Amsterdam, Vienna and Bristol in 2019, including 46 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders involved in child-friendly planning, we contribute to the understanding of how place-based subjectivation processes operate within these plans. We argue that child-friendly urban plans are instrumental in the process of creating subjects that have internalised the norms of neoliberal urbanisation.