Inventing space in the cañada: Tracing children's agency in Los Platanitos, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Abstract

Informal settlements in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, tend to be located in risky and marginal lands along the banks of cañadas, waterways that have been channelized and otherwise transformed by residents as they develop informal settlements on the margins of the formal city. These severely polluted waterways are represented as "decaying," "filthy" and "dangerous" in Dominican planning discourse and drive conceptualizations of informality as an incomplete, liminal state and of informal settlements as liminal landscapes. However, while this deployment of metaphors of liminality in planning discourse supports forms of planning premised on fantasies of citizenship-formation and technical interventionism, a post-colonial, explicitly spatial conceptualization of liminality permits an understanding of the liminal as a source of agency and alternative productions of space. This article examines children's placemaking in the informal settlement of Los Platanitos, taking a phenomenological stance in order to understand their practices, imaginaries, and representations associated with their engagement with the cañada landscape. In contradiction to monolithic productions of the cañada as a liminal landscape defined through tropes of "decay," "filth" and "danger," children appropriate and re-construct these meanings of liminality through their everyday practices. By documenting children's productions of place through play, imagination, and representation, this article seeks to illuminate the transformative potential of children's agency for radical forms of urban planning situated in everyday practices.

Walking with Youth in Los Platanitos: Learning Mobilities, Youth Inclusion, and Co-production in International Planning Studios

“…Although the Growing Up in Cities Program (Lynch 1977) and the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989 led to a push for youth inclusion in urban planning (Chawla 2002;Chawla and Heft 2002;Freeman and Vass 2010), youth continue to be marginalized in economic and community development processes (Day and Wagner 2010;Vivoni 2013). This is often due to stigma associated with youth as uninterested troublemakers, as we have observed in Los Platanitos and other low-income communities in Latin American cities where we have worked (Sletto and Diaz 2015; see also Hardoy et al 2010). Moreover, the liminal positioning "of youth somewhere within the child-adult binary easily evokes unease, disquiet, and moral panic" (Langevang 2008, 228) in decision makers.…”

“…While many international planning studios in the Global South seek to foster critical reflexivity and understanding of classed, racialized, and gendered geographies resulting from uneven development (ACSP Task Force on Global Planning Education 2019; Irazábal et al 2015; Sletto 2013; Sletto and Diaz 2015; Wu and Brooks 2010), here we seek to draw attention to excluded populations within already marginalized communities. In our critical pedagogy in Los Platanitos, we have focused, in particular, on engaging youth in field research and community-based planning activities.…”

Planning for Play? A Systematic Literature Review

“… Omuta (1988) used a deferred demand approach to examine recreation potential in Benin City in Nigeria. “Inventing Space in the Cañada: Tracing Children's Agency in Los Platanitos, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic” by Sletto and Diaz (2015) was the only article to focus on the Caribbean. They examine children's placemaking in an informal settlement, with an overarching focus on their practice, imaginaries, and interactions with the landscape ( Sletto and Diaz 2015 ).…”

“…“Inventing Space in the Cañada: Tracing Children's Agency in Los Platanitos, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic” by Sletto and Diaz (2015) was the only article to focus on the Caribbean. They examine children's placemaking in an informal settlement, with an overarching focus on their practice, imaginaries, and interactions with the landscape ( Sletto and Diaz 2015 ). Huang's (2006) study in Taipei, Taiwan found that social interaction amongst children and their caregivers increased as opportunities for children's play increased.…”