ABSTRACT
Urban natures created for children1 tend to reproduce adult conceptions of nature, cities, and child development. These natures are shaped by conceptions of both city and nature, which as Castree (2014: xvii) argues are “… made sense for [us] by a myriad of others.” For children, nature is materially produced and made sense of not only by epistemic workers-urban planners, designers, developers, and educators-but also by parents and other young people, for example, friends and siblings. Such others design and produce material and symbolic natures that they think children in cities need. Many of these natures are rooted in nostalgia, which recreates idealized natures of childhoods.2 Children’s global urban natures are often green space in parks, schoolyards, and backyards.3 These green spaces often contain grass (in the form of a manicured lawn), trees, bushes, flowers, as well as playground equipment, perhaps water sprinklers and of course the sand pile or box.4 Children’s natures, just like children themselves, have tended to be marginalized in urban theory, planning, and (urban) political ecology. Yet the natures produced for children are visible in everyday urban landscapes, and are part of existing socio-natural metabolisms in cities. This chapter seeks to address
the lack of attention to children’s nature in urban political ecology by exploring one particular and commonplace “nature”: the sand pile.
