Spaces of play, spaces of responsibility: Creating dichotomous geographies of outdoor citizenship

Geoforum 55 (2014) 22–32

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Spaces of play, spaces of responsibility: Creating dichotomous geographies of outdoor citizenship Katrina M. Brown Social, Economic & Geographical Sciences Group, James Hutton Institute, Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen AB15 8QH, UK

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 27 September 2012 Received in revised form 8 May 2014

Keywords: Citizenship Nature Mobilities Video ethnography Outdoor recreation Responsibility

a b s t r a c t This paper concerns the co-constitution of citizens and environments, and how the association of outdoor spaces produced as particular ‘natures’ with particular performative norms produces distinct spatialities of inclusion and exclusion. These issues are explored in relation to the moral geographies of outdoor access, whereby the realisation of citizen entitlements to perform outdoor activity depend on the spatial production of norms, practices and identities in relation to various ‘natures’. Using mountain biking as an example, the paper explores how particular subjectivities become placed in the ‘nature domesticated’ of purpose-built trail centres and displaced from the ‘nature wild’ of mountains. Trail centres are positioned as places of play, ignorance and recklessness in which mountain bikers can belong, whilst mountains are constituted as places of responsibility, quiet contemplation and seriousness, in which mountain bikers are out of place. Such spatialisation, setting practices of play and responsibility in opposition to each other, is flagged as problematic in relation to the actualisation of citizenship entitlements, and in turn meeting a range of societal goals for health, wellbeing and ecological knowledges. Despite arguments that play is generative (rather than the ‘other’) of responsibility, there is evidence to suggest that such a dichotomy could become more materially realised, with implications for the ability of citizens to access and share space, and to translate their knowledge and experience from one ‘nature’ to another. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Growing outdoor participation, but in which outdoors? Generating greater participation in outdoor activity is an increasingly pressing concern in the UK. It is seen as crucial to meeting policy imperatives regarding health, mobility, and economic development, as well as social and environmental citizenship (SNH, 2007; Defra, 2008). Mountain biking is seen as an important vehicle for achieving outdoor participation objectives, particularly for encouraging and sustaining activity among young people (SMBDC, 2009; King, 2010). In practice, however, mountain biking has met with significant resistance to its acceptance as a legitimate mode of outdoor citizenship, even where legally endorsed. Conflicts have been identified between mountain bikers and more established outdoor recreational users, with particular objections to mountain biking including: noise; speed and style of movement; wearing of bright or intimidating clothing; moving in big groups; inconsiderate, irresponsible and dangerous behaviour; the presence of a ‘machine’ or ‘urban’ artefact in nature; and, causing environmental damage or being disrespectful to nature (Ruff and Mellors, 1993; Ravenscroft, 2004; Carothers

E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.05.002 0016-7185/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

et al., 2001; Heer et al., 2003; Milner, 2006; Hoy, 2006; Brown, submitted for publication). With this prevailing image of mountain biking as feckless and reckless, it could be argued that the mountain biker is constituted as deviant and the outdoor ‘anti-citizen’ (after Matless, 1998), whereby their pursuit of sensory pleasure and its associated bodily effects are considered vulgar, polluting or disruptive in relation to established ideals of environmental engagement. A legitimate citizen of the outdoors must demonstrate the requisite conduct and aesthetic ability demanded by dominant moral orderings, which according to Matless (1998) are always spatially constituted. Judgements made about the (in)appropriateness of behaviour cannot be separated from judgements made about the characteristics, value and purpose of the environments in question (see also Cresswell, 2006; Edensor, 2006). However, little consideration has been given to the spatial contingency of citizenship, acceptance and belonging in relation to outdoor activity, despite the drive for growing participation. This paper explores with respect to mountain biking how and why deviant subjectivities are not considered inappropriate everywhere, and attends to hitherto overlooked underlying mechanisms of such spatial differentiation. The paper draws upon a study of outdoor access in Scotland which illustrates the emergence of distinct moral geographies of

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recreation participation. The (un)acceptability of mountain biking as ‘in’ or ‘out of place’ (Cresswell, 1996) is shown to be highly contingent on precisely which ‘natures’ subjects are attempting to access, and how these subjectivities are mobilised in relation to these natures. A vivid illustration is how mountain biking is allowed to belong (or is even positively encouraged and prioritised) in the overtly commodified spaces of purpose-built trail centres, but are deemed unacceptable in spaces seen as ‘wilder’ and more ‘natural’ such as mountains. We need to examine further some of the core geographical imaginaries with which particular outdoor activities – and moral judgements made about their associated conduct and identities – have developed. It is commonly suggested that mountain biking is resisted in part because it is adversarial to, or not as much a part of, ‘nature’. However, spatialities of acceptable environmental conduct raise questions of precisely which ‘natures’ are being invoked (implicitly or explicitly) in such debate (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998), and thus who is allowed to engage with them (Whatmore, 2002). How we co-constitute legitimate citizens and ‘natures’ also evokes questions of the capacity to perform appropriate conduct in particular spaces, and in which spaces particular subjects are encouraged or expected to access. Such questions underpin the governance of outdoor recreation, not least due to the heavy regulatory reliance on informal customary practices. Everyday norms and subjectivities play a fundamental role in delineating how outdoor access is enabled and governed – along with legislation and codes of conduct defining rights and responsibilities1 of outdoor citizenship (Parker, 2006, 2007) – and are therefore a fundamental aspect of facilitating desired increases in participation. The aim is, therefore, to use mountain biking to examine in more depth how performative norms of conduct are mutually constituted with particular spaces – in this case particular ‘natures’ – and what this means for the practical realisation of outdoor citizen (or deviant) status. Specifically, I explore how trail centres and mountains are produced as particular ‘wild’ or ‘domestic’ outdoor spaces, and in ways that enable and disenable particular outdoor subjectivities through their constitution together with the moral axes of ‘responsibility’ and ‘play’.

Nature and outdoor citizens Traditionally, studies of citizenship have been concerned with the allocation of rights and responsibilities (Marshall, 1950 [2009]), most often with regard to the freedoms, protections and obligations linking individual and nation state. More recent scholarship, however, has critiqued static and official notions of entitlement, and demonstrated how citizenship is not given, but involves the active negotiation of acceptance and belonging, and thus has to be learned, and continually worked at (Hall et al., 1999). It is increasingly understood as spatially and performatively contingent, which means that citizen rights are realised or denied as they are enacted through the normativities of grounded, embodied everyday practices, as well as through formal institutional apparatus (Valentine, 2008; Laurier and Philo, 2006; Dickinson et al., 2008; Mitchell, 2003; Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008). In fact, it is helpful to think in terms of relational processes of citizenship formation, which unfold across a range of interlinked social and spatial scales (Desforges et al., 2005). A number of authors have attended to the relationship between outdoor recreation and citizenship (Curry, 2002; Ravenscroft, 1 In Scotland, where the empirical material of this paper comes from, the rights and responsibilities of outdoor access are defined by the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 Part I and the Scottish Outdoor Access Code. This framework allows non-motorised access to most land and inland water on the condition that it is ‘responsible’.

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1998; Ravenscroft et al., 2002; Lorimer, 1997; Flemsæter et al., 2011), though fewer have dealt in depth with how such relations are geographically produced. A key exception is Matless (1994, 1998, 2000) who examines outdoor activities in terms of the moral geographies of associating particular environments with particular identities and forms of conduct. He explains that who counts as a legitimate citizen is judged against socially and materially situated normativities of how the outdoors and nature ought to be engaged with and appreciated. Here particular ‘natures’ can become the grounds for producing particular leisure identities, and the characteristics ascribed to a space form the basis for invoking moral judgements about associated forms of appropriate bodily conduct. Going further, Edensor (2000, 2006) highlights that it is not just a case of a contested delineation of which outdoor subjectivities are appropriate to particular domains. Rather, he asserts it is a case of particular rural domains being actively produced and reproduced as outdoor subjectivities are enacted. The case of public rights of access in Scotland illustrates very well how legal rights of outdoor citizenship only become meaningful when enacted in and through practice, and with the tacit acceptance of others (Brown, 2012), and the myriad social and environmental contingencies upon which this depends. Rather than tying particular users to particular paths or areas, these rights espouse a multi-use ethic bounded behaviourally through the conditionality of acting ‘responsibly’ (the outline principles of which feature in an associated Code of conduct). A similar principle is also implicit in the outdoor access rights of many other countries (Ravenscroft et al., 2002; Parker, 2006, 2007; Flemsæter et al., 2011). Therefore, the capacity to perform a ‘responsible’ subjectivity is crucial to the ability to participate with legal legitimacy in outdoor activities, but also has to be performed in a way that is acceptable to other users and land managers who hold the most normative power in bounding a legitimate outdoor citizen on the ground. Whether or not mountain bikers count as legitimate citizens of the outdoors is, however, highly contested (Brown, 2012; Pothecary, 2012). Mountain biking has emerged as an important and illustrative manifestation of shifting socionatural relations of outdoor recreation: creating novel openings and possibilities for where and how the outdoors can be done. Such new and differentiating modes of aesthetic and mobile engagement, and associated expressions of attachment, unsettle and reconfigure previously stabilised conventions, habits, and embodiments of outdoor recreation (Edensor, 2006). Often mobilised by those seeking to defend established forms of use is disdain towards anyone treating nature as a ‘playground’ (Edensor, 2006; Thompson (2010). Play has been flagged in recent scholarship as a ‘‘significant geographical concern in its own right’’ (Woodyer, 2012, p. 313), where particular issue is taken with assumptions of play as solely the domain of children, and ‘‘as the ‘other’ of conventional adult behaviour’’ (Woodyer, 2012, p. 314). Instead, research illustrates the relevance and attraction of play throughout the lifecourse, including adulthood (Stevens, 2007), and indeed emphasises the benefits of play to health, wellbeing, vitality, creativity, selfvalidation and relationships which can permeate each facet of ordinary adult lives (Brown, 2010; Rieber et al., 1998; Schrage, 2000). Geographers have also recognised and helped to question other ways in which play is conceived dualistically, such as its prevalent positioning in opposition to work, rationality, seriousness, depth, purpose, productivity, necessity, constraint and morality (Dubin, 1956; Bowman, 1987; Chick and Hood, 1998; Stevens, 2007; Woodyer, 2012). Play in such dualisms often is framed in pejorative terms, for example, as Chick and Hood (1998, p. 5) state, ‘‘work has been seen as the fountainhead of progress while play and leisure are, at best, diversions and, at worst, potential settings for the handiwork of the devil’’. An important contribution of

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geographers is to prompt critical consideration of the consequential ways in which play (and associated concepts such as playfulness and childishness) are spatially constituted, in both urban (Stevens, 2007) and rural (Jones, 2000) settings. This work considers the sensuality, openness, improvisation and escape of play, and its transformative potential for bodies and spaces, as well as how play becomes entangled with spaces and subjects bounded through notions of (im)purity. However, as yet, the debate has not extended to how play is mobilised in relation to nature and citizenship, and the possible implications for outdoor participation. Multiple, co-constituted urban natures Geographical debate is increasingly informed by ‘‘a sense of natures as active outcomes not pregiven starting points’’ (Bingham and Hinchliffe, 2008, p. 85), which means that such natures are ‘‘inescapably social’’ (Castree, 2004, p. 3). The fixing of ‘nature’ and its dis/connection to places, practices and people in ways that generate and preserve the fabrication of their seeming stability, is shown to be not only a relational achievement (Whatmore, 2002), but exposed as inescapably political, never innocent or neutral but heavily power-laden, normatively encoded and struggled over (Latour, 2004; Haraway, 1991; Swyngedouw, 2009). Accordingly, producing ‘natures’ is a core part of producing space, in uneven and contested ways. A burgeoning area of scholarship conceptualises all such ‘natures’ as urban natures, in recognition that ‘‘urbanization is not the end of nature, but rather its transformation’’ (Braun, 2005, p. 640, after Cronon, 1991) and of natures’ production and transformation as inextricably interwoven with socio-spatial processes of urbanisation.2 How we constitute particular urban natures – whether as mountains, trail centres, forests, greenspace, National Parks, wilderness or playgrounds – matters because how we configure any spaces shapes our ethical parameters regarding how bodies and environments may entwine with, and act upon, each other (Whatmore, 2002; Latour, 2004; Mol, 1999). As soon as we disembed, disembody, or objectify something or someone, we pave the way to exclude them or treat them in ways that were hitherto not possible or thinkable. Similarly, configuring ‘nature’ in particular ways (e.g. as eternal, stable, truthful, or essential) makes certain territorialisations, by particular subjects, legitimate whilst undermining others. For example, Whatmore and Thorne (1998) explain how purification of categories of ‘wildness’ and ‘domesticity’ and their material groundings, at once enables and justifies the fixing of the characteristics of particular spaces together with particular subjectivities. This leads on to a major question of who then gets to engage or connect with which natures, and in which ways (Panelli, 2010). Geographical constitution of trail centres Purpose-built mountain biking trail centres are proliferating all over the world, and can be understood as one of many ‘natures’ produced as distinct spatialities when commodity relations (re)order outdoor recreation spaces. Trail centres are characterised by waymarked trails that have been intentionally designed and engineered for mountain biking. Set routes are graded, riskassessed and increasingly standardised according to their difficulty. Trail centres are what many could easily think of as ‘urban’ nature; calling upon entrenched notions of the urban as the encroachment of the human, artificial, and built, upon once natural environments (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003). Certainly, they are overtly 2 Building on the earlier insights of Williams (1973) and Harvey (1996) and others, for an overview see Heynen et al. (2006).

caught up in the commoditisation of socio-material relations (Whatmore, 2002) in that they are often explicitly created by configurations of state and commercial actors as a vehicle to further rural economic development. In the UK, the aim has primarily been to revalorise land thought of as residual, and especially monocultural forestry plantations that have become obsolete in terms of the timber markets for which they had originally been conceived. There are at least 25 purpose-built trail centres in Scotland.3 They are considered a key contributor to mountain biking being worth over £49 million annually to the Scottish economy, and having grown participation by nearly 10% (UHI, 2013). As in the UK generally, most have been built on National Forest Estate land by the Forestry Commission4 but privately owned centres also exist. They increasingly feature additional facilities such as toilets, café, ticketed car parking, bike shop, skills loops, jump parks, and even motorised uplift by either vehicle or chairlift. The string of trail centres in Southern Scotland known as the ‘‘7stanes’’ is widely considered the Forestry Commission’s flagship development: a collection of seven mountain biking ‘centres’ developed as an EU partnership project to boost the ailing rural economy postfoot-and-mouth disease.5 Other areas – notably in the Highlands of Scotland – have followed suit with the aim of attracting more tourists across more of the year. Lauded by the business development community in terms of economic multipliers produced, such spaces have also become iconic and internationally reputed for the mountain biking experiences they afford (UHI, 2013). More recently, trail centres have also been developed in the urban fringe – particularly in areas of post-industrial decline – in a bid to make mountain biking more accessible to youth and the majority of the population, and thus encourage greater outdoor participation (UHI, 2013). The spread of purpose-built trails is heralded as a new chapter in how mountain biking and the outdoors are done, as we can see from this UK guidebook excerpt: ‘‘The manmade [sic] nature of the trails has created a new style of riding, with bermed corners, smooth jumps and flowing singletrack – not things found so easily or so often on natural trails. Clear waymarking has removed the need for a map, for navigational skills and for route planning. Beginners can turn up, knowing they’ll be able to ride a trail at their level, while advanced riders are assured of a good technical ride. Essentially, a trip to a trail centre minimises stress and maximises fun . . .’’ [Fenton, 2008, p. 8] Here the author describes trail centres as enabling a liberating way of riding, where riders can enjoy greater assurance of having a positive experience. He foregrounds the pleasure of continuity, flow, security, and technical challenge that come from the certainties of specifically designed, categorised and signposted paths and features. However, he identifies a tension between trail centres and the ‘soul’ and ‘adventure’ of mountain biking asking ‘‘Do you really want to visit North Wales and spend all your time riding in a forest that’s similar to South Wales?’’ (Fenton, 2008, p. 8). He indicates that something might be lost in creating the standardisation and similarity that measures and reduces (actual and perceived) risk and makes terrain knowable, controllable and predictable in such 3 Many are listed here http://www.dmbins.com/riders/where-to-ride and can be found on this map: https://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&source=embed& oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=112950966862993097975.00044b2bed15b8f994e21&dg= feature (both accessed 03.03.14). 4 The Forestry Commission developed the UK’s first mountain biking-specific trail in Coed y Brenin in 1999 and have been at the forefront of delivering purpose-built trails ever since. 5 The UK 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease in livestock caused access to be restricted to rural areas normally popular for recreation and tourism, with a substantial negative impact on the rural economy.

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ways. Yet that predictability is also the perceived advantage. It seems trail centres align well with identified trends in leisure patterns (Macnaghten and Urry, 2000) where increasing numbers of stressed, time-pressured participants are looking for a quick, guaranteed experience. Geographical constitution of mountains The rubric of ‘mountain biking’ conveys the centrality of mountains – and associated geographical imaginaries of challenging environmental frontiers – to the semiotic and material mobilisation of this outdoor activity. Indeed, it seems that running in tandem with the proliferation of trail centres is a renewed impetus for riding in ‘wilder’ and more ‘natural’ places (Singletrack, 2011). Mountains hold a deep fascination for the human imagination, which has led to them being enrolled, ordered and ‘fixed’ in various ways (Macfarlane, 2003; Cosgrove and della Dora, 2009). In Western culture particularly, stable geographical tropes connote ‘mountains’ with isolation and remoteness, steep gradients, rough terrain, desolation, danger, and hostile climate, as well as sparsely populated and beyond regulatory reach. Since the 18th century, mountains have been widely and variously revered through their constitution as spaces of scientific discovery, heroic adventure and exploration, colonial expansion and military control, the achievement of sublime aesthetic experience, as well as restoration, sanctuary, and re-creation of mind, body and spirit. They tend to be produced in deed, discourse and image as ‘‘seemingly uncorrupted islands within an impure world’’ (Cosgrove and della Dora, 2009, p. 13) and as ‘‘the primary place of authentic wilderness’’ (Cosgrove and della Dora, 2009, p. 7) construed as natural and uncontaminated by the presence or traces of humans. The asserted remove of mountains, especially from all things ‘urban’ or ‘domestic’, has created associations as places to prove and build moral ‘character’ and generate a sense of citizenship (Lorimer, 1997). Bolstered by Darwinian notions of ‘fitness’, acts of coping with suffering, exertion and discomfort, as well as exposure to risk and danger, mountains have long been celebrated as ways of affirming masculinity and demonstrating physical accomplishment whilst punishing human vanity and hubris (Thompson, 2010). Moreover, they are closely linked with the kinds of skills that ‘proper’ and ‘rightful’ mountain users, as ultimate outdoor citizens, are expected to possess, such as reading a map, using a compass, and executing safety measures (Lorimer and Lund, 2003; Beedie, 2003). Consider here the spatial contingency of ‘wild(er)ness’ and ‘domesticity’ elaborated by Whatmore and Thorne (1998). Being spatially produced as external and separate to urbanity, mountains are simultaneously associated with a different set of performative norms of conduct to regulate outdoor citizenship within them (Beedie, 2003; Lorimer and Lund, 2003) compared to spaces deemed ‘urban’ (Neal and Walters, 2007). However, the urban natures scholarship elaborated above poses a challenge to these enduring dualistic understandings. Following Williams (1973), Wilson (1992), Harvey (1996) and Gandy (2002) and others, mountains too are urban natures in the sense that they are still produced through global urbanisation processes and associated (sociomaterial) capital and commodity relations. Like any conurbation and hinterland, mountains and cities are inextricably interwoven together in the same socionatural system in which ideas, people, materials, goods, services and capital flow. Both are transformed in the process of their co-constitution. Methods I draw from ethnographic research conducted between 2006 and 2010, which examined the contested re-configuring of outdoor

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access and recreation governance in the wake of major legislative change.6 This entailed a particular focus on walking and mountain biking in the North-East of Scotland. The approach taken in the study encompassed three different components. Two comprised the use and development of techniques of mobile and video ethnography, to interrogate the practices of walking and mountain biking whilst doing the practices together with participants (for a more in-depth discussion of these methods, see Brown et al., 2008; and Brown and Spinney, 2010; Brown and Banks, in press, in press; see also Spinney, 2011). First we conducted 10 audio-recorded ‘go-along’ interviews, informed by the ‘walking with’ techniques increasingly employed in geography (Lorimer and Lund, 2003; Anderson, 2004) and, in the case of mountain biking, adapted to become ‘ride-along’ interviews. In a second phase we enrolled head-mounted video cameras (minicam or ‘headcam’) into the research encounters, creating an audio-visual recording of a total of 34 walking and mountain biking outings, and using the footage to prompt discussion with participants in subsequent unstructured interviews. The participants ranged in age from 23 to 61 years old. The majority were male (22 of 34) and in socio-economic classes,7 C1, C2 or B (all 34), and only one was from an ethnic minority. Other than the absence of children,8 this social differentiation was felt by participants to be representative of participation in Scotland, and indeed mountain biking in general. The discursive evidence materialising from the mobile ethnographic techniques was supported by analysis of transcripts and fieldnotes from observation of the quarterly meetings of the Cairngorm Local Outdoor Access Forum (LOAF).9

The moral geographies of outdoor citizenship and the place of mountain biking Co-constituting citizenship and natures A striking theme emerging from the data was the binary distinction made between two key ‘natures’ of the outdoors: places with ‘‘purpose-built’’ or ‘‘man-made’’ [sic] trails, which were articulated in contradistinction to the ‘‘natural’’ trails found out with (and sometimes unmarked within) trail centres. Just as striking were the ways in which participants bodily and discursively performed these spaces differently regarding the ways of moving, sensing and interacting that were acceptable there. This was thrown into sharpest relief regarding mountains, evoked as quintessentially ‘natural’ places. A number of walkers, mountain bikers and access forum members worked to constitute mountain biking as incompatible with mountains. Paula, one of the walking participants, who also did some mountain biking, emphasised how the high ground is not just wild, remote and fragile, but ‘‘a lot more hostile as well, and by that point you really need to know what you’re doing before you really go on up there . . .[. . .]. . . I think it’s more I don’t equate mountain bikers with people who necessarily understand all that’’. In this and other such discursive mobilisations, mountain bikers were conveyed as the kind of people who ‘‘don’t know what they’re 6 Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 Part I conferred and clarified rights of outdoor access for all non-motorised forms of mobility and thus changed the governance structure of outdoor recreation. 7 These socio-economic grades correspond to the following occupation-based demographic classification: A = upper middle class, B = middle class, C1 = lower middle class, C2 = skilled working class, D = working class, E = non working. For more detail, see: http://www.nrs.co.uk/lifestyle-data/ (accessed 06.05.14). 8 Young people, women and those considered living in deprived areas would be good to recruit in future study as policy and research documents have identified mountain biking as a particularly attractive channel for these groups to become more active outdoors (e.g. King, 2010; Brown et al., 2010; O’Brien and Morris, 2014). 9 Forum members include land managers, public agency staff, community members, and third sector and interest group representatives.

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doing’’ (Kevin), who are ‘‘ignorant’’ (Gavin) and lack the knowledge, skill and experience to judge and respond to the terrain and the ecological or meteorological conditions of mountains. This raises the question of why mountain bikers have come to be seen as so unknowledgeable and unskilled. It emerged that the close association of mountain bikers with legally or morally ‘irresponsible’ forms of conduct was enabled and fuelled by foregrounding their entanglements with purposebuilt trail centres, and the embodiments and conduct they encourage. Performing trail centres A recurrent theme was the degree to which trail centres allowed riders to explore the embodied and sensual experience of riding a bike, free from the usual environmental constraints and social obligations of more ‘natural’ or ‘wild’ outdoor spaces. Having robust, predictable trail surfaces, where expectations of meeting other people or unforeseen impediments are low, permitted a refocusing of attention on the micro-spaces where body and terrain intermingle (‘‘it’s just you and the land . . .[. . .]. . . you get a chance to really see what you can do, how far or fast you can go and still stay on’’, Kevin), as well as enjoying undisturbed social interactions which give such engagements meaning (‘‘if it’s just other bikers, folk around you understand what you are trying to do, and even egg you on, like they know you are trying to get up the hill without dabbing [a foot to the ground], they know you want to get all the way down the hill without stopping’’, Natasha). Riders conveyed as much through their more-than-verbal expressions of elation and disappointment whilst riding, as through discussion afterwards, that central to their desired outdoor experience was to explore the limits and abilities of the body-bike in rolling over textured and shapely terrain, and the heavily somatic and haptic sensations of doing so (for an expanded account, see Brown, in preparation). In trail centres riders concentrated with little interruption on intense and deeply kinaesthetic forms of play. These involved becoming attuned to the ‘feel’ of granularity, gradient and micro-to-macro topographies of the landscape (likened to ‘‘massage, but from the inside’’, Michelle), and improvising and experimenting with various fluid bodily-bike-terrain configurations relating to the forces, frictions and feelings of speed, grip, mass, weightlessness, balance and direction, and how they responded to jumps, bumps, corners, drop-offs and other trail features. Spaces of play Purpose-built trails were positioned predominantly as places of ‘play’, which itself was typically evoked as being childlike, with no requirement to act responsibly: It’s like the equivalent of running round the playground at school screaming . . . it’s like playing as opposed to a challenge or pushing yourself . . . unless you’re really stupid, you’re not going to get yourself into that much trouble . . .[. . .]. . . it’s about playing really as opposed to. . . you don’t really need to be that responsible, you don’t need to consider that much. [Penny/mountain biker] This participant emphasised her feelings of liberation in not having to give particular consideration to other users or the environment, explaining that in trail centres you can be ‘‘mindless’’ and ‘‘juvenile’’ and it does not matter because these environments are ‘‘foolproof’’. Others concurred, invoking similar notions of being ‘‘carefree’’ (Duncan), ‘‘childish’’ (Jon) and able to ‘‘fool around’’ (Louise). Playfulness, often inflected with notions of

foolishness, freedom, and abandon, was largely invoked here with a great deal of endorsement, or at least with a sense of forgiving affection for play as childlike guilty pleasure. Indeed, a number of participants did use the term ‘‘juvenile’’ in more pejorative terms. One described mountain bikers as ‘‘young hooligans’’ (David) and another as ‘‘hoodlums’’ who were ‘‘childish’’ (Geoff). Trail centres were accordingly disparaged as places of pleasure and little restraint, where (animal) instincts and juvenility reign and recreating bodies are constituted as mere vessels for hormones (e.g. ‘‘there they can just behave like animals’’ (David), or they are ‘‘just adrenaline junkies’’ (Geoff)). In such ways, mountain biking was invoked by some as a more basal, primitive and sometimes even animalistic enactment of the outdoors – reinforced by its foregrounding of haptic senses (Brown, in preparation) – and conjoined with play understood in the sense of a subject being underdeveloped and undisciplined. Clearly, whether pejorative or celebratory, the associations of trail centres with play and youthfulness were a strongly emergent theme. Mountains, meanwhile, were configured as the preserve of oldness (mainly pejoratively defined), especially regarding those resisting mountain biking who were described as ‘‘old duffers’’ (Jon), ‘‘whingeing grannies’’ (Laura) and ‘‘old, stuffy ramblers’’ (Scott), and were often associated with the practices of walking. What is most interesting is how such configurations intersect with different territorialisations and how these are reinforced or resisted. Jon expresses his problem with: old duffers that want the countryside for themselves, especially the most remote parts . . . some of the old guys just like the remoteness and everything like that, and they want to keep it that way for them, so they can get out there. In his portrayal of walkers as ‘old duffers’ he conveys his feeling that particular outdoor spaces (in this case mountains) are appropriated by particular demographics. However, when taken together with the aforementioned codifications of trail centres, and the fact that mobilisations of youthfulness and oldness did not correlate clearly to the actual ages of participants, it seems that the struggle may be as much to do with the right to be playful and youthful in particular natures, whatever your age, as with any inter-generational conflict. Cultivating irresponsibility? Trail centres were not seen as places of adventure, exploring ‘nature’, or ‘pushing oneself’ in a traditional outdoor sense, but primarily as places of play and fun where one can let go of restrictions, follow desires and express oneself, with a greater emphasis on interior exploration. Many thought these outdoor spaces thus cultivated certain habits, dispositions, capacities and identities, whilst failing to demand others. A number of riders explained that did not have to worry about navigation because the coloured arrows marked the way, and that prescribed and waymarked routes meant they could dispense with a map and compass. Graded, risk-assessed, ‘all-weather’, and standardised trails were felt to discourage the ability to judge risk and varying conditions. The crux decision of matching ability to terrain was felt to be largely covered by the initial choice of grade to be ridden10 (e.g. ‘‘this trail is red and I can ride reds’’ (Gavin)) rather than a matter of ongoing trailcraft. Some also mentioned that they did not give their kit or nutrition much thought since they were never far from the carpark. My fieldnotes and video recordings also suggested that, in contrast to riding on trails considered ‘natural’, riders in trail centres would ride with less caution and consideration (e.g. slowing down 10

The grades are generally green, blue, red and black, where black is the hardest.

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less for blind corners or whilst passing other users), and paying less heed to environmental impacts (e.g. vegetation damage through corner-cutting or riding over the edge of the trail, or surface damage from riding in wet conditions). When talking around the video, some participants felt that the transformation, controlling, reinforcement and regularisation of the shape and surfaces of the environment, the stipulating and channelling of movements within it, and consequent reduction of certain likelihoods and risks, encouraged them to ‘‘switch off’’ (Fiona) from certain social and environmental considerations. Like Paula, they tended to feel absolved the usual obligations and the need to know. A strong notion came through of trail centres cultivating riders who are not equipped to handle ‘wilder’ and more ‘natural’ natures. The idea that trail centres actually engender ignorant subjects imbued the judgements of other recreationists, such as one mountain biker who said, ‘‘you get people coming who have no idea how to ride natural trails. They don’t know anything about assessing conditions or reading a map. But then, why would they know if they’ve only ever ridden in trail centres. They’re not bad people, they’re just ignorant. They don’t have the experience’’ [Alan]. Mountain bikers are thus easily positioned as lacking knowledge (and ‘ignorant’) because in the purpose-built habitat of trail centres there is not much they need to know. Being relieved of requirements to know or worry was emphasised by many participants as a large part of the appeal of riding in the highly controlled and ‘tamed’ environments of trail centres. However, such conjoining of trail centres with a less demanding, less competent mode of outdoor citizenship, meant they were also constituted as encouraging the degeneracy of outdoor citizenship and the deskillment of the practitioners most associated with them. This stands in stark contrast to one common mobilisation of play is as a skill-building practice. There is clearly an issue of which skills play augments. Tensions between legal and embodied norms Like mountains, the ‘natures’ of trail centres were considered places of escape; not necessarily an escape from typical signifiers of the urban (e.g. commerce, technology, density of people), but an escape from behavioural and regulatory conventions (Neal and Walters, 2007). This included a perceived liberation from the restrictions and bodily hierarchies scripted in the Code, most notably the obligation for mountain bikers to always give way to walkers and other users. In a post-ride interview, a rider recounted an episode in which she and her companions were ‘‘surprised’’ and bemused in encountering walkers on the trail at Glentress, one of the most popular UK trail centres: there was people who were walking on the specific mountain bike trails and getting frustrated, you know, been sort of seemingly annoyed that we were cycling up there . . .[. . .]. . . this is an area which has been specifically made for mountain biking, and it seemed a bit strange that walkers were trying to use the same area . . . plenty of other areas you can go to [Sarah] Her group did not feel the walkers were legitimate in their frustration at the mountain bikers’ appropriation of these outdoor spaces. They underscored trail centres as spaces only for bikers because they were made for bikers, and, crucially as places they were not as prepared or inclined to make particular effort to concede passage to other users. She contrasted this with the approach they took when riding elsewhere: ‘then you’ve got to be a bit more, you know, maybe considerate of . . . there will be walkers around’. She explained that they always gave way to walkers ‘‘except at trail centres, obviously’’ [emphasis added].

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Pervading thus is a supposition that riders can conduct themselves more ‘freely’ in trail centres since there is no expectation of encountering anyone else, or at least no-one who is not also mountain biking (even though small numbers of walkers were encountered on each study outing). Moreover, these and other participants feel that an exclusive claim of mountain bikers to the spaces of trail centres is signalled in the materialities and affordances built with mountain biking in mind. This is despite the access legislation being multi-use, and specifying hierarchies in which cyclists always give way to other users. This incongruence between legal and moral boundaries was a source of consternation to access and recreation managers and officials, one of whom stated exasperatedly that: ‘‘the Code applies in trail centres too, but people don’t seem to always realise that’’. The specificity of the infrastructure – the shape, texture, robustness and design of purposely limited and controlled interactions with different subjects – have all become part of what distinguishes trail centres as a commodity and as a particular kind of outdoor space. Here certain practices and objects embody norms of permissiveness in ways they would not be elsewhere (e.g. skidding, speed, paying, advertising, conspicuous technology, emerged clearly from the data). A number of participants portrayed a geographically contingent ethic of care for the environment. For example, riders would not necessarily avoid trail centres in wet conditions – and they accept their agency in the deterioration of their surfaces – in a way they would not emulate or condone in the ‘wider outdoors’. Some riders even mobilise an explicit economic justification for environmental damage: ‘it doesn’t matter if I cause some erosion. I’ve paid for this trail – through the parking and through my taxes,11 [Jon]. Indeed, accounts suggest that the capacity to stimulate economic activity is becoming increasingly leveraged as a source of justification for priority of outdoor citizenship, sometimes for particular modes of mobility. Positioning mountain biking as having an equal (or even prior) claim to particular outdoor spaces was justified in ways that resonated intimately with policy rhetoric of this activity as a beneficial consumer activity. For example, it was relatively common to hear riders conveying how walkers and land managers ‘‘don’t always recognise how much money mountain biking brings into these areas’’ [Andrew], as a way of defending their feeling of being rightful citizens. Resisting the (dis)placement of mobile subjects Nevertheless, some mountain bikers resisted the universalisation of mountain biking subjectivities, as if fixed in ‘nature domesticated’ mode. They struggled to disentangle their identities from trail centres and distance themselves from ‘anti-citizen’ subjectivities by talking of a ‘new breed’ of rider who were not ‘real’ mountain bikers because they were ‘‘brought up on Glentress, don’t know what they’re doing’’ [Ben], or only ever rode in trail centres. Those wishing to ride in ‘wilder’ natures or on more ‘natural’ trails asserted their ability to discern the difference between different natures, and varying circumstances, as well as the capacity to take on board the conditionalities of accessing harsh and fragile environments: I wouldn’t go frequently onto the plateau. I wouldn’t necessarily take a big group up onto the plateau or things like that. But if I felt I wanted to do an adventure like that sometime I’d be happy going to do it. [Ryan] 11 Since it is not legally possible to charge for access, those providing and maintaining purpose-built trails usually apply a charge to the associated parking facilities as a way to recoup some of the cost (often along with investment in other facilities, such as a café and bike shop). Such charges can be controversial when applied by State landowners, such as the Forestry Commission, as many feel their taxes ought to cover this kind of infrastructure provision.

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K.M. Brown / Geoforum 55 (2014) 22–32

Such territorialisations were usually qualified in various ways, as Ryan does with respect to group size and frequency of visit. Spatialities of play and responsibility Constituting nature domesticated Emerging from the study were thus moral geographies in which wild and domestic natures were distinguished and differently encoded with respect to acceptable subjectivity of how the outdoors can be performed, which itself was sharply divided through particular mobilisations of play and responsibility, and other intertwining binaries (see Table 1). Mountain bikers themselves recognised how they were encouraged to be ‘rad’, playful and expansive in the purpose-built terrain of trail centres, but ‘responsible’, restrained and serious in mountains or more ‘natural’ or ‘wild’ areas. Moreover, they showed how playful subjects become placed in domesticated natures – created as spaces of contained deviance from ideal citizenship where play, mindlessness and irresponsibility are catered for, engendered and even encouraged – whilst becoming displaced from wilder natures, created as spaces of ideal citizenship and the preserve of responsible, quiet and serious practices. In enrolling certain infrastructures in the constitution of trail centres, state and commercial actors promote particular territorialisations in which mountain biking practices are actively encouraged to dominate and enact a prior claim over other modalities. Particular dispositions towards environments and other users are encouraged which are considered, yet permissive and not wholly congruent with legal encodings. Such spatial claims are bolstered by the material and semiotic constitution of trail centres as ‘nature domesticated’. These spaces overtly signal their production as urban natures through classic hallmarks of metropolitan modernity (after Lewis, 2004): highly managed, artificial, controlled, smoothed out, standardised, risk-assessed and risk-reduced, unashamed technological enrolment and development. Accordingly, trail centres are not considered particularly ‘natural’, pristine, fragile, or precious environments. Rather they are treated as a more revalorised residual, robust, and ultimately expendable or sacrificial outdoors. Table 1 Configuring different spaces of outdoor citizenship – entwining binaries. Outdoors

Trail centre

Mountains

Nature

Domestic Safe Robust Proximate Easy/accommodating

Wild Risky/dangerous Fragile Remote Hostile

Terrain

Purpose-built/ engineered

Natural

Practices

Play Freedom

Serious Constraint/obligation/ regulation Cognitive Visual senses to fore

More-than-cognitive Kinaesthetic senses to fore Subjects

Ignorant/foolish Incompetent Irresponsible Body Mindless Playful Childlike Immature/childish

Knowledgeable Competent and skilful Responsible Mind Mindful Serious Adult Mature

Citizen legitimacy performed

Irresponsible

Responsible

It is possible for even those typically deemed anti-citizen, such as mountain bikers, to become acceptable in domesticated natures for two key reasons. On one hand, they are ‘made safe’ and regarded as neutralised in terms of their impact, in that they can do little or no harm to other users or the environment, and even themselves. On other hand, they can be made productive through trail centres, specifically in terms of revenue streams. These more ‘managed’ outdoor spaces are felt to encourage and demand a more limited mode of citizenship; albeit one which garners little respect, and is perhaps tolerated (by others) largely by way of its economic justification. In this way, sculpted and managed outdoor spaces like trail centres give mountain bikers a space where they feel like they belong, and where they can explore through deeply haptic play the feelings and limits of moving their bodies together with a bicycle and shapely, textured terrain. If play is understood as a taste of the world as it might be otherwise (Katz, 2004), in domesticated natures, riders have the opportunity to radically explore alternative orderings in which the need to heed differently embodied others, and wider ecologies, is diminished. Playing in trail centres allows mountain bikers the chance to perform rural space as it might be otherwise (after Katz, 2004) and be liberated from established normativities of the ‘right’ ways to do the outdoors; how rural space could be experienced by radically valorising haptic over visual modes of landscape appreciation (Brown, in preparation), and if one could be uninhibited in their somatic exploration of self, technology, and various shapes, speeds, sensations, textures, forces, and gradients. However, for these subjects, having their ‘own’ space, where they felt freedom and inclusion, seemed to come at the cost of undermining further claims to other spaces more broadly. Problems of exclusion for mountain bikers emerged when performance of – or close associations with – one nature (e.g. trail centres) then paved the way for a disappropriation from others (e.g. mountains), either because riders were deskilled and ignorant, or because they were assumed to be so. Study participants showed how environments considered domesticated, like trail centres, were enacted as less demanding or nurturing of certain capacities of outdoor citizenship (e.g. navigation, judging environmental conditions, or orchestrating encounters with different users). Juxtaposing the serious and responsible approach held to be vital in performing mountains, with mobilisations of mountain bikers as playful and ignorant, worked to disqualify them from belonging in such ‘wild’, ‘harsh’, ‘demanding’ and ‘risky’ natures, implying that they would be unable to deal adequately with the attendant considerations, sensitivities, challenges and dangers. Fixing ‘ignorant’/unknowing subjects across space Trail centres were in a sense positioned as possessing deviantogenic materialities, which, by their domesticated nature, invite or beget ignorant, reckless and irresponsible subjects. Such a mode of citizen subjectivity may be largely accepted as legitimate in ‘domesticated’ natures – where social and environmental impacts can be contained and economic gain is generated – but, as found here, can be considered deviant and unacceptable in wilder natures. Mountain bikers tend to be disassociated with the requisite conduct and aesthetic ability needed to be a legitimate citizen of more ‘natural’, remote and mountainous kinds of outdoor space. Once fixed as irresponsible, such subjects cannot then belong in ‘wilder’ natures. Fixing subjectivity across space is the key device here. Mountain bikers come to be seen as ignorant and unskilled because they are associated with environments thought to engender practices ‘other’ to the ideals of outdoor citizenship (e.g. ideals of self-sufficiency, see Beedie, 2003). Such constellations of citizenship entailed at least 3 key associations. First, assumptions were made about the kinds of

K.M. Brown / Geoforum 55 (2014) 22–32

subjectivities various ‘natures’ could engender (e.g. mountains ‘build character’ whilst trail centres beget ‘ignorance’). Second, assumptions were made about how different ‘natures’ could handle such subjectivities (e.g. in relation to natures deemed robust or fragile, special or expendable). Thirdly, subjectivities were selectively fixed across space, crucially, from one outdoors to another. Subjects (e.g. mountain bikers) deemed forged on the anvil of particular natures (e.g. trail centres) were fixed in particular ways (e.g. feckless and reckless). There was an often-implicit assumption that if riders are ‘hoodlums’ in trail centres (supposedly because of the agency of trail centres) they will therefore act this way in the wider and ‘wilder’ outdoors too. Holding play apart from particular natures and adulthood Such spatial hierarchies in outdoor citizenship are achieved, in part, through setting play in opposition to responsibility. Scholars such as Massey (2004) and Katz (2005) have noted that responsibility has a spatiality and becomes manifest in spaces and across scales in consequential ways. This study highlights how notions of responsibility become dichotomised with play as they are differentially mobilised in reproducing particular spatialities and assigning or precluding particular subjectivities in relation to them. Underpinning such configurations are the notions that: (a) a subject cannot be responsible and playful at any one time and (b) that practices of play and responsibility require separate biophysical spaces. Multiple binary logics work to drive a wedge between different ‘natures’, between different outdoor subjects, and their legitimacy as citizens. Insisting that play and responsibility must be performed as distinct subjectivities – and cordoning them off into separate spaces and bodies – is accomplished through multiple well-worn decouplings, such as holding apart mind from body, visual from kinaesthetic, and risk from safety. The emerging sociospatial contingency of play with regard to citizenship was most clearly mobilised here in relation to binaries of wild–domestic natures and child–adult subjectivities, and their varying associations of purity and impurity. On one hand, play tended to be positioned as incompatible with mountains. For some, play was ideally cordoned off into spaces considered ‘‘safe’’ (e.g. Paula), ‘‘sanitized’’ (e.g. Ryan), or expendable, and thus accommodating of, or resistant to, ‘polluting’ uses and users. In this case, the spaces in question were the post-industrial, residual forestry plantations of trail centres. Although various recreationists might engage playfully in mountains, it was not acceptable to talk about ‘play’ (especially with any connotations of immaturity, abandon or being carefree or careless) in relation to them in the way that it was in domesticated natures. Instead, mountain goers talked about such engagements in terms of ‘escape’ and emphasise exteriorised notions of ‘exploration’ and ‘freedom’ that foregrounded their physical remove from urbanity. Set alongside certain mountain bikers’ desire to engage playfully with the mountain environment – even if acting within legal scriptings of ‘responsibility’ – participants thus found themselves part of longstanding struggles over the appropriateness of constituting mountains as a ‘playground’ (Thompson, 2010). On the other hand, a tacit struggle could be identified over whether and, crucially, where it is acceptable for adults to play. Riders saw both trail centres and ‘natural’ trails as spaces of possibility for playing with movement, gradients, shapes and textures, but how those spaces were encoded with regard to acceptable subjectivities of play bounded these ways of moving and being. Even those openly endorsing play as part of their outdoor recreation still tended to articulate play in terms of being childlike (or childish, juvenile, immature, free from worry, having freedom of bodily expression), and in such ways held play apart from adulthood. There was a prevailing sense in which the outdoor play that they

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most sought – which for some resonated notably with their childhood play – felt somewhat like a forbidden fruit, and that a reprieve to be legitimately playful in this ‘childish’ way could only happen particular spaces. Katz (2004) and Kesby (2007) indicate that childishness need not be understood in pejorative terms, yet the findings suggest that a great deal of agency is exerted when it is. Here, the degree to which play and associated notions of childishness were mobilised pejoratively (or not) was highly spatialised. In the domesticated natures of trail centres, participants mobilised themes of childishness as a ‘good thing’ – as embodiments to be relished, tolerated, and even encouraged – whilst in natures considered more ‘wild’ and ‘natural’, such childishness was viewed in terms of suspicion, derision, superfluity or deviance and play mobilised as the preserve of incomplete or underdeveloped beings. Certain natures are deemed not for playing with, and not a place to be childish, with implications for the subjects allowed to belong there. Viewing play as childlike in such ways – whether or not pejorative – worked to create a schism between play and responsibility. Even though play is increasingly associated with wellbeing, vitality and self-actualisation across the lifecourse (Woodyer, 2012), in these circumstances there was a resistance to allowing playful subjects to also be mature, serious, moral subjects. The inference was that by following one’s desire to play, a subject was less able to perform the ethical subjectivity necessary to share space with human and nonhuman others. Perhaps there is an empirical question to explore ⁄⁄⁄there regarding how play and the seeking of flow and preoccupation of being ‘in the zone’, especially through deeply haptic play, might influence one’s capacity to connect with and fully take account of others, and the circumstances under which this may or may not be the case. We need to ask: what are the conditionalities and effects with which ‘‘[t]he reciprocal relations emerging within and through embodiment allow people and things to be set free of cultural co-ordinates’’ (Woodyer, 2012, pp. 320–321)? For example, we saw for some participants how ethical subjectivities cultivated in trail centres regarding prior citizenship claims over other users, and regarding environmental damage, linked to enactments of play (and absolution from obligations to be ‘responsible’) were justified by their contribution to economic development. There is scholarship suggesting that, rather than being diametrically opposed to responsibility, play is actually generative of it. Haraway (2008) asserts ‘‘the idea that the experience of sensual joy in the nonliteral open of play might underlie the possibility of morality and responsibility for and to one another in all of our undertakings at whatever webbed scales of time and space’’ (p. 242). She emphasises a notion of openness, rather than an unbridled freedom, in the repertoires of play. This openness enables articulations between bodies and environments that allow and invite the exploration and development of feelings and relations of ethical subjectivity. Katz (2004) too underlines the transformative possibilities of play where the open-endedness provides scope for differently coming to consciousness and creatively re-configuring meanings, rules and relations in a different way. Together with the aforementioned work that increasingly points to the consequential spatial constitution of responsibility, these strands of scholarship form a basis from which couplings of play and degeneracy (and the bounding of citizenship entangled with it) could perhaps be resisted. Belonging in different ‘natures’: informal zoning and the citizen trap The mountain biker is commonly considered the threatening outsider or ‘anti-citizen’ (after Matless, 1998) of outdoor recreation. Yet, as this study shows, mountain bikers are not universally

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eschewed as outdoor citizens. Their celebration and dominance in purpose-built trail centres and condemnation in mountain areas illustrates how legitimate outdoor citizenship can be spatially circumscribed in ways that can exceed legal boundings. Thus, it may be more appropriate to talk about such differentially excluded outdoor subjects as sub-citizen, rather as either citizen or anti-citizen, so that analytical space is left for considering the contingencies through which such citizenship unfolds. Such moral geographies matter for rural contestation more broadly as they exemplify how the belonging and territorialisation of citizen status is in part contingent on how subjects are normatively encoded in conjunction with particular ‘natures’; not only regarding the natures in which they are held to ‘belong’, but also regarding the embodiments and dispositions such natures are held to engender. Just as the city and the country are both held to be urban natures that do not exist in isolation from each other (Gandy, 2002; Wilson, 1992), so mountains and trail centres are mutually constituted as two sides of the same coin. As ‘domestic’ natures, trail centres are allowed to become overtly entangled and fixed with the urban, commodification and consumption in a way ‘wild’ natures and ‘natural’ trails are not. As we know from Whatmore (2002), distinguishing wild and domestic natures is entwined with defining the people and practices permissible in those natures. In this case, the placing of mountain biking in trail centres and its displacement from mountains can be understood as part of a broader dual drive to (re)produce ‘wild’ natures as unpolluted and purging them of the pollution of ‘undesirable’ behaviours and people, whilst generating economic development from domesticated, less ‘natural’, residual natures where sub-citizens can be safely contained. A crucial finding was how the material and semiotic inclusion and engendering of particular subjectivities in one space could actually facilitate their exclusion in another; in this case how the accommodation of mountain bikers in domesticated natures could actually facilitate their disqualification from wilder natures. A key mechanism through which this spatialised citizenship was achieved was by mobilising notions of play and responsibility in opposition to each other, and together with well-established binaries (e.g. wild–domestic and pure–impure). This generated a citizenship paradox. On one hand, subjects typically considered anti-citizen were given a place of belonging, where they could be unconstrained by the usual hierarchies and restrictions. Trail centres were allowed to become ‘otherable’ rural spaces (after Jones, 2000, p. 31), in that they were performed bodily and discursively as spaces of escape from prevailing outdoor conventions and legal scriptings; where the usual norms of responsibility were purged and the playful pursuit of sensory and bodily becoming could proceed unhampered. As with the urban realm elaborated by Stevens (2007), play in rural spaces was mobilised as an ‘othering’ of regulation. Stevens and Dovy (2004) suggest the toleration of unfettered play in such spaces ‘‘creates the illusion of a social world where rules are relaxed’’ (p. 359). However, as regards some mountain bikers it was suggested that an illusion of relaxed rules became the reality performed, in these spaces and beyond. Play mobilised thus could be considered a radical re-imagining and reconfiguring of how to move and sense one’s body in nature, and a resistance to prevailing order of the outdoors that celebrates quiet, pedestrian contemplation. The diminution of certain physical and social inhibitors in trail centres certainly gave mountain bikers unparalleled opportunities to perform rural space on their own terms, to explore how bodies and terrains can be co-constituted in deeply kinaesthetic, playful, vitalising ways. Yet in another sense, despite disrupting legal scripts of access rights, participants did not necessarily disrupt – and in fact often reinforced – established orderings, especially in terms of the

capitalist commodification of rural spaces. As powerful actors are concerned, trail centres may be regarded more as a form of ordered disorder. Indeed, on the other hand, these inclusion zones created conditions that allowed established orderings to remain relatively undisturbed in the wider outdoors, and not only through the well-documented ‘honey-pot’ effect (Robinson, 1999). They actually worked against subjects wishing to perform other spaces where normative requisites could not be interpreted so liberally, as experienced by mountain bikers when trying to perform ‘wilder’ or more ‘natural’ natures. This was because the material and semiotic associations of one space (domesticated natures of trail centres engendering playful, childish, irresponsible subjectivities) allowed a defilement of subjects that made them untenable in other ‘purer’ spaces (wilder natures, disavowed as ‘playgrounds’, demanding responsibility). Here subjects become fixed in ways that foreclose the possibility of them possessing the judgement and competencies to perform differently in different natures. If citizenship is, as Hall et al. (1999) suggest, something that has to be learnt, worked at and negotiated, across power gradients, these findings raise issues surrounding how and where people have the opportunity to learn and embody the competencies and ethical subjectivities (in this case ‘responsibility’) upon which their citizenship is conditional, especially in relation to performing citizenship across multiple spatial settings. Although, play–responsibility dichotomies are resisted by some, there is a need to consider further whether allowing their spatial bifurcation invites an outdoor citizenship trap. The problem could be that particular subjectivities encouraged to perform particular (especially more overtly managed) natures in particular ways (e.g. playfully) may become further confined to those spaces, as assumptions of ignorance and incompetency – and consequent segregation – then lead to actual or greater ignorance and incompetency. Such spatialities might have resonance for performing citizenship in all kinds of rural, urban, and (increasingly commodified) public spaces. For example, there could be implications for the mixing of diverse subjectivities in public space if increased zoning, whether formal or informal, further inhibited capacities to share space, or if play could only happen in overtly ‘consumptive’ spaces with people absolved of responsibility or other ethical subjectivities in those spaces. In such ways, outdoor recreation is caught up in broader debate over the place of play in society (Woodyer, 2012), who gets to play, and how play is constituted together with geographical imaginaries and materialities associated with the ‘outdoors’ or ‘rural’ (Valentine, 1997; Valentine and McKendrick, 1997). Despite exhortations for there to be more play throughout the lifecourse (Brown, 2012), especially in the outdoors (Rivkin, 1995; McGinnis, 2002), we see from this paper there is a struggle over where adults can acceptably play, and in which natures. Overt play is still seen as childlike and cordoned off into particular domesticated leisure spaces that are distanced spatially and ontologically from adulthood, responsibility, and from natures that are considered purer, wilder and more ‘natural’. Being childlike was positively associated with the vitality and self-actualisation of play, but had to be ‘made safe’ in delimited areas, both in terms of reducing risk for participants and protecting others from encounters with playing bodies. Different areas of the countryside, thus, provide different possibilities for play. Jones (2000) observes this regarding children but it applies to adults’ play too. It could be argued that creating distinct natures as domestic and wild/‘natural’ and constituting them as places of play and responsibility respectively, works against a mode of outdoor citizenship that can simultaneously address the play imperatives for wellbeing and the responsibility imperatives for enacting rights to public

K.M. Brown / Geoforum 55 (2014) 22–32

space. Far more needs to be known about the circumstances under which play and ethical subjectivities (such as responsibility) become mutually generative or not, and how this intersects with producing spaces that prioritise economically beneficial forms of play. For example, we need to address how the ‘‘temporary inhabitation of alternate worlds and orderings’’ (Woodyer, 2012, p. 321) that play enables, can be allowed to engender the associated vitality, connectedness and capacity for self-actualisation, without compromising players’ ability to be sufficiently responsible (and ‘response-able’, after Haraway, 2008) to share space with other people and nonhuman species. There is therefore a need to better understand the spatialities of how, and for whom, play and responsibility are valorised, devalorised, and mobilised to produce particular affects, effects and exclusions. This includes paying critical attention to assumptions made about how different natures facilitate (particular kinds of) play, in which natures forms of play belong, and how play can be used to bound acceptable outdoor citizen subjectivity. For geographical scholarship more broadly, it is important that future research further examines how the material and semiotic entanglements of inclusive spaces can paradoxically work to disqualify citizens from wider spaces. This includes problematising how citizens may be expected to translate – or not – embodied knowledges, habits, dispositions and experiences across settings. Meriting particular attention is how subjects can be fixed as playful, ignorant or irresponsible in ways that allow money to be made from them, whilst contributing to conditions that may work to exclude them from wider public space.

Acknowledgements This research was funded by the Scottish Government’s ‘Environment—Land Use and Rural Stewardship’ Research Programme, 2006–2011. Special thanks to Gunhild Setten for her constructive comments on a previous draft, and to the reviewers who provided comments that were both insightful and constructively presented. I am grateful also to Keith Marshall and Rachel Dilley who assisted in the data collection.

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