Playing

In Italy, the first public parks fitted with play equipment were realised around 1940, making reference to those which for sometime had been set up in Northern Europe. From that date, their diffusion has grown progressively, so much so to become a common element in parks and schoolyards.

Over the last ten years there has been a growing improvement in the safety, sturdiness, and pleasure of the toys available for installing in public parks. There is however a standardisation of the design proposals, in the adoption of stereotypes developed around solutions that determine the passive activity of a child, without attributing the correct importance to the development of imagination and creativity. This is demonstrated by the fact that children often use toys improperly and differently than that for which they were conceived and fabricated. This ends up thwarting the activities adopted to guarantee the safety of the toy.

Research carried out in schools has shown that during the periods dedicated to relaxation, only a modest percentage of children use the toys in the play area. The activities of the others take place in intermediate areas and places of invented play (corridors, stairs, benches, fences, stones, trees, bushes).
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Moreover, this research has shown that spontaneous play activities are more numerous the more stimulating elements there are in the area available to the children.

All this does not mean that pre-packaged toys are to be disdained, but alone they are not sufficient to ensure the interest and quality of education of an area used for child recreation.

In the context of these guidelines we do not intend developing such concepts further, but use them to suggest means suited to improving the involvement of differently-abled children in play activities.

In fact, overcoming the predefined use of the toy, and the attribution of a greater importance to the added value of the imagination and continuous reinvention of the toy itself by children, offer greater possibilities of taking on and resolving the problems tied to the use also by children with different abilities.

Already in 1940 professor Carl Theodor Sorensen, famous Danish landscape architect, theorised the concept of “Robinson spielplatze” or rather the use of “scraps” as elements of play. Around the 70’s the landscape architect Arvid Bengston built such a concept in some parks of Sweden.

The use of recycled materials (old railway sleepers, cement tubes, stone masses, a large disused engine, parts of a ship etc.) or the positioning of components of everyday life (two corner partitions, a door, or a window, a table, a hanger, etc.) are elements able to create “personal” places, offering themselves as a theatre for living imaginary adventures.

Not least, spaces created with the sharp-witted use of trees and bushes can be used for imaginary toys.
The activities required for ensuring a good level of accessibility and use also by differently-abled children are the same as those described in these guidelines. Here, there is the advantage of not being conditioned by a structure of a toy that is rigid in its conception, but of being able to manage, in design terms, much more freely the area available and therefore with greater attention to overcoming the barriers and obstacles for use by all children. It will then be the imagination and the inventiveness of the group to involve the different participants, each with their own abilities, in the game.

Taking it to an extreme, we could arrive at replacing the different elements made available for playing with forms, which are indefinitely infinite, abstract figures whose perception gives free play to the subjectivity of the child and group. The actions of the toys, rules, involvements, would become changeable and guided only by the imagination.

Important experience in this sense was conducted at the beginning of the 70s by the psycho-pedagogic institute of Sante Zennaro of Imola. More recently, also in the Parc de Sceaux, close to Paris, a play area has been realised with criteria similar to those mentioned.