ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the potent use of nature in the contemporary composition of childhood and play and its distillation and manifestation in the concrete production of a 'natural playground'. This specific formation is taken as a representation of the ways in which constituents of nature, play, space and childhood assemble to form a seductive common-sense view of this relationship, an unquestioned orthodoxy of thought with its accompanying clichés and material effects. The ideal of the natural child has a powerful effect on the Western adult imaginary of childhood. Nature, and by inference humans, are fixed: positivism constitutes nature as a passive object that can be fully known and used to meet human ends, while constructivism attributes agency purely to human activity. A posthuman position produces a radical alternative image of life as an assemblage of forces and flows, intensities, passions and desires that produce and solidify in space and consolidate in time.
