The place where we live: Children, families, play, neighbourhoods and spaces of care during and after the pandemic

Abstract In this paper, we explore what the experiences of some children and families in their neighbourhoods during the first UK COVID‐19 lockdown can tell us about the value and importance of neighbourhood spaces, relations and play in the wider contexts of neoliberalism, austerity and the mooted polycrisis. We use the work of Donald Winnicott, and recent interpretations of his work (by Bonnie Honig and Joanna Kellond), to explore neighbourhood spaces of play as spaces of care, drawing on concepts of facilitating (or holding) environments, potential and transitional spaces, transitional objects (or ‘public things’), the capacity for concern and care‐cure. We reflect on how children and their families' engagement with their most proximate outdoor spaces—the streets, alleyways and green spaces on their doorsteps—during the first UK lockdown signals the ways in which these spaces, and the play and the relations that can develop within them, should be enabled and nurtured beyond the pandemic. In this way, we argue for the political importance of neighbourhood spaces of care, in crises and beyond, and for the value of the possibility of play in these spaces.