The public playground paradox: ‘child’s joy’ or heterotopia of fear?

ABSTRACT

Literature depicts children of the Global North withdrawing from public space to ‘acceptable islands’. Driven by fears both of and for children, the public playground – one such island – provides clear-cut distinctions between childhood and adulthood. Extending this argument, this paper takes the original approach of theoretically framing the playground as a heterotopia of deviance, examining – for the first time – three Greek public playground sites in relation to adjacent public space. Drawing on an ethnographic study in Athens, findings show fear to underpin surveillance, control and playground boundary porosity. Normative classification as ‘children’s space’ discourages adult engagement. However, in a novel and significant finding, a paradoxical phenomenon sees the playground’s presence simultaneously legitimizing playful behaviour in adjacent public space for children and adults. Extended playground play creates alternate orderings and negotiates norms and hierarchies, suggesting significant wider potential to reconceptualise playground-urban design for an intergenerational public realm.     

述论古典时期雅典城市的公共空间

本文主要论述古典时期雅典城市依托于公共建筑所形成的三类公共空间,即宗教性公共空间、市政性公共空间和文体性公共空间.雅典城市公共空间为城邦公有,向公众开放,是真正意义上的公有和公用空间,是城邦公共活动的中心.公共空间的形成和发展是希腊古典文化繁荣的重要基石.     

Managing Munificence

The navy of Athens during the democratic period (ca. 480-322 BCE) was largely financed and managed by wealthy citizens who undertook a public service, or liturgy, to maintain a warship for a year. With reference to a model of decisions made by the citizens eligible to undertake the liturgy, the author argues that the successive reforms to the institution were designed in ways and introduced at times to preserve its potential both to raise revenue and to remain popular. The first and second reforms performed these tasks by increasing the incentives for the citizens most willing to spend their money to undertake the liturgy; the third did so by reducing free riding.     

‘Why can’t they meet in bars and clubs like normal people?’: the protective state and bioregulating gay public sex spaces

State regulation of gay public sex spaces (PSS) has prompted geographers to assess the influence that localised legalities exert in specific micro-spaces of interaction, and to expand this research into cities not considered to be archetypically ‘gay friendly’. Through the lens of Foucault’s governmentality, it is important to consider state-directed bioregulatory influences upon toilets and parks as PSS. Such bioregulation, with its aim of producing a ‘healthy’ sexual population, seeks to expose public sex as ‘dangerous’, encouraging a policing of PSS and the men who use them. Part of this bioregulation also enlists men using PSS as responsible for peer surveillance to ensure anonymity and privacy in PSS. This auto-surveillance develops a ‘common code of conduct’ leading these men to develop their own modes of ‘normativity’ within these hetero-challenging spaces. By consulting with men who use PSS, I unearth oral histories of how changing laws, policy and ‘mainstream’ attitudes towards PSS in Glasgow, Scotland, have impacted upon cruising and cottaging. This paper will provide a place-specific reading of gay urban sexscapes, exploring how state bioregulation encourages the creation of new gay practices, identities and geographies.     

Gender,Perceptions of Safety and Strategic Responses among Ohio University Students

Research on perceptions of safety in public spaces must seek a balance between paying careful attention to the effects of gender, while challenging simplistic notions of a dichotomy of fearful women and fearless men. In a study of perceptions of safety among undergraduate students at the Ohio State University, this principle was addressed by decentering fear as the object of study and focusing instead on the various strategies that women and men use to manage their perceptions of safety—including avoidance of certain situations (for example, being in specific places, or going outside after dark), precautionary measures, and assertions of confidence. Questionnaire responses and follow-up interviews indicated that most students usually felt safe on campus; however, women were more likely than men to have felt unsafe. Students used a wide range of strategies to make themselves feel safer, from staying home after dark to formulating plans for self-defense to telling themselves they had nothing to fear. While a focus on strategic responses illuminated areas of overlap in men's and women's experiences, gender differences were also striking. Men are unlikely to rely on avoidance strategies, while some women view self-imposed restrictions on activity as normal and necessary. Furthermore, many men are unwilling or unable to relate to questions about fear and safety, explicitly or implicitly reinscribing fear as a ‘women's issue’.     

Firm relocation in times of economic crisis: evidence from Greek small and medium enterprises’ movement to Bulgaria, 2007–2014

This paper examines firm relocation in the aftermath of the 2007 global economic crisis. In particular, the paper analyses the unprecedented recent increase in the movement of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from Greece to Bulgaria using original insights by a survey of 103 Greek companies in Bulgaria. The findings suggest a reconsideration of the existing literature on firm mobility in order to explain the post-crisis movement of Greek SMEs. Entrepreneurs perceived firm relocation as a necessity, while, contrary to the existing literature, labour cost does not appear to have significantly influenced firm exit from Greece, the level of demand was highlighted as more important compared with the literature findings and access to external finance emerged as a major factor. Important among elements that attracted businesspeople to Bulgaria were low taxation and geographical proximity to Greece. The present analysis thus challenges the significance of firm relocation determinants in the literature.     

公共危机治理主体的多元化及结构分析

政府失败理论、治理理论、利益相关者理论和协同理论为公共危机治理主体多元化提供了强有力的理论支撑。在多元主体结构中,政府是公共危机治理的主导力量,也是核心主体;民间组织是公共危机治理的重要力量,也是联系政府与公民的纽带;企业和公民是公共危机治理的基础;媒体是公共危机治理的重要媒介,也是政府与其他主体合作互助信息平台的主要搭建者。     

试论公元前5世纪中期雅典的陪审法庭变革

雅典的陪审法庭创建于梭伦改革时期,最初附属于公民大会。公元前5世纪中期,陪审法庭从公民大会中分离出来,成为雅典民主制的核心机构之一。从形式上看,它从单一的法庭转变成多个陪审法庭;从职能上看,陪审法庭新增了官员的任职资格审查和账目审计等职权;从性质上看,陪审法庭不仅仅是接受上诉案件的终审法庭,还是一审的法庭;另外,陪审津贴的颁行给每一个公民以出席陪审法庭的机会。陪审法庭的这些变革是雅典民主化进程的需要,也是人口增长和雅典帝国事务增多的结果。     

Practising the British way of famine: technologies of relief, 1770–1985

In the past 200 years Britons have responded to famines in particular ways. This article explores these particularities by focusing not simply on the remarkably unchanging humanitarian representation of the victims of famine but on the changing technologies through which relief was collected and distributed. It shows how technologies of famine relief were created from the need to govern colonial populations rather than from the development of new sentimentality and ethics. The authors seek to demonstrate that, despite the changing nature of these technologies, the forms of expertise that sustained them, a set of routines and practices developed that allowed the performance of a British way with famine that slowly extended from the empire to the world. In the wake of two world wars these forms of expertise were extended to Europe and became internationalised through the work of voluntary organisations. After the formal end of Empire, these technologies were retooled and used to assist places in postcolonial Africa. They also helped create a new type of global citizen, informed of technologies of relief and invested in the Global South through the rise of a humanitarian culture.     

Creating the Swedish Juvenile Delinquent: criminal policy,science and institutionalization c. 1930–1970

This article discusses what I call the creation of the juvenile delinquent in the period from the 1930s to the 1970s. Making use of a theoretical understanding taken from Michel Foucault and David Garland this article shows how several elements and factors contributed to this process of which I concentrate on discussing three: the criminal political context, criminological ideas and administrative changes. These practices, including the discourse production around the young offender, led to the creation of a new category: the juvenile delinquent. What happened is understood and analyzed with the help of Foucault's central concept of governmentality. Special emphasis had been laid on investigating the role in this process of reformatory prisons and the Reformatory Prisons Board. Three of the tentative conclusions that could be drawn from the discussion are that the domination of the administrative logic of order and control over the rehabilitative logic played an important role in the creation of the juvenile delinquent; that the diagnostic practice and the scientific credibility that it was built on created a widening gap between the young offenders and ‘normal’ youths; and that the creation of the juvenile delinquent contributed to a stronger symbiosis between the social, administrative and penal bodies.