The maneuvering of everyday spaces to nudge the ‘population’ towards a physically active lifestyle (Guthold, Stevens, Riley, & Bull, 2018) or active living has been the hallmark of the policy modes of instrumental thinking for combating the pandemic of physical inactivity (Kohl, et al., 2012) particularly in urban spaces across the world. While such a ‘population-based’ approach has often raised concerns of social and spatial justice, expression of identity, liberty, and surveillance at an individual level, it also highlights limitations of the ecological model which emphasises the causal relationship between physical activity and the built environment. As a result of this ecological logic employed for promoting physical activities and active living, a variety of interventions such as open gyms, fitness trails, and jogging tracks, have been installed in the public parks of Delhi to make its ‘population’ fit, healthy, and physically active.
By employing a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) conducted over a period of 10 months at 3 sites in the city of Delhi, the present study aims to understand the ways in which physical activities are performed, produced, and practiced in the city of Delhi. While conceptualising these interventions as ‘infrastructures’ aimed at promoting physical activities, the paper argues that physical activity in the everyday spaces of the city remains entangled with the socio-spatial dialectic (Soja, 1980). The paper shows that on one hand, everyday spaces of physical activity that is public parks, in this case, are coproduced as spaces of leisure and fun in the city of Delhi, while on the other hand, these interventions which are aimed at promoting the physical activity, ‘infrastructures’ the social. This process of ‘infrastructuring’ of the social marks the ‘infrastructural rule’ whereby an infrastructural regime produces the notion of shared everyday life by facilitating life through an enabling infrastructure (Heath & Legg, 2018).
Mots clés : Physical Activity|Infrastructure|Social|Space|Fun
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