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.