What is a playground’s role in connecting kids to nature?
In 1930s Denmark, landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen had an epiphany. Playgrounds in urban settings, with their uniform, predictable structures, did nothing to inspire children’s imaginations. On the other hand, children in the countryside, provided with just tree branches, tires, and other loose-scrap material, could immerse themselves in creative play, inventing whole new worlds with natural resources. City kids didn’t have that opportunity.
This line of thought gave birth to Sørensen’s most famous concept: the “junk,” or “adventure” playground. The first one opened in Copenhagen in 1943. It was full of raw and scrap materials like bricks, rope, rocks, planks of wood, and basic tools, and the area was lightly designed to mimic natural landscapes. Though even Sørensen said it was ugly to look at, he called it “the most beautiful and best of my works,” and believed that access to these types of primitive materials could help children play in a more self-directed and creative way. Almost a century after Sørensen’s first adventure playground, playground designers and landscape architects are still contending with many of the same tensions: how can playscape design best support childhood development, encourage immersive and creative play, and connect a child to nature?
What A Playground Should Do
“A well-designed playground is able to support multiple aspects of childhood development and health: the mental, the physical, the social, the spiritual, and the emotional,” says Janet Dyment, professor of community development at Acadia University, who studies outdoor learning. Natural playgrounds, a sibling of sorts to adventure playgrounds and “the antithesis of a manufactured, structured playground,” are especially good for this, she says.
Natural playscapes emphasize natural materials and often include features like trees, bushes, ponds, and the like, to connect children with nature and give them space for open-ended, creative play. The problem with a conventional playground is that it leads to “prescriptive play,” says Dyment. All the moves and paths on a plastic playground structure are laid out for kids in a way that doesn’t allow for much creativity. They climb up some stairs, then shoot down a slide. It’s predictable, and for kids, that can be stifling.
Introducing Risk And Challenge
To provide kids with diverse challenges and meet them where they are, one approach is to incorporate “graduated challenge” into playgrounds, says Janelle Zwart, a playground designer at the Canadian design-build playground company, Earthscape. Earthscape’s playgrounds tend to be unique, featuring lots of colorful, organic materials and shapes.
To keep children engaged, playgrounds need elements that are difficult but not so difficult that playing becomes frustrating or inaccessible, says Zwart. And since children are of all ages and with varying abilities, a design that caters to the full spectrum of difficulty will give a playground staying power.
Kids need to face challenges and risks in their play, says Dyment, because “it’s how children learn to make decisions for themselves.” If a child climbs on a log and feels scared by the height, does he or she head back down? And if so, how does one get down? By experiencing and thinking through these challenging situations, kids start to learn how their decisions lead to different consequences, all while obtaining a better sense of the limits of their bodies, she says.
Conventional playground structures are so uniform that they don’t encourage kids to improve motor skills, says Victoria Carr, a professor of early childhood education at the University of Cincinnati. The flatness of a playground makes sense in today’s risk-averse society, she says—designers don’t want kids to trip. But in standardizing these spaces so heavily, children lack ample opportunity to test the full range of movements they can achieve with their bodies. And circuitous paths, twists, and turns can help develop a child’s wayfinding skills, says Carr.
Another common topic that childhood-play experts discuss is the importance of “loose parts” play—any objects that children can move, transform, combine, or take apart, like planks of wood or bricks in Sørensen’s adventure playgrounds. Children like to play with things that have divergent qualities—items that can be used in many imaginative ways, says Carr. A kid may lose interest in a slide that can only be used as a slide. But a stick can be a weapon, a conductor’s baton, a wand, a digging tool, and so on.
Designing With Child Development And Nature Connection In Mind
“The ideal integration, when it comes to nature and a playground setting, is to really fuse the playground with the landscape as much as you can,” says Zwart. If a department is planning a playground for an area with natural hills and pre-existing shrubbery, integrating the topography and plants into the design is great. Bushes and trees can act as natural separators between spaces, she says, so mindful planning can work to everyone’s advantage.
Danish landscape architect Helle Nebelong works on nature playgrounds with minimal man-made structures and an emphasis on mimicking natural landscapes. Her work is directly influenced by Sørensen, who believed there are many natural features that should be reproduced for kids in playgrounds. These features include recreating a “beach” through sand and water, “forests” through trees and shrubbery, and “mountains” through small hills and varying terrain. “I use these kinds of elements that are taken from real nature and then scale them down into the size that works for the play space I’m working on,” she says. In her experience, mimicking creeks or beaches with small water features is an especially effective way to inspire deep, creative, and fun play.
Nature and adventure playgrounds exist on a spectrum. Some, like many of Earthscape’s playgrounds, include large structures for kids to explore, while others are minimal and wide open. Rather than debate which options are better for children than others, says Dyment, the most important thing is there’s a conversation happening about moving away from prescriptive play structures for children and broadening ideas of what play can or should look like.
Sørensen’s ideas for child autonomy and self-directed play were radical, and still feel like modern concepts. And yet his work and legacy are not as widely known as some might expect. While his original junk playground is still open in Copenhagen, there are only a handful of adventure playgrounds in the United States—and often don’t include the same degree of raw materials and tools Sørensen originally intended.
But if park officials and designers do carry forth his ideas, Nebelong says they should also remember that Sørensen believed in always asking children what they want and observing how they use play spaces. “You have to open up your senses and look at what is happening and how children are playing,” she says.