Pérez-del-Pulgar, CarmenAnguelovski, IsabelleConnolly, James2020-05-052020Pérez del Pulgar C, Anguelovski I, Connolly J. Toward a green and playful city: understanding the social and political production of children's relational wellbeing in Barcelona. Cities. 2020 Jan; 96: 102438. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2019.1024380264-2751http://hdl.handle.net/10230/44406This paper examines recent urban green amenities directed toward children and families and develops a novel understanding of the ways in which children's socio-natures are made/unmade through such interventions. We employ ethnographic and archival analysis in two new parks – Poble Nou and Nou Barris – in Barcelona to examine how a particular type of children's wellbeing, what we call “relational wellbeing” is shaped through the production of green-playful-child-friendly amenities. We find that planning processes and visions, urban development goals, and neighbourhood socio-material structure moderate the effect of green-playful-child-friendly amenities on relational wellbeing by directing how these spaces are used. This finding points toward the importance – for equity concerns – of accounting for the social and political processes that generate relational wellbeing. These processes are often reflective of broader economic agendas of urban transformation designed to extract value, control space, and/or legitimize speculative urban development – while sometimes eroding local socio-material conditions – to the point of producing green spaces of privilege, exclusion and control. The connection between relational wellbeing and green-playful-child-friendly interventions highlights the importance, within the urban environmental equity literature, of reconceptualising pathways of wellbeing and health beyond questions of spatial distribution of natural areas and offers a new perspective for the development of future guidelines on green-playful-child-friendly space policies.application/pdfeng© Elsevier http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102438info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102438BarcelonaChildren-Nature-PlayUrban Environmental EquityUrban Political EcologyRelational WellbeingEnvironmental JusticeGentrificationinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess