Adventure Playgrounds to Redefine Children’s Place in the City
Invented nearly a century ago in Denmark, adventure playgrounds are spaces for free play designed for children, allowing them to reclaim public spaces. In recent years, projects based on this concept have been multiplying in France. How can we interpret this renewed interest? Do these playgrounds represent a new kind of space for experimentation and education?
Sylvain Wagnon, University of Montpellier; Delphine Patry, University of Caen Normandy and Mathieu DEPOIL, Paul Valéry University – Montpellier III
_-_2020-10-26_-_2.jpg){kind=link}
Their story begins in the early 1930s, spearheaded by Carl Theodor Sørensen (1893–1979). This Danish landscape architect envisioned a new kind of space where children could give free rein to their imagination, try new experiences, and where adult influence would be minimal. His goal was to enable them to imagine and build their own world.
In 1943, the first adventure playground was established in Emdrup, a suburb of Copenhagen. But it was in England that the movement really took off, in a country where the adventure playground came to be defined in contrast to the “square,” that standardized urban playground.
In the 1950s, things began to move quickly across Europe (Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, France). As urban areas became increasingly densely populated, playgrounds sprang up at the foot of buildings under construction.
Educational Utopias
These initiatives took shape after May 1968, based on educational and political utopias. Vacant lots in the suburbs were transformed into spaces for play and discovery. The phenomenon then spread to Berkeley, California, starting in 1979, and to Japan.
In France, these projects are emerging as new arenas for environmental activism. The adventure playground has become a space for anti-authoritarian educational practices, new collective ways of life, and the reclamation of urban vacant lots. 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 housing development 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 expected of them. At school, they’re asked to recite their lessons. At home, they’re expected to behave… In the park, the playground structures are designed for climbing and jumping, and they always encourage certain movements. At the adventure playground, children are told, ‘Anything goes. But we don’t expect anything specific from them.’”
The adventure playgrounds of the 1970s and 1980s were spaces for community-based education, such as the one in Bellevue, Nantes, or the one in Meinau, in the suburbs of Strasbourg, where children built their own play structures using recycled materials and tools provided by educators who guided and supported them.
Given their precarious nature and the pressure from the real estate market, most of these initiatives struggle to survive in the long term. But the idea continues to gain traction, with spaces for freedom such as the Petits Pierrots adventure playground, created in 1988 in Paris’s20th arrondissement. Today, there are approximately more than 1,000 adventure playgrounds around the world.
A New Era
In recent years, initiatives have been gaining momentum again in France, in line with the recent trend toward the 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 the CEMEA (Centers for Training in Active Education Methods), all of these adventure playgrounds carry on this history and these struggles for shared spaces within the city, now with specific goals: to rethink children’s place in the city and to foster their independence.
Patrick Janicek/Flickr, CC BY
Creating a space for children—designed by them—is an innovative vision of education and urban space. Don’t community education projects thus offer an opportunity to rethink the connections between residents and urban policies?
Adventure playgrounds have become a subject of research through the Tapla network (Adventure Playgrounds of the Past/for the Future), launched 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 future prospects.
Optional Activities
Recent research highlights the importance of free play in children’s development. Such activities promote a well-rounded education that takes into account the various aspects 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 interests—and their curiosity to build, construct, garden, care for animals, or simply observe their surroundings.
See also:
Nature in School: Is It Time to Hold Classes Outdoors?
There is no initial intention to engage in formal learning, and this freedom involves taking risks. The adventure playground is thus an ideal setting for discovering autonomy. Getting to know oneself better, understanding others more deeply, and recognizing the need to be with others are all elements that help build this individual and collective autonomy.
Assessing the risks we take is essential to children’s learning, development, and health. In these settings, they will test their own limits, cooperate, interact, share, and get involved.
To ensure the long-term viability of these initiatives and help them spread, we should consider developing a charter for adventure playgrounds. This would not only help better define their social and educational objectives—which differ from those of traditional playgrounds —but also identify the similarities and differences among these projects.
This article was written in collaboration with the CEMEA Occitanie team.
Sylvain Wagnon, Full Professor of Education, School of Education, University of Montpellier; Delphine Patry, Ph.D. in Education, Assistant Professor at the University of Caen-Normandy, Associate Member of CIRNEF, University of Caen Normandy and Mathieu DEPOIL, Ph.D. candidate in Educational 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.