The New Playground

Steev emails me about the Rockwell Group, an architecture firm building “the playground of the future” in New York. The NYT writes:

Instead of monkey bars and jungle gyms, there are blue and white blocks to stack into high walls or to connect as sluices and walkways.

In place of swing sets and seesaws, there are wheelbarrows and rolling carts to move materials about.

And while there are still the familiar elements of sand and water, they are no longer there to be shoveled and splashed so much as turned into landscapes of fanciful design.

The Wall Street Journal also gets in on the action.

Play 2.0 is user-generated apparently, and that’s okay. Kids will climb on and play on anything semi-stable and play with anything up to and including a broken glass bottle, so I think the idea that they will roll their own playground – and that it will be fun and cool – is great. Of course it’s also part of the dangerous slide of our society into relativism (”What might be fun for you is not fun for me.” “This is MY fun, don’t try and impose your fun on me.” and worse yet “There is no fun.”).

What about all that brightly-colored plastic though? At the risk of sounding old: We played on a lot of rusty, splintery stuff as kids, and we liked it. But maybe today’s kid needs all that soft stuff. Probably result in a lot less broken arms, scraped knees, and burns from old tires sitting out in the August sun.

Meanwhile KaBOOM!, a non-profit which builds, funds, and raises awareness of public playspaces, has a nice Playspace Finder that you can use to find and add play areas in your neighborhood.