Department of Design

Care spaces in times of crisis: Designing urban public spaces of play in the Global South (2021-2024)

Ongoing research project of the INUSE research group.
Care spaces- A play street in Mexico city, with a young girl playing with a hula hoop
A child plays in the streets of Mexico City (2018)

The project aim is to investigate how open public spaces for play might be expanded and reinvented against current restrictions and the acute crisis of care and social reproduction. The research is developed as an inquiry process in which theory and practice are in constant dialogue. The theoretical framework is constructed around the fields of design, urban studies, and feminist approaches on social reproduction. The practice-based part builds on participatory design methods to develop spatial interventions that are used as playful tools to investigate the idea of play as care. Through a highly interdisciplinary approach, the research challenges the established idea that, in times of uncertainty, play spaces do not represent an alternative to the regimes of everyday inequality, particularly in the growing megacities of the global South.

Funding: KONE Foundation

Contact

Brenda Vertiz
Doctoral researcher
[email protected]

INUSE Research Projects
  • Published:
  • Updated: