BEYOND PLAYGROUNDS

The best advice you can give a kid may be: Go play in the street

by James Krohe Jr.

Illinois Issues June 1996 ¦ 19

When my gang and I were growing up in Springfield in the 1950s, no public playground was closer than the schoolyard that stood six blocks and a busy street away. But we were hardly deprived, for what a playground existed within two blocks of my house! A propane tank, which we boys transformed variously into a submarine, a fighter aircraft or a bucking bull. A cinderblock back wall of a gas station, which made a perfect backstop for ball games. A culvert that drained a nearby cornfield and collected all manner of curious debris for convenient examination. Not one but two climbing trees, and assorted dirt piles from excavations for houses being built in the next block. A railroad track. And the smoothest, curviest sidewalks that our parents' FHA mortgages would pay for — a perfect Grand Prix circuit for 20-inch bikes.

When it comes to playgrounds, nothing beats the real world. The play equipment so expensively provided by the forward-thinking parents of the postwar years proved to be as big a waste of money as bomb shelters, and for the same reason — they were invented to serve a need that didn't exist.

Today the world is different. The "nice" neighborhood of universal yearning is the center of a child-proofed city carefully stripped of danger and contagion, a place where children are doomed to approved entertainments under the watchful eye of adults. Among those entertainments is the formal playground, which is enjoying a renaissance. "More playgrounds were built in the past five to 10 years than in the previous 20," says Kenneth Kutska, superintendent of parks and planning for the Wheaton Park District.

Playgrounds used to be found in backyards or in parks and schools; today a mall. fast-food emporium, day care center, hospital or airport terminal would not dare open without its own tot lot. In spite of the competition from the private playground, usage of public playgrounds is going up too. Public playgrounds are still free to use, as in the '50s; unlike the '50s they are brighter, safer, more interesting, and (thanks mainly to federal regulations) easier for more kids to use, especially toddlers and those with disabilities.

Will these playgrounds be remembered more fondly by today's kids than those of my youth? If so, will it be because the new generation of play spaces better meets their needs? Or will it be because formal playgrounds are the only play spaces that today's kids have? Do even the best of today's playgrounds provide more than a pale imitation of the real world that was the venue for children's play for the thousands of years before humans invented monkey bars? Better as playgrounds have become, are they enough?

The playground of universal memory — the metal pipe "jungle gym" or "monkey bars" set on an asphalt slab, the strap swings, the teeter-totter — was largely invented in turn-of-the-century Illinois. Jane Addams in 1889 allocated a parcel of land at Hull House for one of the first model playgrounds built in America. Chicago later became the first major city to fully integrate play and recreational facilities into its parks. A product of good intentions and bad thinking, the traditional playground was an injury lawyer's dream of fun. While the purposes they were designed to serve were soon rendered moot by social change, playgrounds changed little in design or in purpose for another three-quarters of a century.

In the 1970s the playground was re-invented. Play in the 1890s had been seen as improving to children in the moral and physical senses, with scant concern for learning in the intellectual and social senses. In the postwar world, worries about delinquency gave way to fretting about development. Healthful play in the 1970s meant giving children chances to develop social and problem-solving skills.

The result was a series of innovations lumped under the term "creative playground." Metal jungle gyms began to be replaced by linked apparatus in the form of ramps, multilevel decks with rails, crawl tubes, web climbers and ladders that allowed resting, hiding and crawling, as well as climbing and swinging. Their generic shapes could be transformed by a child's imagination into castle battlements or ships' superstructures, as needed. As they also accommodated more than one kid at a time, they encouraged kids to play together and so master what one expert called the unwritten rules of socialization, fair play and concern for others. If expectations exceeded actual results, well, teeter-totters hadn't done much to slow juvenile delinquency either.

The old playground not only was dull, however; it was dangerous. The injuries happened to kids, but the pain was suffered by schools and parks and recreation agencies in the form of big-buck liability suits. A 1985 out-of-court settlement of a personal-injury lawsuit saw the Chicago Park District pay initial damages of $9.5 million to a boy who suffered brain damage when, as a 2-year-old, he fell from a slide onto asphalt in a North Side park.

That case partly inspired the then-Illinois Department of Conservation to compile its 1995 A Guide to Playground Planning. The Guide is a compendium of best practice in the playground biz in Illinois. It was co-authored by five local park district officials, who spoke for anxious parks professionals everywhere when they urged that safety "must be the highest priority" in playground development.

Thus did the liability lawyer join the public health reformer and the child development expert as the Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison of contemporary playgrounds. That their influence has been salutary cannot be disputed. "Most government entities in Illinois have already removed those things recommended to be removed," says Kutska, who is immediate past pres-

More playgrounds have been built in the past five to 10 years than in the previous 20. Playgrounds used to he found in backyards or in parks and schools; today a mall, fast-food emporium, day care center or airport would not dare open without its own tot lot.

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Ideally, a playground allows kids to test, within reasonably safe limits, their capacities in interaction with the real world. It should he fun and challenging. Yet the safe and creative playground seems to recede from Illinois' grasp the harder its public officials push to try to achieve it.

ident of the National Recreation and Park Association. Roundabouts are being removed so quickly across Illinois that the main threat of injuries is to workers rushing to tear them down. Chicago may still have mean streets, but its playgrounds are friendlier now without jungle gyms in its parks. They survive mainly in school grounds around the state, which remain the last refuge of many out-dated ideas.

Because as many as 75 percent of playground injuries result from falls onto hard surfaces, concrete and asphalt are being replaced so fast that parks agencies that cushion playgrounds with hardwood mulch or sand are already looking a bit backward. In suburbs such as Wheaton, where parents form a playground lobby as potent as farmers in Moweaqua, they have installed rubber chips from old tires in an experiment that promises to put real bounce into bouncing babies.

Alas, the safe and creative playground, like honest and efficient government, seems to recede from Illinois' grasp the harder its public officials push to achieve it. Take safety. If Illinois' experience is typical of the United States as a whole, recent improvements in playground safety have had little effect on accident rates. The number of injuries requiring emergency room treatment has stayed remarkably constant through the 1990s.

True, this may be a quirk of the numbers. People (especially liability-conscious professional care givers) are eager to submit kids to hospital treatment for even minor bang-ups. Also, there probably are more kids using playgrounds than ever, and more kids mean more boo-boos. Kids using playgrounds are younger than ever too — perversely, because parents tend to perceive the newer facilities as safer.

A survey of recent national playground accident reports by the Consumer Product Safety Commission suggests that the roughly 40 percent of such incidents that aren't caused by lack of supervision by adults are caused by misuse. Ideally, a playground allows kids to test, within reasonably safe limits, their capacities in interaction with the real world — as the Guide puts it, "fun, challenging,

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and safe playgrounds." But it is hard to build a playground that is fun, challenging and safe. Too safe and they bore kids, who seek invigorating challenges in play.

To make playgrounds interesting, kids often will deliberately use them in contrived or extreme ways. Wheaton's rubberized playground is known among local daredevils as the "Power Rangers" playground because there they can do belly-flops on it they would never dare do on mulch or pea gravel because it would hurt. Thus the Catch-22: The safer you make a playground (past a certain point), the more likely it is that kids will get hurt on it.

Safe play apparatus does not necessarily mean boring apparatus. Experienced child care people know that older kids do not push themselves beyond what they feel they have the skill to do. Well-designed equipment abets this natural sensibleness; it does not take danger out of play, but makes the danger apprehensible, so a child can choose whether to proceed safely. "Kids play in abandoned buildings and don't get hurt," notes Kutska, in large part because abandoned buildings do not bear an adult imprimatur as "safe."

And younger kids? In 1987, an Illinois appellate court ruled on a case involving a 5-year-old boy who fell off the monkey bars in a Chicago Housing Authority playlot and broke his arm. The judges invoked what they called the "common sense" notion that even a 5-year-old ought to know that a fall from a height onto concrete will hurt.

The ruling was consistent with today's tougher attitudes toward personal responsibility, but it may be inconsistent with children's natures. Most children younger than 6 or so are as incapable of conceiving danger as most legislators are of conceiving a deficit. And we must ask whether kids coddled by fearful or indulgent parents may never have had a chance to learn the equation that used to be every kid's introduction to advanced math: Gravity + Street = Ouch².

To make playgrounds interesting, kids often use them in contrived ways.

Safety concerns — bureaucratese for "panic" — have led to whole chunks of the traditional landscape of childhood being ruled off-limits to kids. Water?

According to the Guide, ponds, streams or drainage ditches "attract children and can be hazardous." Which, of course, is why they attract children. Trees? It's hard to imagine a piece of play equipment more perfectly designed to satisfy children of all ages and abilities than a good climbing tree. But the Guide warns that tree climbing "can become a problem if not controlled" and urges that low-hanging tree branches be removed.

The British and Scandanavians urge the planting of shrubs in "waste" areas near playgrounds because kids love to hide in them; in this country, shrubs are a no-no because branches might poke kids in the eyes or offer hiding places for the pederasts, child snatchers and drug pushers who are assumed to lurk everywhere. The Europeans helpfully note that prickly plants make useful screens because kids won't try to tear them up; the Guide warns that "hazardous" species such as hawthorne or thorny locust should not be located near playgrounds because they might tear up kids.

Such prescriptions betray not just different attitudes about playground safety, but different attitudes about kids.

If the safe playground is actually only dangerous in new ways, so the creative contemporary playground is a creative experience mainly for the adults who design them. The purpose of playgrounds, to quote the Guide, is to give kids a physical challenge and a chance to interact socially with other kids on the playground. But decades of child development research has concluded that there is a deeper significance to child's play. Play is an essential part of what a '70s expert called "life-research." Children learn about the world by playing with — not just in — it. Until they are dragooned into schools, play is the principal medium for learning by children. They learn by doing — moving, pretending, building, taking chances, hiding, throwing, playing in dirt and in water, balancing themselves. As playground architect M. Paul Friedberg put it in his influential 1970 book, Play and Interplay, the world is the child's laboratory, and he is its scientist.

The standard prebuilt play set is the outdoor equivalent of the classroom textbook — pretty to look at, comprehensive, authoritative in its expression of official doctrine regarding children's needs. The adult need to direct play, to teach, when what kids need is the freedom to learn, is so ingrained in the culture as to seem natural.

Being creative, for example, is not a matter of pretending but of doing. If the play environment is fixed, children can't manipulate the environment and adapt it to their needs. And while contemporary creative playgrounds are more complex than their predecessors, they remain just as fixed in form. Kids can use multipart apparatus in every way but the one that would really engage their need to experiment — taking it apart and putting it back together in new ways.

The problem is not that kids don't find conventional play equipment fun, at least at first. The problem is that fun is all they find in it. The Discovery Zone pioneered in the marketing of franchised "fun and fitness" in the form of indoor pay-for-playgrounds featuring slides and "ball bins" and trampolines. When it went public in mid-1993 the company was a hot Wall Street buy, but by February of 1996 the stock was selling for less than one-thirtieth its highest price. Analysts explained that kids failed to demand repeat visits because they got bored with what one analyst derisively called "hamster habitats."

Part of the problem is that, just as hospitals are designed for doctors rather than patients, playgrounds are designed for everybody but kids. Letting kids have some say in designing playgrounds is not as loony as it may

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Even very young kids are capable of reasoned opinions about play alternatives; they are, after all, experts, which is one reason the better commercial playground architects consult children as part of the design process. And giving kids a say gives them a sense of proprietorship.

sound. Even very young kids are capable of reasoned opinions about play alternatives; they are, after all, experts, which is one reason the better commercial playground architects consult children as part of the design process. Giving kids a say also eases vandalism by giving them a connection to the playground and a sobering sense of proprietorship.

The Guide's recommendation that "users" be included (along with child development experts) on public playground planning teams may already be a bit redundant. Agencies responsible for many a new Illinois playground — the Indian Boundary Park in Chicago's West Rogers Park, the school playground built near that city's Rockwell Gardens housing project, do-it-yourself play projects in such suburbs as Antioch and Crystal Lake, to name just a few from recent years — gave interested parents and children a chance to say which play equipment they would like.

Consulting with kids can mean no more than giving them meaningless consumer options — like having Dad let you choose whether to have a McNuggets or Happy Meal at McDonald's. Also, kids' choices in such cases are constrained by adults' (usually obvious) expectations, and by their own sometimes limited experience of unfettered play. A happier approach is to give local kids a piece of land — say, a lot donated for park use by developers to satisfy local dedication ordinances — and letting them develop and maintain it themselves, under lenient adult supervision.

Compare the conventional U.S. playground to the "adventure playground" first tried in Copenhagen in 1943. A fenced compound measuring roughly 50 yards on a side, the adventure playground is an environment that allows kids to explore, investigate and manipulate materials under the guidance of a paid adult "playleader." Rather than fixed single-purpose apparatus, the "equipment" is mostly stuff kids themselves can bring in, from poles, wire, canvas, tires and ropes to hay bales and old construction materials. (In the United Kingdom, they are called junk playgrounds.) The "apparatus" in an adventure playground is designed to be invented, used, sometimes broken and — most crucially — put back together again. An American Adventure Playground Association was set up as early as 1976, but the innovation never took hold in the United States, mainly because they offend suburban notions of tidiness and insurers' notions of insurability.

Formal playgrounds are the best venues for outdoor play for only part of a typical kid's day anyway, indeed for only part of a typical kid's life. A wiser course might be not to build better playgrounds but to eliminate the need for formal playgrounds as the sole venue for children's play. The street, the alley, the vacant lot, the riverfront, the underpass are the classic venues for child's play. Kids tend to see the whole world as a playground, usually with results that annoy adults. (Public statuary probably gets climbed more often than jungle gyms.) The richness and variety of the urban environment is perfect for kids, yet today's

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cities are nearly universally decried as bad places for kids. The suburbanization of Illinois owes as much to the urgent desire of parents to remove children from the corrupting and confining presence of the city as it does to cheap mortgages and underpriced gasoline. The result is a bifurcated realm whose two parts are both poor places for kids, cities (in general) being too dangerous and suburbs (on the whole) being not dangerous enough.

When kids' impulse to play lacks opportunity, they appropriate unused space, or they use space in the "wrong" ways. (When neighborhood Hispanic kids a few years ago appropriated some of Chicago's ornamental boulevards for soccer fields, who was more in the wrong — the kids or city parks planners who had failed to put playing fields where the kids were?) Vandalism is usually understood as the outcome of alienation or anger or boredom, but it may also be seen as a form of frustrated play, an experiment that takes a destructive turn because there are no constructive alternatives.

Since the 1970s various international do-gooder groups have urged giving the needs of kids higher priority in the planning of cities. Making cities child-friendly means including play opportunities as an official goal of urban design, along with traffic management or sewage disposal.

There have been sporadic attempts to retrofit American cities for kids.

The main formal provisions of public space for kids' play is in the form of school yards, which differ from the better parks playgrounds by being less educational. (Where are the gardens? lamented one '70s playground activist. The science mosaics by students? The outdoor stages for impromptu and planned recitals and plays and skits?)

The informal public space available for play — streets, a realm that includes parkways and sidewalks — is more plentiful and more interesting. Alas, as now configured, streets in even residential neighborhoods are too dangerous for anything smaller than a car to play in. Many an Illinois parent moves to a "quiet" suburb when in fact what they want is a slow suburb, meaning a place where kids can play near or in streets without undue risk from cars. (The popularity of cul-de-sacs as an address owes much to this.)

The planning task thus becomes either to make playgrounds more exciting than streets as places to play, or to make the streets as safe as the playgrounds. The latter may be easier. The Netherlands in the mid-1970s devised the woonerf, a residential district from which through traffic is banned, and local traffic is made to move (by various "traffic calming" devices) no faster than people walk. Such designation opens up streets as places to walk, play and socialize. Such districts have been described as ways to "humanize" the street, but "child-ize" might be a better term. Because the street usually is the playspace closest to houses, conversion to a woonerf especially benefits very young children. Similar districts in the United Kingdom, in fact, are known as "play streets."

There have been sporadic attempts to retrofit U.S. cities for kids. HUD's Open Space Land Program of the 1970s gave us playgrounds as a species of urban renewal. Vest pocket parks — an invention of the 1950s — were all the craze in the '70s as a way to exploit inner city space left vacant (often temporarily) by razing or fires.

New subdivisions and planned communities would seem to offer the best chance to build kid-friendly residential neighborhoods. Newer subdivision schemes feature landscaped central courts that are potential play space to kids. A series of public open spaces (secured by easements from home-owners) could link communally owned "natural" areas and also would allow kids to crisscross blocks, moving between rather than across yards. The former need not be large — a few dozen square yards perhaps, planted with species of trees such as willows that regenerate rapidly after the often aggressive pruning of young arborists.

Ah, but this is Illinois, not Sweden. The Europeans quickly learned that blocks of large detached houses whose public area consists mainly of roads — in short, the postwar U.S. subdivision — are too diffuse for the woonerf concept to work. (What some have called "repatriation of the street" will work better in denser cities like Chicago. Since the city's cul-de-sac program began in 1994, neighborhoods in seven different wards have asked permission to close off streets; crime prevention is usually the hoped-for result, but these modified woonerven also offer children safer places to play.)

The low density of U.S. housing developments frustrates the public provision of play space in other ways. Typically not enough kids dwell on any one block of sprawling subdivisions to justify building a playground on every block. (The Dutch set 100 yards as the maximum distance from home kids under 6 will roam; it is hard to imagine many American parents allowing kids so young to roam so far.)

Many a posh suburb markets recreational amenities for kids, but they almost always take the form of clubhouses or conventional parks. The new landscaped central courts are overlooked by the front rooms of adjoining houses, where moms usually aren't; playspace that can't be seen won't get played in, at least not by younger children. In any event such spaces are offered in addition to, not instead of, private backyards, and thus are redundant from the start.

By the standards of much of the West, Illinois cities and suburbs are not especially child-friendly places. This is true in spite of the fact that one quarter of the typical Illinois city in 1990 consisted of kids under 16. Perhaps if the franchise was expanded to our public-minded 10-year-olds, we might someday be able to judge a town as a "nice place to raise kids in" not according to how many playgrounds it has, but according to how few playgrounds it needs.

James Krohe Jr. is a contributing editor of Illinois Issues.

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