Noora Pyyrya* & Sirpa Taniaa Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland* Email: noora.pyyry@helsinki.fiAbstractThis paper is a conceptual argument for more-than-human playful politics in young people’s practices of spending their free time in the city. Reworking of urban space happens in a mode of playful experimentation and emerges from human-material encounters in the city: it arises from ‘dwelling with’. This understanding grants agency to the material world and has consequences to how we conceptualize everyday politics. Spatial reworking in ‘dwelling with’ is a more-than-human endeavor in which the city plays an active part: it is joint-participation. When young people are playfully engaged with the city, they are open to being differently with ordinary things and spaces. Openness to difference cultivates meaningful being-in-the-world and makes it possible to rework the city through new associations. Events of reworking become political in certain landscapes. Everyday spatial politics, then, is not always ‘serious business’ of political coordination – it can also arise from spontaneous intra-active play with the city.
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