City play past and present

The city has always been built for and by adults. Historically, children have moved and played where they could – without playgrounds. With the growth of car traffic during the twentieth century, both children's safety and how the city was planned were affected. Adventure playgrounds became a response to the accelerating urbanization. In our time, we see how high land prices and new planning ideals drive districts where children's freedom of movement and the need for exciting play environments are no longer a priority.

Special places for children's play began to be prepared as early as the beginning of the 20th century for both safety and health reasons. Playgrounds were placed in a park environment and became important gathering places. In the middle of the 20th century, Stockholm's planning of parks and playgrounds was world-famous for being so progressive and modern. Arvid Bengtsson, the city gardener in Helsingborg 1951–1962, became famous both in Sweden and abroad for having innovative playgrounds built with adventure play and animal husbandry. At this time, Sweden was a pioneering country for child-friendly urban planning. Car-free lanes and solid green areas with playgrounds were ideal for housing construction. This planning ideal survived during large-scale housing construction in the 1960s and 70s, but both the scale and the lack of care provoked strong reactions. The demonstrations for better play and more humane planning sometimes became violent in both Sweden and Denmark. Activists cordoned off streets, tore down fences between courtyards for larger contiguous play areas and drove scrap cars into schoolyards to give children more spacious and fun play opportunities. It affected urban planning in Sweden.

There is plenty of research that shows how important it is for the urban environment to provide space for children's play and independent movements. It's not just about playgrounds – but about parks and green areas, traffic planning, residential yards and yards at school and preschool. Outdoor play in combination with varied and rich play environments stimulates the imagination and play in green environments makes it easier to play despite different ages, interests and abilities. Unfortunately, this knowledge is rarely used in planning. New highly exploited neighbourhoods are often built from the perspective of adults.

Urban planning aims to provide all people with a good living environment – adults, the elderly, children and young people! Support for children's right to play and movement in their everyday environment is found in the new architectural policy "Designed Living Environment" and in the Convention on the Rights of the Child's new status as a law.

City planners, who were raised in the countryside, saw at the beginning of the last century that city children were rarely allowed to mess around and play creatively on the arranged playgrounds. In response to this, the Danish landscape architect C.Th. Sørensen (1893–1979) developed a playground that would give children maximum freedom within a defined area. He had seen that children who played outdoors liked messy environments best.

In the 1930s, Sørensen developed ideas for a scrap playground "Skrammellegeplats" – a playground full of leftover building materials and rubbish. An adult play leader was on site. Such a playground idea came appropriately during the war years' lack of materials. During the German occupation, the first construction playground opened in Emdrup, Copenhagen. Emdrup became perhaps the single most revolutionary event in playground design during the 20th century and was visited by city planners from all over the world. Arvid Bengtsson, who was a city gardener in Helsingborg 1951–1962, visited Emdrup and took the ideas back to Sweden.

Adventure playgrounds had a major impact in Sweden in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Today, only a handful of them remain, despite being described as well-functioning and popular. We can only speculate as to the reason why they were closed down. It costs to have employed play leaders, but a perhaps even bigger explanation is that the concern about exposing children to risks has increased and that there is uncertainty about who is responsible if a child injures themselves while playing outdoors. An adventure playground can also look cluttered and messy in an adult's eyes. Sørensen described the adventure play as both the most beautiful and the ugliest he has given rise to!

An adventure playground is a living and changing place. The play leaders or educators' sensitivity to the children's initiative, the ability to feel playfulness themselves and at the same time be an adult leader is crucial. Adventure play is an intuitive way to collaborate with other children, follow their ideas and realize them with the support of adults. It is a playground with almost inexhaustible possibilities. The adventure play was born in Scandinavia but is today flourishing in Great Britain and Japan.

The preschool yard and schoolyard are today more important than ever for children's play. Parks, housing estates and schoolyards shrink as cities become denser. This means that the places where children can play spontaneously will be fewer. It can be said that children's opportunities to play on their own outdoors are threatened, partly due to densification but also through increasing adult control over children's lives, where they are and what they do. Parents have become more anxious. Not only because the traffic is increasing but also because the trust in other people has decreased in society in general. For many children, the preschool and schoolyard will be the only place where they can play and move freely.

The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning is the authority that monitors and interprets the legislation on community planning and construction. In their guidance from 2022, they recommend that the schoolyard should have an area corresponding to forty square meters per child in preschool and thirty square meters in primary school. A preschool yard needs to be at least 6,000 square meters in size and a schoolyard at least 10,000 square meters for it to be able to accommodate the functions and variety that the growing child needs. The measurements are based on both the knowledge of children's play and movement needs and the experience of wear and tear. On a farm, plants such as trees, grass and shrubs wear particularly hard. This is because children like to play there. If the yard is too small, the plants do not survive and often it is instead covered with rubber mats, artificial grass or asphalt. The municipalities themselves decide what their requirements are to set for the farm areas in their municipality.

A large enough yard is not everything. But enough space is a prerequisite for accommodating fun-filled, stimulating and challenging places for play. Research shows that a good yard should be varied and have a lot of greenery and loose material to build and play with. Challenges and height differences are needed. Ideally, there should be both places where adults are present and places where you can be by yourself and feel "far away". A well-designed schoolyard also provides better opportunities for educators to use the outdoor environment as a complement to classroom teaching. Learning benefits when several senses are active.

Preschool yards and schoolyards are public places in Sweden. They are thus open to the public even if during the day they are a place for educational activities. When the school day is over, the yard can function as a child-friendly place for the children and young people who live around the school.

How much land needs to be set aside for yards in preschools and schools is a hot topic of debate. Particularly questionable is the need for land in the central parts of the big cities, where the land requires a high price that the municipalities want to benefit from by selling and building. Living up to the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning's recommendation is difficult in already completed districts. When new neighbourhoods are planned, there is the possibility; then it is the municipality's guidelines that govern. To manage the difficult equation, playgrounds are sometimes placed on roofs and new preschools and schools are placed next to parks that are expected to be used as yards. The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning states that such solutions can be a complement to a schoolyard – but that they do not replace it. The play quality and accessibility are not the same in a public park as in your own yard. There is also a slight conflict of interest between the public who want to use the park in their own way and the children and schools who have other needs. Another conflict that can arise is the question of who pays for the wear and tear that occurs when children play and use a park daily.

Lack of sufficiently large and good play environments will in the long run affect children's and young people's health and well-being. The Swedish Public Health Agency is already warning of rising ill-health rates, including obesity and diabetes. Many children and young people sit still far too much. Being able to get to school independently, have access to places for spontaneous outdoor play and have spacious and varied preschools and schoolyards is therefore very important. If there is room to run and move during the school day, the schoolyard can cover as much as a third of the children's daily movement needs.

In the mid-nineties, the city of Malmö's then city gardener Gunnar Ericson wanted to review the city's playgrounds. Malmö then had neglected and uniform playgrounds that consisted of swings, a climbing frame, a sandbox and a slide surrounded by gravel. A renewal was needed. Adventure playgrounds based on different themes were a new idea that was launched in connection with a comprehensive playground analysis and a comprehensive playground program. The concept of the playground has since spread and developed to mean site-specific playground design with thematic content.

The first themed playgrounds that were designed experimented with the limits of what a playground can be. At the Jungle Playground in southern Malmö, they investigated whether it was possible to design a playground where children could play in the bushes, something children often want but are sometimes forbidden to do. With the theme "jungle", a new idea was tried: the playground as a shrub and tree-planted place where children themselves could make walks, play freely and create their own play worlds. The neighbourhood where the jungle playground was to be built consisted of residential buildings with small gardens. A wilder playground could then offer the children something they did not have access to at home.

Theme playgrounds have come to function as excursion destinations, both for preschools and the general public. This is good because children and families from different parts of the city meet with the children's play as a common interest. If you look at children's everyday play, however, cohesive green and car-free areas in their own neighbourhoods are more important.

In recent years, new terms have been introduced to describe play environments that are not planned playgrounds. "Play area" means that play and movement are planned along a park or stretch of street in the urban environment. The term "lekotop" ("playotope"), which is close to the term ecotope, can be said to be the children's (l) ecosystem; a play area constructed of natural materials in harmony with nature or plantations.

The playground seems to be developing in two different directions. On the one hand, increasingly lavish and site-specific playgrounds with themes. On the other hand, testing is being done on how play and play equipment can be integrated into both the street environment and the natural environment.

Helsingborg has a proud tradition of protecting children's play. Through innovative adventure playgrounds that flourished during the fifties and sixties, the city has spurred international interest.

Over the years, the municipality has had several playground programs, all of which reflected the ambitions of their time. In 1999, an inventory of the city's playgrounds was made, and an action plan was then drawn up to secure Helsingborg's playgrounds per the new standard that came into force in 2000. Upgrades and safety adaptations of Helsingborg's playgrounds were carried out continuously until 2012. During this period, many playgrounds were refurbished – but at the same time, about 25% of the playgrounds were closed. Since 2016, Helsingborg has had a play strategy that aims to develop the city's playgrounds with a focus on play quality, participation, accessibility and sustainability.

Helsingborg today has just over 200 playgrounds. They are divided into the categories local playground, which are smaller playgrounds for the children who cannot get that far themselves, area playground that has more play opportunities for the children who can move a bit away from home, and excursion playground. At the excursion playgrounds, you should be able to stay and play for a longer period and they should attract children and adults to visit other parts of the city than the one where you live. In this way, they want to help create new meetings between people who live in different parts of the city. The playground is expected to be a socially levelling place. Playgrounds are also considered green resources in an increasingly dense city. By using materials that let water through and designing the surface so that it can receive large amounts of rain, the playgrounds contribute to making the city sustainable and climate-adapted.

An important reason why playgrounds should be close to all children's homes in Helsingborg is that they increase physical activity. Research shows that a physically active childhood creates greater chances of remaining physically active as an adult. The goal is for the playgrounds to be designed in a way that benefits curiosity and equality and balances the challenge against safety.

A new initiative to promote movement at all ages is the newly constructed play area that runs between the districts of Drottninghög and Fredriksdal. The play area is 800 meters long and connects two popular excursion playgrounds, "Princesses and Dragons" and "Dinosaur Playground". Here, the play moves out of the playground and takes place in the urban environment and connects schools and neighbourhoods in a new and playful way that can appeal to all ages. The driving force to create play environments throughout the city is driven by the realization that children and young people generally move far too little today. One group that should be given special priority are teenage girls who move the least of all.

The children who live in Helsingborg have been invited to influence the themes and design of the two new excursion playgrounds that have been built for expo H22. The Jungle Playground in Oceanhamnen is the result of the children's choice, as is the Dinosaur Playground in Fredriksdal.

In order for the municipality's officials to get in touch with the play experts, i.e., the children themselves, different methods are used. Asking children how and where they want to play is supported by Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Through adapted dialogues, where children both with and without a developed spoken language can participate, children's wishes and ideas are collected. The municipality's officials have also gone on tour to various playgrounds and through conversations and pictures listened to what children think is the most fun and how they would like to be able to play and move. In this work, the officials have expressed how important it is for the adult to stay out and let through the children's thoughts and ideas.

Another way to make children co-creators in playground construction is the digital tool Pladdra. Through an app with an AR tool, children can try different equipment directly in an augmented reality picture. Pladdra is shown here next to the playground in Slottshagen on Thursdays during the expo.

Helsingborg Municipality's guidelines (2018) for yards in preschools and schools follow the quality recommendations described in the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning guidelines, but have lower requirements for yard space. The qualities are about where in the urban environment preschool and school are located and describe which play values and educational activities are to be accommodated. The municipality of Helsingborg recommends that yards at preschools are 25 square meters per child and have a continuous play area of at least 3,000 square meters. For primary school yards, it is recommended that the farm is 15 square meters per child, with a minimum contiguous area of 3,000 square meters.