ABSTRACT
It was in children’s everyday spaces that Colin Ward could most clearly point to what he saw as ‘anarchy in action’. Children were identified as key players – both literally and metaphorically – in the anarchist’s social and political world. Both The Child in the City (1978) and The Child in the Country (1988) depict children, in unsentimental ways, negotiating and creatively appropriating their everyday environments. In The Child in the City, Colin Ward understands and positions children’s play in all of its complexity:
Play is often at the same time, training in motor skills and sensory awareness, exercise and excitement, and warfare with the adult world, as well as providing a disturbing parody of this world.
(Ward 1978: 97)