Revisiting the junk playground: Cultivating new democratic imaginaries

’What can we do here?’

The question caught me off guard, as I was scattering my materials for a ‘junk playground’ design experiment that was not officially open yet. Two girls had been watching me for a while, but now they couldn’t be expected to wait any longer. They were just too curious, eagerly demanding an answer, and an invitation to play. The two started scavenging materials, building, drawing, telling stories and playing for hours on end, tirelessly exploring all the many things they could in fact do there.

In this paper, I unfold the implications of their enticing little question – ‘what can we do here’ – in contrast to those situations where people asked me ‘what are we supposed to do here?’. Where the former demonstrate a keen sense of adventure, the latter requests directions for arriving at specific destinations. I further argue that the two questions embody rather different conceptions of democracy. While the latter implies a democracy of rules, procedures and institutions, like representative democracy, ordered and managed, the former gestures towards radical democracy where participation can be more lively, unruly and less restrained.

In a time where many children and young people experience low degrees of democratic agency and self-confidence, I suggest that we urgently need spaces and environments where fewer things are determined in advance. It seems our tradition of junk playgrounds still has something to teach us, and I believe these spaces might help us revitalise and maintain democracy as a way of life.