Adventure playgrounds to redefine the place of children in the city

[The conversation] - Published on May 7, 2021 in Science-Society

Invented almost a century ago in Denmark, adventure playgrounds are spaces where children can engage in free play, allowing them to reclaim public spaces. In recent years, there has been a surge in projects based on this concept in France. How can we analyze this renewed interest? Do these playgrounds constitute a new kind of experimental and educational environment?

Sylvain Wagnon, University of Montpellier; Delphine Patry, University of Caen Normandy and Mathieu DEPOIL, Paul Valéry University – Montpellier III

Their story began in the early 1930s, spearheaded by Carl Theodor Sørensen (1893-1979). This Danish landscape architect was thinking about a new kind of space where kids could let their imaginations run wild, try new things, and where adults would have as little influence as possible. His goal was to let them imagine and build their own worlds.

In 1943, the first adventure playground was created in Emdrup, in the suburbs of Copenhagen. But it was in England that the movement really took off, in a country where adventure playgrounds were defined in opposition to standard city playgrounds.

In the 1950s, everything accelerated on the European continent (Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, France). Faced with increasing urban densification, adventure playgrounds sprang up at the foot of buildings under construction.

Educational utopias

The initiatives took shape after May 1968, based on educational and political utopias. Vacant lots in the suburbs were converted into spaces for play and discovery. The phenomenon then spread to Berkeley in the United States in 1979 and to Japan.

In France, projects are developing as new spaces for environmental activism. Adventure playgrounds are becoming places for anti-authoritarian educational practices, new forms of collective living, and the appropriation of urban wasteland. In an article in Le Monde by Katie Breen published in 1976, Dominique d'Allaines-Margot recounts her experience as a youth worker in the new town of Bouffémont in the Val-d'Oise:

The adventure playground offers children a role and an attitude that are completely different from what is usually imposed on them. At school, they are asked to recite their lessons. At home, they have to be well-behaved... In the park, the play structures are designed for climbing and jumping, and they always encourage certain movements. On the adventure playground, children are told, "Anything goes. But nothing specific is expected of them."

The adventure playgrounds of the 1970s and 1980s were places of popular education, such as Bellevue in Nantes or Meinau in the suburbs of Strasbourg, where children created their own games using recycled materials and tools provided by educators who guided and supported them.

Precarious and subject to real estate pressure, most experiments struggle to survive. But the idea continues to gain ground, with spaces of freedom such as the Petits Pierrots adventure playground, created in 1988 in the^20th arrondissement of Paris. Today, there are approximately more than 1,000 adventure playgrounds around the world.

A new era

In recent years, initiatives have been developing once again in France, in line with the recent trend toward revegetation of urban spaces. Projects are springing up in the Île-de-France region (Villiers-le-Bel, Rambouillet, Bagnolet), in the Pays de la Loire region (Nantes, Cholet, Angers, Saint-Nazaire, Orvault), as well as in Reims, Bordeaux, Marseille, and, in the summer of 2021, in Montpellier.

Often initiated and supported by CEMEA (Centers for Training in Active Education Methods), all these adventure playgrounds perpetuate this history and these struggles for common spaces within the city, with specific objectives today: to rethink the place of children in the city and to promote their autonomy.

Creating a place for children, designed by them, is an innovative vision of education and urban space. Do popular education projects not allow us to rethink the links between residents and urban policies?

Adventure playgrounds have become a subject of research with the Tapla network (Terrains d’aventure du passé/pour l’avenir, or Adventure Playgrounds of the Past/for the Future), initiated by Baptiste Besse-Patin, Aurélien Ramos, Gilles Raveneau, and Clothilde Roullier as an international, multidisciplinary, and open network that studies the legacy of adventure playgrounds and their prospects for the future.

Free activities

Recent studies show the importance of free activities in children's development. These activities promote a well-rounded education, taking into account the different facets of each child's personality: intellectual, manual, physical, and emotional.

Rather than offering structured activities, adventure playgrounds encourage this approach by focusing on children's needs and desires, their curiosity to build, construct, garden, care for animals, or simply observe their environment.

See also:
Nature at school: is it time to take classes outdoors?

There is no initial desire for formal learning, and this freedom involves taking risks. The adventure playground is therefore conducive to discovering independence. Getting to know oneself better, understanding others better, and recognizing the need to be with others are all elements that contribute to building this individual and collective independence.

Assessing the risks we take is essential to children's learning, development, and health. In these areas, they will test their own limits, cooperate, exchange, share, and engage.

To ensure the long-term viability of these experiences and encourage their spread, consideration should be given to creating a charter for adventure playgrounds. This would not only help to better define their social and educational objectives—which differ from those of traditional playgrounds —but also highlight the similarities and differences between projects.

This article was written in collaboration with the CEMEA Occitanie team.

Sylvain Wagnon, Professor of Education Sciences, Faculty of Education, University of Montpellier; Delphine Patry, Doctor of Education Sciences, Assistant Professor at the University of Caen-Normandy, associate member of CIRNEF, University of Caen Normandy and Mathieu DEPOIL, Doctoral Student in Education Sciences at Liderf – University of Montpellier, Paul Valéry University – Montpellier III

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.

Keywords: Education, Initiatives, Company