Childhood and urbanity in São Paulo city’s playgrounds

Abstract

Playgrounds were deployed in the 1930s, in São Paulo city, aiming at promoting the socialization of children during their free time, especially by offering recreational, artistic and cultural activities, in the context of the changes of thought regarding life in the city, provoked by the new educational and hygienic ideas of that period. To contribute to the understanding of the subject, this work aimed to understand the notions of urbanity and childhood that guided this political and educational project, by means of a systematic bibliographical research of doctoral dissertations, master’s theses and undergraduate theses developed at USP and Unicamp. Playgrounds were understood in the sources analyzed as a space and a time of sociability among children, as well as agreements and disagreements between the cultures produced in the universe of children and the cultures of the adult world. This ambiguous character is pointed out in the study, which covered both their disciplinary bias and their form of expression of citizenship and cultural diffusion. Above all, playgrounds were important in the construction of children’s bodily experience, considering the emphasis on educational practices related to the body.