This article examines how environmental design is set in motion as a technique of government in Swedish policy texts issued to advise those who build and plan preschools. Drawing on Foucauldian research on governmentality and Carol Bacchis 'What's the problem Represented to be?' (WPR) approach, five Swedish government policies on how to build and design preschools are examined from a critical perspective. The WPR analysis helps identify how policies produce problems in certain ways and in this case shows how the preschool environment features in policies in accordance with a certain logic. The study shows that the environment is meant to function as a mediator for disciplinary power, to shape children's behaviors in desirable ways without coercion. The article also highlights certain silences in the material, the most prominent of these being the lack of discussion about adapting preschool environments to different needs without labeling children as disabled.

This article problematizes the ideals and norms surrounding the organization of environments for children. It investigates the understanding of the arrangement and organization of Early Childhood Education (ECE) environments, aiming to offer an alternative perspective on taken-for-granted assumptions about ideal environments for children. Using Foucault's conceptualization of discourse and power, the article examines how discursive practices shape and reshape norms and ideals of what constitutes a 'good' physical environment in ECE. Based on 145 texts published between 1969 and 2021 in an influential Swedish preschool teacher journal, the study analyzes systematic discourses on preschool environments. Key findings concern the environment's role in the governing of children. The discursive construction of ideal environments emphasizes a 'toy-free' setting with minimal framing and instruction, pointing to a discursive shift in the desired type of freedom for children: from the freedom to become a part of culture, to the freedom to change culture.

This article examines early childhood educational space as a technology of government through Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia. Drawing on this concept, the analysis juxtaposes and interrogates different perspectives on space, thereby advancing its conceptualization as an object of critical inquiry. The analysis is based on nine contemporary research articles focusing on children and processes of subjectification in early childhood education. These studies are examined as empirical cases in which knowledge and power are produced, negotiated, and contested. The analysis shows that the preschool functions as a site of overlapping yet distinct spatial arrangements. Such a heterotopic configuration enables multiple—and at times contradictory—processes of subjectification, through which children are simultaneously constituted as autonomous agents and regulated learners. Thus, mobilizing the concept of heterotopia makes it possible to analyze constructions of space not merely as context but as a dynamic site that actively participates in the reproduction and transformation of power relations in early childhood education.