Childhood and confinement. Resistance Space Practices

Abstract

This study presents a reflection on the relationship between space, play and childhood and the ability to reinvent contexts through a proposal of spatial practices. The main objective is to identify those spatial issues linked to the experience of living in childhood that determine community spaces for recreation and learning. The proposal, based on an own experience, arises from the observation of the new forms of occupation of the habitual domestic space of two girls of 3 and 5 years old after the situation of confinement decreed in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this unprecedented situation, housing is reinvented through small ephemeral interventions configured through a combination of simple spatial patterns that the children handle with ease, projecting places of protection and experimentation that respond to their needs instantly. These practices of resistance allow us to question the functions of domestic space, and by extension, of urban space, highlighting the urgent need to project our homes and urban spaces in terms of care and sustainability, from a feminist and community perspective that integrates the view and experience of childhood into the design process.