Adventure Playgrounds:

C. Th. Sørensen, a Danish landscape architect, noticed that children preferred to play everywhere but in the playgrounds that he built. In 1931, he imagined “A junk playground in which children could create and shape, dream and imagine a reality.” Why not give children in the city the same chances for play as those in the country? His initial ideas started the adventure playground movement.

Carl Theodor Sørensen en 1935:

“Finally we should probably at some point experiment with what one could call a junk playground. I am thinking in terms of an area, not too small in size, well closed off from its surroundings by thick greenery, where we should gather, for the amusement of bigger children, all sorts of old scrap that the children from the apartment blocks could be allowed to work with, as the children in the countryside and in the suburbs already have. There could be branches and waste from tree polling and bushes, old cardboard boxes, planks and boards, “dead” cars, old tyres and lots of other things, which would be a joy for healthy boys to use for something. Of course it would look terrible, and of course some kind of order would have to be maintained; but I believe that things would not need to go radically wrong with that sort of situation. If there were really a lot of space, one is tempted to imagine tiny little kindergartens, keeping hens and the like, but it would at all events require an interested adult supervisor…”

John Bertelsen en 1946:

“The adventure playground is an attempt to give the city child a substitute for the play and development potential it has lost as the city has become a place where there is no space for the child’s imagination and play. Access to all building sites is forbidden to unauthorized persons, there are no trees where the children can climb and play Tarzan. The railway station grounds and the common, where they used to be able to fight great battles and have strange adventures, do not exist any more. No! It is now not easy to be a child in the city when you feel the urge to be a caveman or a bushman”.

Roy Kozlovsky en Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction (pdf):

Yet children’s activities inside the playground’s premises did not correspond with the artistic status of the playground as a landscape. Hence Sørensen’s admission that “of all the things I have helped to realize, the junk playground is the ugliest; yet for me it is the best and most beautiful of my works.” The anti-aesthetic position of the playground was most pronounced in its appropriation of junk as desirable play material. Emdrup’s first play leader, John Bertelsen, coined the term junkology to describe the activity of children. He defined it as the inversion of social values where “all pedagogical and occupational ideas were quickly turned upside down, becoming junkology.”

…Children have an urge to explore, touch, manipulate and experiment with their world in order to understand it. This has had important influence on the design of many pre-schools and kindergartens but not much on public playgrounds. The value of play for creativity is also little recognized by those who plan and design public settings. But when adults in New York City recall their own play experiences, they recall creatively adapting the environment to suit their needs – inventing their world. When children have the freedom in space and time to play with one another, they find ways to pass on their culture to peers through games, song and dance, but also to transform it…

 …Public playgrounds continue to be relatively sterile environments that allow only for running, jumping, climbing and swinging. To support a wider repertoire of play, children need diversity and manipulability in their environment. But it is difficult to create playgrounds with “loose parts” when there is no staff to maintain the environment (Nicholson, Simon (1971), “The theory of loose parts”, Landscape Architecture Vol 62, No 1.). Playgrounds of fixed manufactured equipment are designed for ease of maintenance, and in response to fears of liability. Sometimes “protecting children” is an excuse for laziness or for the unwillingness of adults to provide a good play setting for children…

[Roger Hart, Containing children: some lessons on planning
for play from New York City]

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