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‘Opportunity structures’: urban landscape, social capital and health promotion in Australia |
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This paper presents data from 40 in-depth interviews that were conducted as part of a study of social capital and health in relation to people’s perceptions of the influence of ‘place’ on their participation levels and health. These data were used to examine features of the western suburbs of Adelaide that were perceived as health damaging and health promoting. The paper demonstrates that our Australian suburban respondents expressed a considerable concern about these features and the impact they have on their perception of community and their ability to participate in it. Safety, connectedness to the area, the reputation of an area and the extent and nature of community facilities are all seen as important to a healthy community. The research found that in the more deprived socioeconomic areas within the study area, there was a significant degree of dissatisfaction with features of the urban environment, such as availability of amenities, provision of public transport, and proximity of industry to private dwellings. The paper concludes by considering certain features of urban environments that might make them more supportive of health through encouraging contact between people. We conclude that these environments could be improved using the following measures: a subsidy scheme to support the viability of local shops and cafés (thereby providing meeting places and employment); parks with facilitators (who could play a role in increasing safety in the park but also encouraging community development); attractive places to walk; and a general environmental improvement program.
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Children's Use of Public Space: the Gendered World of the Playground |
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This article considers the gendered character of the contemporary playground. Based on observational studies in eight Amsterdam playgrounds and interviews with users, it is shown how playground participation, activities and micro-geographies are structured by gender. Furthermore, not only does the playground function as a gendered space, its physical and symbolic landscapes also reinforce this binary divide. In addition, the contested character of this divide is illustrated with examples of girls and boys challenging traditional gender behaviour. In its gendered access, the playground is comparable with other public spaces: in contrast, however, it has not yet been the focus of feminist critique. This article points out the wider significance of creating emancipatory public play environments.
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Changing spaces for sports |
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The author argues that the fundamental values associated with sports seem to have changed. Physical and psychological wellbeing, the playful aspect of training and the non-committal social network are of increasing importance for the practice of sports, while competition and success only remain of significance for a more limited number of people. Accordingly spaces for sports are also undergoing change. In the city of today, physical exercise takes place on streets and squares, on rooftops, in buildings that previously served other purposes, in parks and city forests and even in the harbour. The essay gives a number of examples of these new sports spaces. Their common denominator lies in their urban proximity, the combination of previously irreconcilable functions, high adaptability and the fact that they often make use of urban residual areas.
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Embedded Expectations, Embodied Knowledge and the Movements That Connect: A System Theoretical ... |
...Attempt to Explain the Use and Non-Use of Sport FacilitiesIn this article I propose another way of studying the use and non-use of sport facilities. I argue that sport facilities embed expectations observable to individuals who are forced to meet these expectations or not. I also claim that our choices concerning the use or non-use of a sport facility are grounded in our embodied knowledge, a knowledge that is not easy to make conscious. My last claim is that movements connect the embedded expectations and embodied knowledge and eventually mediate changes in both these structures.
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`Healthification' and the Promises of Urban Space: A Textual Analysis of Place, Activity, Youth... |
... (PLAY-ing) in the CityIn this article, I begin to unpack how urban physical activity space is being imagined by physical activity policy-makers. I review literature pertaining to youth, urban space and play, and I engage in a preliminary analysis of a small selection of government (Canada) and media communications to examine how space and health are represented discursively in policy texts. These representations of space and health are not necessarily new, but are appearing to become more prevalent in Canadian public health contexts as the `panic' about youth crime and physical (in)activity escalates. I am concerned with how space is represented in policy texts and what space is called onto be(come) in the service of the new public health in Toronto, Canada. I examine how youth are discursively incited, and in what ways, to make use of, and to find salvation in, `healthified' urban spaces. In current neoliberal and neo-conservative times, youth are increasingly called upon to engage in healthy living in spaces that are replete with discourses of `healthification', civic engagement and consumerism. I conclude by suggesting that we need to pay attention to current investments in urban youth's active living space, how urban youth take up and/or refuse spatial inscriptions and prescriptions, and how youth imagine themselves as subjects of healthified urban spaces (that are best thought of in terms of a complicated network of hegemonic local and global interrelations).
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