Playgrounds as colonial infrastructure: biopolitics and spatial control in Jaffa

Research has examined the role of national parks in rural areas under colonial conditions and explored their role as mechanisms for masking territorial control, displacement, and dispossession. This article aims to shift the focus to urban green spaces. It investigates the proliferation of playgrounds as infrastructural tools of settler-colonial urbanism through a genealogical approach. Focusing on Jaffa – a historically Palestinian city within Israel currently undergoing neoliberal urban regeneration – the article traces the histories and developments of the playgrounds’ spaces. The findings show that they not only obscure past processes of dispossession and displacement but also function as biop instruments in the present and toward a settler-colonial future. These playgrounds inscribe socio-political distinctions into the urban fabric, delineating whose lives are to be nurtured, whose future is to be envisioned, and whose presence is taken as superfluous.