Why We Need to Reinvent the Playground

By Ahmed Bukair

If you were to think of a typical playground, images of swings attached to brightly coloured slides and climbable platforms would likely appear in your head. However, what if someone told you that this standard for playgrounds is too dull, is highly institutionalized and may even be harmful for kids?

It all began with the “Junkyard Playground,” a concept that emerged in the late 1940s when Carl Theodor Sørensen, an architect in Denmark during World War II started to question the prevailing children’s playspace.

He saw how children preferred to go to construction and bomb sites rather than settling for playgrounds, to build structures with the abandoned materials.

Marjory Allen, a landscape architect, brought the ‘junkyard’ concept to England after meeting with Sørensen and becoming convinced that older children needed more to ignite their imagination than the standard playground.

Her efforts, though controversial, normalized what became known as the ‘junk playgrounds”, where it spread throughout Denmark, Europe and North America, taking greater root in the UK.

The architects of this radically different concept find that the kids favour a life-sized sandbox where they can experiment and build whatever their heart desires. Instead of sand and plastic shovels and hammers, they get real materials such as bricks, wood planks and tools.

Having these playgrounds contain appropriate levels of risk while offering children a challenging space to grow is essential for the enjoyment of the parks. The supporters of the ‘junk’ parks perceive that children placed in these environments naturally become more careful, and develop resiliency skills.

In fact, they see children who are placed in the “typical” playground, become uninterested and more impulsive in their actions, which results in more injuries. However, having access to hammers and nails, from an early age, is seen as giving children the opportunity to build responsibility and be creative within the boundaries of risk that they become immersed in.

Allen reaffirms this by saying that children “can take really dangerous risks and overcome them. And this fills up a tremendous sense of self-confidence in themselves which is interesting to watch.”