ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way images of children playing were used at the
Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in relation to urban
reform and social regeneration planning theories. In the interwar years, planners
advocating urban reform used images of street play to indict the modern
metropolis on the evidence of its failure to satisfy the essential biological needs
of children. Emblematic in this respect is José Luis Sert’s 1942 publication Can
Our Cities Survive? which exemplified the undesirable outcome of unplanned,
profit-driven urbanization with photographs of children playing in slums. Sert
mobilized such images to argue for the implementation of the Functional
City model as a blueprint for reconstructing war-damaged cities and elimin-
ating urban blight. However, in many postwar presentations, especially those
made by Team 10 – the group of architects whose polemical stance against
the Functional City led to CIAM’s eventual demise – street play in slums
was, instead, used to signify the desirable qualities of urban space, and was
identified as a regenerative social force. Peter and Alison Smithson’s Urban
Re-identification Grille, presented at CIAM’s ninth meeting in 1953, is
representative of this tendency. It deployed images of children playing on the
streets of Bethnal Green, a slum district in London’s East End, as evidence
nor merely specific to the discussions of modern architects at CIAM. Instead,
I argue that the changing meaning of play is located in a new model of power
and subjectivity. This chapter examines the status of socio-spatial categories
such as the home, the street, the neighbourhood and the city as they were
rethought through the discourse of the child, and frames them in relation to
social policies and modes of knowledge that became dominant after the
Second World War.
