Adventure Playgrounds offer unrestricted play in either natural or junk environments. They allow kids to explore and invent with found materials. Today they are growing in popularity in the United States due to modern parents' awareness of the importance of risk, creativity, and free play.
A little history. The first junk playgrounds were based on the ideas of Carl Theodor Sorenson, a Danish landscape architect who realized that kids played everywhere except in the playgrounds that he designed in the 1930s. Inspired by kids playing on a construction site, he created a junk playground. In the 1940s, Marjory Allen, an English landscape architect and child welfare advocate suggested that they use their bombed building sites with scattered junk that kids were playing in all day to create places similar to what she saw in Denmark. Play supervision (the play worker) was introduced, and some of these sites became Adventure Playgrounds.
Today, there are many public Adventure Playgrounds in Europe, and there are a few here in the US. Europeans more readily embraced spaces for children to engage in what developmental psychologists like to call “managed risk.” “It’s central that kids can take their natural and intense play impulses and act on them,” says Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychologist and the founding director of the National Institute of Play. Children need an environment with “the opportunity to engage in open, free play where they’re allowed to self-organize,” he adds. “It’s a central part of being human and developing into competent adulthood.” Wild play helps shape who we become, he says, and it should be embraced, not feared.”1
The Adventure Playground in Berkeley, California’s Marina area opened in 1979 and has been a part of many generations of children’s lives ever since. I have visited several adventure playgrounds in Europe and on our visit to the Berkeley playground I was happy to find many of the same features. There is junk scattered about, climbing features made from tires and nets, old boats to pretend sail, a super long zip line. There is a tool shed that provides children with hammers, clamps, nails, and wood to build forts, sculptures or to make signs for posting.
Paint is provided for children to personalize the spaces, signs and objects. Empty barrels on the site are used by kids to roll down hills or create obstacle courses. Play workers wander about removing hazards and asking thoughtful questions. One thing you don’t find at the Adventure Playgrounds here in the United States is children making fires which is acceptable risk taking in some European Adventure Playgrounds.
Although created for children visiting this playground is a fun experience for adults too and offers more for us to do than a typical playground. When planning a visit check the City of Berkeley’s website for more information and registration. If you are interested in learning more about Adventure Playgrounds, I am a fan of the short documentary The Land. It takes place at an Adventure Playground in a small Welch town.
1 Krystina Castella: Designing for kids: Creating for playing, learning, and growing
Brown, Stuart (2017) US Coalition of Play Conference on the Value of Play: Where Design Meets Play, April 2– 5 2017.
