Adventure Playgrounds

Brendan Crain, writing for the Project for Public Spaces, advocates for dynamic and flexible “adventure playgrounds”:

But research and support have been mounting for years to back up what many of us feel on a gut level: these sanitized playscapes are junk…

Cities are where us “grown-ups” play at leading meaningful and enjoyable lives, so it may be helpful (if anecdotal) to think of playgrounds as the staging areas for the cities of tomorrow. If we want to live in siloed cities, with offices here, houses there, and all quarters safely demarcated by wide arterial roads, we should probably go right on ahead building playgrounds where the slides and plastic tic-tac-toes cower away from each other. But if we want bustling, creative cities full of the surprise and serendipity that makes urban life so enjoyable, we might want to start thinking about playgrounds as microcosmic multi-use destinations…

Shouldn’t our playgrounds be great places, too?

I believe that unstructured, imaginative play is important for kids. Unfortunately our litigious and zealously over protective culture has produced many playgrounds that aren’t very great. The kids deserve better.