Full Description
This book explores the concept of leisure through the lens of colour, offering a fresh and innovative perspective on how chromatic elements shape our understanding of health, wellbeing, and environmental ethics. By focusing on the material and symbolic significance of hues, particularly blue, green, and grey, the book delves into the ways these colours influence leisure spaces and activities. From children's play to surfing in artificial wave pools and skateboarding, the chapters examine diverse leisure practices across locations such as the UK, Russia, Turkey, East Asia, and North America. The book also challenges the traditional focus on blue and green spaces by highlighting the potential of grey spaces—urban environments like city streets, rooftops, and industrial landscapes—as sites of healthy and meaningful leisure.
Through twelve original chapters based on empirical research, this book introduces the nascent field of chromatic leisure, offering new conceptual frameworks that add depth and nuance to leisure scholarship. It critically examines how grey spaces, often overlooked in health and wellbeing discourse, provide alternative ways to frame leisure, embracing ambiguity, hybridity, and complexity. This book is essential reading for students, scholars and policymakers in Leisure Studies, Social Geography, Urbanism, and Health and Wellbeing research.
The chapters in this book were originally published in Leisure Studies and are now accompanied by three new chapters and an updated introduction.
Contents
Introduction: The leisure of grey spaces, urban play and the chromatic turn 1. 'It's a far cry from small boys in the park, jumpers for goalposts. Isn't it?' the changing space of informal youth football in the UK 2. Children's play in grey spaces: ludic geographies and the chromatic turn 3. Dystopian leisure? A post-qualitative inquiry on the polluted and (un)safe leisure spaces of Roma children 4. "Grey is all that is depressing and dull": the chromatic landscapes of rooftop exploration in St Petersburg and the "grey spaces" of leisure in the Capitalocene 5. Riding artificial waves: the hybridisation of surfing in urban spaces 6. 'Everybody's East Lake': polluted leisure and BMX in grey spaces 7. Dancing on the asphalt: extending the bodies and materialities of chromatic leisure in Hong Kong 8. The grey forms of knowledge. Border scraps, secrecy and the reproduction of skateboarding in Tijuana (Mexico) 9. The 'dark' dimensions of grey space in freestyle skateboarding 10. City of courts: excavating the future in West Los Angeles 11. Skateparks, pollution, and decolonisation 12. Skateboarding's bruising affect: From grey spaces to blue dots 13. Reading the Grey Zones Afterword: Sense Making within the Grey Spaces of a Socially Informed, Research-Practice
