The Politics of Play

Rethinking recreational spaces to better serve cities—and children

by Linda Baker

The playground is the McDonald’s of landscape design. Travel to any city in many parts of the world and the presentation is identical: a flat surface topped by one or two standardized all-in-one activity structures. The Memorial Park playground, which opened this August in Wilsonville, Oregon, points in a different direction. Located in a 17-acre park, the site features a large grassy mound encircled by a series of discrete elements. There is a six-foot-tall red rubber dome, concentric circles of rocks, a small waterfall, and two curved climbing walls with holes in their centers.

“The idea was to find simple solutions that don’t specify the type of play,” explains project manager Tim Nash, at the time with Murase Associates. Before starting the Wilsonville design, Nash (who is now with Portland’s Koch Landscape Architecture) researched Aldo van Eyck, the Dutch architect known for creating unpretentious arrangements of sandpits, benches, and tumbling bars in postwar Amsterdam. The Wilsonville project is part of a burgeoning “creative playground” movement—one that eschews the homogenous regulated space of contemporary recreational areas in favor of diverse open-ended “playscapes.” Ranging from Modernist set pieces to bucolic panoramas, the new projects aim to move beyond gymnasium-style functions (crawling, swinging, climbing). Instead the goal is to stimulate kids’ imaginations, encourage independent exploration, and—more ambitiously—incorporate the twenty-first-century playground into the fabric of community life.

For example, the organic forms of the Wilsonville site—leavened with a splash of red—blend seamlessly with the park’s rolling hills. An amphitheater for parents, embedded in one side of the playscape’s grassy mound, helps blur the boundary between spaces for children and those for adults. “We wanted to invert the typical layout, where caretakers are on the outside,” Nash says.

Much of the design momentum originates in Denmark, Holland, and Germany, where children are increasingly viewed as an indicator group for successful urban planning. But even in the United Kingdom and the United States, where privatized backyard play is the ethos, a handful of architects, educators, and equipment manufacturers is beginning to rethink the relationship among children, playground design, and public space. Creating more inclusive spaces for children and families, so the logic goes, is one step toward making the entire city a safer and more welcoming place for kids.

“The quality of the built environment in play provision has been pretty dire,” acknowledges Hattie Coppard, director of London’s Snug & Outdoor. “That’s beginning to change.” Coppard, who will debut an undulating topographically driven design in Southampton’s Houndwell Park next year—“The whole space becomes a play element”—says health concerns such as child obesity and diabetes have brought new scrutiny to young people and their physical environments. In March, for example, the United Kingdom’s Big Lottery Fund launched a $30 million “Playful Ideas” program targeting the installation of neighborhood playscapes. “The focus on innovation and design is significant,” Coppard says. “They don’t want flat ground with a box.”

Over the past 15 years international play-safety guidelines have spawned a ubiquitous crop of red, yellow, and blue structures rooted in “impact-attenuating” surfaces. The design problem is especially acute in the United States, where a litigious culture first eviscerated the seesaw, then the merry-go-round, and increasingly threatens the swing set. Eliminating spontaneity and risk from children’s play not only discourages physical activity, critics claim, but deprives young people of the experiences they need to grow and develop as individuals.