This book explores whether the metaphors of ‘playground’ and ‘battlefield’ might be analytically meaningful terms for understanding contemporary society. This conceptualisation is employed as an allegory to connect processes of social transformation and the making of risky choices with practices of politically uneven power distributions. The dialectic relationship between joy and struggle becomes the heart of the spatial analysis of different sociocultural practices. The duality is presented as a space of becoming, related to the recreation, domination and experience of a place, as well as to corresponding practices of excess, interaction and enjoyment.

Praise

This book takes a look at the contemporary urban capitalist society in its restlessness, instabilities and precarious life-forms. The authors go out of their disciplinary boundaries to find explanation for complex phenomena, combining in a fresh and clever way diverse professional fields. In several cases it prefers a sideways look rather than a confrontational one; a strategy that turns out to be rather constructive. We could categorise this book under the label of critical spatial theory: critical, in that it aims toward not only an explanation but also real change; spatial in that it sees contemporary processes carefully embedded in the midst of crisscrossing trajectories, local simultaneities and human becomings.
Andres Kurg Estonian Academy of Arts

This book allows the reader to access to topographies of change. The image of the playground is very accurate and related to multiple typologies of resistance in the actual crisis. It’s not only Occupy-movements in the entire world, but the way in which societies deal with their pasts—and their futures. This is the other side of the book: battlefields. Here the authors not only try to explain what their view of a playground is but they are proposing how to use this concept for accessing the rituality of everyday life in a post-shock global society as ours.
José Maria Faraldo Complutense University of Madrid

Playgrounds and Battlefields is an eclectic yet vibrant book, with a free-wheeling and anarchical approach that, if occasionally jarring, delivers on its transdisciplinary goals. The committed reader of the book will not only encounter a wide range of discussions with value in their own right, but by remaining open to their interactions staged within the volume, will gain fresh perspectives upon future possibilities within the humanities as well as avenues by which they may re-engage with the social and political demands of our time.
Simon Barker, Journal of Political Power