Weighing Rainbows.
While I was preparing for this lecture I had one of those weird vivid dreams. I was a nerdy super hero, watching a city being designed as a tapestry woven on a loom. The architect had started at the top of the tall towers but. hadn’t left enough room to work right down to street level.
They were deliberately leaving out of the planning the lowest 95cm , child eye height.
Because I was Super Penelope, the un weaver and reweaver, it was my job to make sure they unpicked the whole thing, and started again, this time from the bottom up.
In the real world, I took a walk through two estates immediately next to my home in Mile End, looking at what the the playareas were like there.
Oh the shame of it.
They were eyesores.
An. insult to children and families and to anyone who lives near them.
excruciating.
The notice boards could just have said, “No playing”
Many many. children live on these estates.
But the design of the ‘Play Areas’ communicates to every one, very clearly, that these are not places for children to feel at home or comfortable, to have a sense of worth or belonging, to be happy and carefree, to have a playhood. Or even to be.
These are not the shared fun garden spaces that the plans promised.
That bit of the consultation has been glossed over.
Our cities and streets and estates are resolutely designed at adult eye level, looking over the top of the heads of children, refusing to see them.
Children. are factored out.
And it’s so all pervading that we’ve got used to it
We have internalised its very clear message and rather than advocating for our children, we victim blame, and say stuff like,
“All children want to do now is stay in their rooms and play on computers. They don’t know how to play like we did”. Which is a pretty pathetic gloat.
Or we say, “Children and young people have got no respect for their neighbourhoods nowadays.” Do these spaces show any respect for children?
“Its not worth bothering making nice spaces for them, they’ll only wreck them.” Really?
How did we get to this?
I have watched as people commissioning playground builds are mesmerised by shiney geegaws dangled in front of them by a salesperson representing a cluster of inter-related businesses.
The catalogues show metal and plastic bits of stuff they call “Play Equipment,” which are rather bizarrely linked into key stages of the national curriculum. The spiel goes, “And if you buy this, then we can take care of. all of the IAS and fencing and locks and signage and installation and post installation inspection and maintenance for you.”
It’s a hypotic and very tempting, an easy offer.
The Emporers New playground will be installed. No one. involved in this process will ever go back to see how it is. working… they don’t have to live with it.
But what if you are a child, say a teenager, who isn’t attracted to these designated ‘play areas’?
On most housing estates there are loads of. ‘no ball games ‘ signs. Landlords have really truly. been known to interpret them to mean ‘No Playing’, threatening children with anti-social behaviour orders, and their families with a termination of their tenancy.
Often when you first establish contact with a landlord to discuss play, you will. be referred to the Anti-Social Behaviour officer, in whose portfolio play sits.
It’s also worth noting that if you ask to see their Social Behaviour policy, they do not have one.
Which is odd, because play is probably one of the most sociable of all human behaviours.
When children play together they can become very close and their adults, feeling this closeness can be drawn together as well through mutual interest.
Play weaves new relationships between people. It is social glue
And for the children this is not a life style choice, it is an urgent, visceral, intrinsic, constant need.
It’s the language of childhood, the way that we make sense of the world and find out who we are and who other people are and what is. fascinating to us.
A few years ago I did a CABE Space scholarship. One of the places I visited was Howletts Wild Animal Park.
I was interested in the environments that they created for their rescue and conservation work with Gorillas, many of whom were. orphaned or endangered babies or older creatures who have been through trauma, for example being kept as pets by humans who wanted to train them to behave in more convenient ways than gorillas would naturally do.
They say they often get complaints. from the public because the space doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing, but every element within the enclosure is researched and designed, so that the gorillas can explore and discover and be intellectually physically and emotionally as responsive as they would have been in their natural habitat.
The head. keeper told me, ‘they need to. live in a place where they are able to play into the environment like they do in the wild. That’s how they develop their Gorillaness.”
The same is true of our species.. “through play we become human*.”
. So, imagine this.
We suggested. to one of the landlords of my neighbouring estates, that they create a playful flow throughout the entire development, which backs onto an incredible environmental park whose ecology team would have been delighted to have a contract to manage the planting and care of native species. so as to extend the biodiversity into the soft green areas around the homes.
They could create. lightly planted woods, probably of slender trunked. silver birch, set in wildflower mini meadows and lots of small oases of playablity with gentle curves and curls and. little valleys and hills. There would be lots of seating and a coffee cart and fruit and veg stall and formal and informal events would take place here.
There would be no need for raised pavements, and the water flow through the hard stand would run along shallow surface dips which would run like streams, collecting into deliberately formed slowed-draining puddles when it rained, or when there was a water fight.
This. ever changing, constantly playful landscape would entice people out of their locked-in-tight-homes and beckon them out doors into lucious, shared, in-between spaces which they would probably love.
They would want to sit outside while the children played as naturally as the birds would fly to the new trees.
The playing of children would be woven into the tapestry fabric of the place along with the sitting and the chatting and the nipping out for a stroll-ness of it.
And who knows, perhaps in this world-possible, the children would come out to play on. their own, near their homes, calling round for their mates to come out too.
How radical would that be?
We were so close to having this happen.
So close.
But it didn’t.
Why was a play centric design not adopted?
Was it too expensive?
Surly it can’t have been more costly than the sea of block paving and galvanised railings protecting patches of dog poo strewn grass which contribute nothing to anyone.
The targets which could have been achieved through this design concept are amazing, co-design, apprenticeships, business start ups, community cohesion, physical exercise and mental well being, biodiversity and water harvesting, sustainability… oh my the architects and landlords and developers would be. celebrated.
And how happy would people. living there have. been?
The Welsh Play Sufficiency Framework says that. whilst there are many amazing spin off benefits to play, the outcomes of which can be measured, the outcome of play itself is play.
Trying to measure its’ success is like trying to weigh a rainbow.
Playworkers are the only profession which pays attention to play for its own sake.
We have developed our theories and practices better to support this work.
We advocate for play as a. human right for all children.
It is we who are going to sit you down and tell you that there are 17 different different play types and. point out that what you see when you watch children playing freely, you see a melange of all of them threading in and out of one another.
We will tell you that only one of those play types is specifically and definitively concerned with gross motor skills. We will ask you why it is you think that almost every playground that you have ever seen focusses on that one play type to the almost deliberate exclusion of all the others. (You can’t dig a stream or build a sand castle or a mud pie. with wet pour.)
It is we who are going to ask you how you played as a child.
And you, considering this, will go into a reverie and remember things that you hadn’t consciously thought of since those days, with the most amazing clarity, with smells and. strong sensations and memories of being of absorbed in the vitality and. aliveness of those moments.
We will also bet that you found, in that. freely chosen, purposeless playing , something that has run through your life, probably something that you discovered within yourself, within the world, that sparked your desire to become an architect or a zookeeper, a gardener, a water conservationist or a playworker.
Now look at the images on the screen again.
What have these to do with the playing of your memories?
Probably absolutely nothing.
These are just a begrudging nod to the existence of children.
A tokenistic tick in the box that requires the provision of X amount of space for children’s play on any development.
A. very nominal, fenced in ghost of the real thing, usually with a padlock.
On the other side of my street is another housing estate.
It too has been regenerated. But here the landlord instructed the developer to work with playworkers on co designing the open spaces along with the residents, regenerating and investing in the community as well as the housing and land stock. Weaving in play.
It is quite unusual for Playworkers to be involved in a process like this.
But we were given the chance to spend time with the people who lived here for years.
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We got a small sum of funding to make a playground in an overlooked space, overlooked on four sides by living room windows.
It was a patch of grass was used only as a dog toilet.
We intended to turn it into somewhere which would offer shared respite for the whole community during the 5 or so years of buildings works and for a long time to come.
5 years is a huge chunk of a playhood. We wanted to make something for right now as well as. for the future.
We did our ‘consultation’ by taking along loads of stuff for the children to play with as they pleased, and sand and water and letting them get on with it while we talked with the grown ups about what the children were doing.
What they saw they described as ‘real, old fashioned playing, like we used to do.’
When we asked the adults what they wanted. from this playable space for everyone, they
pretty much always. said that they wanted it to do lots of things, to be flexible in its uses.
‘somewhere that we can be together and get to know the neighbours’,
. Or ‘to spend a lovely afternoon with the grandchildren when they visit’,
‘somewhere where the teenagers can hang out and be safe’
‘somewhere we can have little parties, or bbqs or celebrate Eid or have Easter egg hunts.’
‘somewhere beautiful with growing things’.
.
So working with all the community we scribbled drawings and found pictures of ideas we liked, and. stretched our brains until we found simple and beautiful ways to make the things that everybody dreamed of.
And it worked and they loved it, and the other open areas of the estates were designed using the same principles. Its still there doing its job about 10years on.
The signs. read ‘Play Priority Area’
The children go out and play on their own there, and call round for their mates to come out too.
A playable place should show no. shred of a design ego at work. It should be a blank canvas for the children to create so that it springs to life at the touch of their playing, forever shifting and adapting to the needs of the people who are within it, a bit like the room of requirement.
It should be a holding environment which keeps an arm loosely curled around the place and an. ever vigilant eye open to see that all is well. A Living Room
A great playable place, like play itself, is not product driven.
Assemble were approached by the developers of Kings Cross to build a playground in the largest of their brand new parks which. is in the space in-between the Aga Khan Building, Facebook, Google and Google DeepMind.
It sits in front of Coal Drops Yard with its Heatherwick Kissing Roof and luxury homes in repurposed gas holders. Central Saint Martins. is based there too.
The whole development is a design showcase.
Can you imagine what a state of the art playground there would be like?
How exciting would it be to dream up that project?
This was a chance to do an incredibly bold piece of design.
Which is exactly what Assemble did.
They suggested that they build nothing.
They could have made a great playground on the park, but. however wonderful it was, it would have filled up all the open in-between space with a series of objects which would have dictated the way children played and where they were supposed to do it.
The park would no longer be flexible in its possible uses.
The play would be fixed.
Fixed Play.
Instead of building a playground, they made something quite different.
Like most good design it was deceptively simple.
A blank canvas for the children to play on.
And massively to their credit, the developers, Argent, agreed to try it out and funded it.
Anyway, The. Project design went like this, A team of Playworkers, open spaces, and a shed filled with loose parts.
(Those. are the bits and pieces of stuff that children use in their playing. So a cardboardbox can be what ever the child needs it to be, a den or a costume or a pet.
Loose parts are flexible in their use, just as people want open spaces to be. Liminal.)
The Playworkers rock up in the park with a couple of trolleys, and with the children, start to unpack all the weird and wonderful stuff and no one has any idea what is going to happen, until it does.
The. families sit around and watch and as the Playworkers support the child-play-experts and just do what is needed, fetching and carrying, tying the. pink parachute to the lamppost. so it swells in the breeze. they watch and. listen and respect the play process.
And the time stretches on and a twenty minute visit lasts for several hours but the parents don’t mind.
And the children become more immersed in the process the longer they play.
A time lapse video, would show. them moving all over the park using objects in. creations, which they unmake and remake and reinvent and abandon and dismantle in favour of something new.
And all of it is funny and brilliant and moving and inspiring and quiet and loud and happy and thoughtful and sometimes sad.
It is so alive.
So filled with living.
And because this is a free thing, families of all sorts come out to play together and mix and mingle and the children, because they don’t seem to care about. differences, just get on with their playing. And a new community of families establishes itself every day.
In the cold wet weather we use the atrium outside Central Saint Martins and roll a red carpet around us as a celebration and a proclamation and instead of a fence. We leave a friendly margin so that the public can cut through the converted goods yards and buy a coffee or a meal without tripping over a child or some crazy stuff and so that beautiful flocks of fashion students can glide in and out of the university entrance, marvelling at the dressing up as they pass, and performance artists, are mesmerised , students of. architecture pause and note how spaces and. block buildings are used.
People stop and watch this. raw creativity occupying the place unselfconsciously and they feel good about us being there. It makes them happy. They tell us that they haven’t seen anything like this before, or at least not. for many years.
The shock of the old.
Old fashioned playing, with the children in control of it, trusted. with their own expertise.
PlayKX has become a moving landmark, a part of the. rhythm of this built environment.
It’s an amazing project. A beautiful piece of design. The parents think so too, They tell us as much.
You don’t have to ask the children, because play is their voice , and they are telling us loud and clear what they think, all we have to do is watch.
This project does exactly the opposite thing that a No Ball Games sign does.
It validates playfulness and welcomes children, including them as, talented, intelligent and sentient human beings. Because of it, the whole site becomes a playful flow with children as equal participants.
The quirky sculptures and the curl and kiss of the Heatherwick roof become extraordinary backdrops for much wilder and more outrageous creations.
What would happen if we ran this same project in a city centre, or on a high street?
The street level, the 95 centimetres would burst into life.
People would come not just to shop and eat, but to meet up with friends and to linger there while their children played. A living Street.
If you are wondering how to regenerate a high street, this is an immediate solution.
Its not a new thought.
It’s been talked about for at least 80 years.
In Amsterdam you can see. it in the thousands of small works of genius that Aldo Van Eyke built into almost every street and space, artefacts which spring to life as children touch them as they move through the city, becoming almost invisible as soon as they are gone. Designed as a way to recover from and cleanse the city of the Nazi occupation Van Eyke rebuilt Amsterdam starting from the ground up with the playing of children.
Read. the work of Lady Allen of Hurtwood who introduced Adventure Playgrounds. into the UK. She thought that they were wonderful places, but knew damn well that enclaves or ghettos for children’s play were not enough. So. she designed playable streets and new town spaces, putting. play into the fabric of the optimism of postwar reconstruction.
. Read Jane Jacobs.. just read Jane Jacobs.
Is it such a far fetched utopian vision, that we would build our living spaces and towns and cities to be fit for. play instead of expunging it from our landscapes?
Through play we become human.
So Why ignore it? Why actively design it out?
Why are we mucking about with something so important instead of folding it into the heart of our plans?
Is there any part of the built environment that wouldn’t be made better by the possiblity for children to play?
I can’t think of one.
If you want to try a playful intervention for yourselves, find a piece of pavement that has a high footfall and draw a hopscotch grid with a piece of chalk…… .Then watch what happens.
But please be aware that chalking on the pavement can be considered illegal in England.
‘Through play we become human’ Arthur Battram
