Children’s Guerrilla Play and Dirt Jumps: Parkland as Contested Space During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Australia

Abstract

AbstractIn 2020-21 the Victorian state government in Australia imposed 262 days of sustained lockdown on Melbourne’s population in a bid to contain the COVID pandemic. These lockdowns, among the longest in the world, affected young people especially. Children were subjected to months of curfews, home schooling using digital platforms and severe travel. Nonetheless some children engaged repeatedly in autonomous and well co-ordinated efforts to construct dirt jumps and ride their bikes in urban public parklands in eastern Melbourne. This article is mindful of a long tradition of scholarly work tracing the ways young people have used public space, and contested ‘adultist’ representations of them and regulations affecting the use of public space. We address three questions: Why and how did children design, construct and use dirt bike jumps during the COVID pandemic in public parklands? How did Victorian local councils and others like police, older residents and mainstream media respond to children’s construction of DIY dirt jumps? How were these spontaneous DIY dirt jumps understood by Victorian local councils? Adopting a composite case study method and employing a relational perspective, we draw on images, participant observation, field notes, documents and webpage analysis to answer the research questions. We document how children used urban parklands to hang out, to onstruct and use bike jumps during the lockdowns. We show how they challenged adult representations of themselves and public space which depicted their bike riding and the jump making as anti-social and illegal. Meanwhile local governments continued through the COVID-19 pandemic to proclaim the value of ‘youth participation.’ When that youth participation involved young people initiating and managing projects themselves, their conduct was deemed unlawful as councils continued denying them any meaningful opportunities to exercise autonomy, or have say in important policy decisions. In the final section of the article say why providing insider accounts of what happens is useful for good policy-making and professional practice.