Thinkpiece: Play and our tamariki
(Written by Haylea Muir and first published at Isthmus.co.nz)
Thinking globally, play and our tamariki are important topics.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history and even has a specific Article talking about the right to play.
When we think locally about how we could go about regenerating Aotearoa through connecting land, people and culture, in my mind, designing for kids—especially using the concepts I’m about to describe—is an open gateway leading straight to this.
Play is fundamental to wellbeing because play is a meaningful way to connect with both our natural and social landscapes while nourishing bodies with movement, and brains with challenge and creativity.
In my career at Isthmus so far, I have had the privilege of working play into many projects: playgrounds like Myers Park and Wynyard Quarter, streets like Onekiritea Road at Hobsonville Point, and play strategies within several neighbourhood masterplans.
There is a lot of play theory out in the world, and a lot that has been developed here at Isthmus, not just by me. It’s also worth pointing out that play is actually really important for all ages, and that is an overarching belief in lots of projects here at Isthmus too.
But, this is a thinkpiece not a book, so I’m going to focus on kids, and discuss just a couple of the ‘mantras’ that I personally use when I’m designing almost anything, whether it be a playspace or a whole neighbourhood.
The first one is: ALWAYS design for children.’
As you design, always be asking yourself questions like:
How would you live in this house typology with a kid?
How could a toddler and a teenager both get something out of this park?
Is it really a good idea to have the front door flush with the façade only a metre away from where cars will be manoeuvring?
Can Tamariki or Rangatahi get themselves around without needing to be driven?
How could this place be more playful or fun?
Is this footpath wide enough to walk down with a pram?
And here’s a crazy idea, what if the person pushing the pram wants to walk side by side with someone else? (Don’t get me started on the built environment’s influence over social connectedness…).
The built environment—when done well—can help children thrive and therefore become healthier, more successful adults. Plus, planning for children requires consideration of all sorts of things that also make a place work for other vulnerable groups such as the elderly or disabled.
Playgrounds are a such tiny portion of child centred design—it’s more fundamental than that—it’s about whole environments that grow happy, healthy children. Sometimes this means the perfectly selected piece of play equipment, sometimes this means streetscapes that encourage or facilitate walking to school, and sometimes it means making sure the environment isn’t stressful, or hard, or uncomfortable for the big people looking after the Tamariki.
The next idea is that: Everything should be playable.
In a neighbourhood context “everything is playable” might mean something interesting in the streetscape; stepping stones or balance beams alongside a footpath, some paint on the ground that could spark a game, or a purple birdhouse. All these things can be found at Hobsonville Point.
Maybe you work hard to retain existing trees that are good for climbing or gathering interesting seed pods from.
Maybe your street berm is made wide enough to accommodate the hut that backyards are now too small for.
Maybe your laneway is so well designed, there’s so little conflict between pedestrians and cars, it’s the perfect place to learn to scooter.
In a playspace, I’ve always tried to make every single element playable.
At Hobsonville Point Park, there were level changes between the spaces, so we made the retaining edges fun to balance along. And just for more fun, we accentuated these level changes with our twisting path, adding a few bumps and ramps to make it more exciting on a scooter or in a pram. With some manipulation of levels and changes in texture the path becomes more than just ‘access’, it’s a plaything itself.
Places to sit and observe for caregivers are important in play spaces. In the playground that’s part of the Otahuhu Recreation Precinct, we worked seating into the concrete edges of the play zones, creating wall heights that varied from step height, to kids seat height to adult seat height, with ramps in between so not only were we able to insert retaining where the levels changed (and mess with the levels even more to make the space more dynamic), we could also have a variety of seating options as well as fun play loops to run, crawl or scooter along, all out of the same wall.
At Myers Park, the sit, rest and observe space became a folded deck that keeps littlies engaged, scrambling around and learning to negotiate level changes near to mum or dad while big siblings play on the big stuff. Shade was required, so we made sure the shadows were fun and interesting. I’ve seen kids hopping between the light and dark, inventing games and following the shapes which has made me grin every time.
Crawling, scrambling, balancing, hopping, jumping, hiding, socialising, peek-a-boo games and discovering are all legitimate and important play experiences that can be provided by the landscape surrounding the catalogue equipment that’s offering the traditional swinging, spinning and sliding.
It’s also this aspect of the playspace that keeps it interesting and allows different games to be invented or different levels of challenge to be taken on, each time a child visits.
When I’m at our local park with my kids my greatest fear is not that we’ll end up in A&E, it’s that I will hear a little voice say “Mum, this playground is boring”.
Yes, kids need to learn how to manage boredom, because this is important for fostering creativity, and self-esteem. But, in my mind “I’m bored” and “this place is boring” are two separate issues.
The centre for urban design and mental health reminds us that alongside isolation or lack of community, boredom is a leading contributor to depression, drug and alcohol abuse and a myriad of other mental health issues.
Kids can grow up in a built environment that’s boring, or it can be stimulating, enriching and interesting, that’s up to us.
This one’s pretty obvious: Access to Nature
We all know access to nature is important for our mental health, it helps us be more receptive to learning new things, helps us focus and manage stress. This is especially true for children.
There is also growing evidence that childhood experiences of nature help enhance adult environmentalism.
As the great David Attenborough said:
No one will protect what they don’t care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced.
Play in nature is effective and important as it is typically unstructured free play requiring imagination, sometimes cooperation and almost always loose parts that can be manipulated by children; Leaves, water, sticks, mud, logs, pinecones, sand…. Grass underfoot and fresh air in your lungs: all good sensory stuff. There’s usually also an element of risk which is GREAT! But risk is a topic for another day.
Freely running around on the beach or fossicking around in the bush are the obvious ideal scenarios but these are not necessarily the everyday for our urban and suburban kids. As medium or even high density becomes the norm, bringing nature into neighbourhoods is critical. Then we need to ensure the built environment is not only attractive to kids to get outside but also helps parents feel comfortable to send, or at least take, their kids out into their neighbourhoods.
Nature deficit disorder is a condition coined by author Richard Louv to describe the behavioural and cognitive issues that arise when children (or people in general for that matter), become disconnected from the natural environment. It’s associated with an increased fear and phobia of the outdoors, decreased ability to cope with stress and decreased self-esteem.
This disconnection from nature is occurring in as little as one generation and it’s due to increased technology use, increased fear and distrust of society and/or their street environment, by parents, massive increases in homework and structured “extra-curricular” activities, and increased urbanisation.
In the UK, Project Wild Thing found that time playing outside during the week had halved in one generation. Roaming distances from home shrunk by 90% in 30 years. Fewer than 1 in 10 kids regularly play in wild spaces.
But even here at home, our friends at AUT have found in their research that while most NZ parents recognise the potential developmental benefits of real play, and believe that children need to be exposed to some form of risk to develop their risk management skills, the majority of children do not often participate in a wide range of real play activities; in fact, a reasonable proportion does not engage in real play at all.
Kiwi kids have got it pretty good on a global scale.
So, I put it to all who have influence over habitats for humans:
– Always design with children in mind.
– Make everything you can playable.
– Ensure access to nature for everyone, everywhere.
This mahi changes the way people live.
