Creating Playspaces By and For Children
by Roger Hart,
Children's Environments Research Group
An edited version of a presentation given by Professor Hart at the conference, "Article 31: The Child's Right to Play", held in Birmingham, England on 22 June 1994. With numerous national and international examples, Hart presents the benefits and misconceptions of children's participation in creating and transforming their play spaces.
"Play" and "work" in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
The references to play in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child have very different implications for children in different countries. The
play articles are a particularly important provision for
children in those countries we now call "The
South" or the "Third World", where many
children are engaged in exploitative work for extremely
long hours with no opportunity for play. For industrially
advanced countries, like the United Kingdom, where
exploitative work has long been banished for all but a
small minority of children, most children do have
opportunities to play. The question is, what kind of
play. For clues to this we have to look beyond Articles 7
and 31, the specific sections dealing with play, to the
Convention as a whole. It emphasises strongly a child's
right to grow into meaningful roles in society as full,
democratic, participating citizens. Too much play theory
and research emphasises the individual and particularly
individual children's learning and creativity through
play, rather than a child's relationship with others,
particularly their peers. This psychological emphasis on
the individual has found its way solidly into the popular
media and the language of parents and schools.
We need a
re-emphasis on play as a place where children build
friendships and indeed build culture and community.Most
parents in the industrialised countries also seem to have
forgotten the value of work in a child's development.
Removal of work from children's lives began in the early
19th century with the honourable goal of protecting
children from exploitation. Then we gradually extended
childhood by increasing the school learning age. Now,
many never get to experience the pleasure of meaningful
work during their childhoods. It is a missed opportunity
to not offer children work as an informal training ground
to develop their competence and sense of ability to make
a meaningful contribution. There is little chance for
children to learn that work can, and should, be more than
just earning money. Children are thirsting to exercise
their work competence. Anyone who has observed a group of
eight-year-olds trying to dam a stream knows that what is
called "play" often looks more like work:
defining goals for themselves, planning with one another
and busily carrying them out. The only time playgrounds
in the USA are really exciting for children seems to be
when they are being built, for there are lots of
materials for them to work with. Once they are finished
the playgrounds quickly become boring. It is difficult to
say where work ends and play begins sometimes but central
to the distinction are the words "voluntary"
and "pleasurable". People who love their jobs,
you could say, are playing.
In the industrialised countries, opportunities for
meaningful work should be fostered more, for in these
activities children learn how to be competent,
co-operative, resourceful and discover the joys of
getting a job done; the growth areas of play provision
today are, by contrast, in play as entertainment.Last
year I spent some time with a group of children in the
Brazilian Amazon. They are struggling with the same
desires for competence and to engage in meaningful
activities as children in this country, but in a very
different environment. Certainly they do a lot of what
people usually think of as play. They took me to their
favourite play place in the forest and showed me how to
swing from gigantic lianas hanging from the trees. But,
like most children throughout the Third World a large
proportion of young children are engaged in work most of
the time, particularly the girls. Play is something that
is snatched now and then between work activities.
However, for many children this is not exploitative work.
One of the problems the international children's agencies
and the International Labour Union is going to have in
interpreting the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
is when work is acceptable and when work is not. Even
today in the United Kingdom new immigrant groups still
struggle to establish an economic footing in the country
by employing their children with the whole family. This
often brings them into conflict with the law but it is
hard for me to think of this as more damaging to children
than preparing them through years of not so relevant
schooling for a world of unemployment!In summary, there
is need for debate in the playwork community about play
and work in relation to the UN Convention on the Rights
of the Child. It is a mistake to pull out
"play" and "work" and declare one as
the desirable and the other as undesirable. In this
country, like the United States, I feel there is a
growing loss of understanding of what kind of society we
are preparing children for. We need more debate on the
place of play and work together in children's'
development and indeed in development throughout the life
cycle.
Playworkers as children's rights advocates: Adults
generally participate too much in creating children's
play settings. Much of play theory tells us that it is
beneficial for children to be able to create and
transform the environment themselves. I believe that one
of the key roles of playworkers is to confront the trend
toward the programming of children's space and time; to
act as advocates for children's free play and to educate
parents and others about this (see Hart 1976; 1983;
Children's Environments, 1992). Playworkers understand
the need to set the stage for play and to allow children
to write their own scripts. While I believe that what we
really need is an un-planning of the environment for
children's play, the realities of the contemporary urban
landscape tells us that we do have to create special
preserves for children to play (See Hart 1976 and 1983
for a discussion of un-planning the British landscape for
children). We should at least involve children in the
planning and design of play settings.
The Convention on
the Rights of the Child calls for children to express
their views "freely in all matters affecting the
child, the views of the child being given due weight in
accordance with the age and maturity of the child".
What more obvious than for children to have a say with
adults in the planning and design of play facilities, and
in the day-to-day running of them. The reason why I like
adventure playgrounds so much is that this idea is built
right into the concept; at least the concept of what
adventure playgrounds were originally supposed to be
(Benjamin, 1976).The so-called "participation
articles" are proving to be the most difficult for
people in the industrialised countries to interpret.
Whether children should have a voice, and when they
should have a voice is a very controversial subject, and
children's participation in public life is an area that
people are really struggling with. The "ladder"
metaphor for children's participation has proved useful
in helping people think about children's developing
capacity to participate so I will borrow from it again
here (see page 25) (Hart, 1992).
1. Manipulation
The classic example of manipulation is when one sees
children in a parade where they have been given signs to
carry but they have had nothing to do with writing the
signs and they do not even know why they are in the
parade or what the signs say . They may be used for
example in a demonstration to prevent a new highway from
being built, arguing that it is dangerous to children
when the real reason is to maintain local real estate
values.It is common in playground design for adults to
ask children to do drawings of what they would like in
their playground. The designers take these away, select
what they wish and do not feed back the results to the
children. They come up with a finished design and pretend
that the children designed it.
2. Decoration
An example of decoration is where you have a
conference and the children are dressed up in relation to
theme, but again do not really understand what the theme
is: another missed opportunity for children.
3. Tokenism
It is very common at conferences for children to be
given a voice, perhaps on a panel, but nobody really
takes seriously what they say. The children are given
little opportunity to prepare for their role and may be
dressed up to look cute. People will certainly clap,
photographs will be taken, there may even be some tears,
but nobody will really take much notice of what the
children say.Each of these examples from the lower rungs
of the ladder can have a negative effect on children's
democratisation, because the children soon come to see
their involvement as a sham.
4. Assigned but informed
This rung of the ladder just achieves what I would
call valid participation. This is a very common way that
children's advocacy organisations get children to play a
role in broadcasting an awareness of the Convention on
the Rights of the Child. I have seen thousands of
children in the Philippines, Brazil and elsewhere
demonstrating for the rights of children and understand
that that is what they are doing, even though the whole
thing might have been designed by adults. Another example
is the hundreds of working children who were organised to
bang on doors in the poorer areas of Bombay in order to
remind mothers to get their children immunised. This use
of children as "social mobilisers", especially
for health initiatives, is tricky because it can easily
become a cheap way for adults to achieve some social
agenda without much thinking about its impact on the
acting children themselves. If done well however it can
be a valuable first step in getting children to
understand their right to have a voice. Although their
own voice is not used, it can help them to see that
children can play a valuable social role. To be
successful in this way, however, it needs to be followed
up with opportunities from higher rungs of the ladder.
The ladder of participation
(Taken from Children's Participation: from
Tokenism to Citizenship, by Roger Hart, published
by UNICEF, 1992)
5. Consulted and informed
There are many ways for children to be authentically
consulted in the design of play environments (Iltus &
Hart, 1995) Children should not just be interviewed or
asked to make drawings, leaving the designer to disappear
and magically produce a play environment which claims to
have been designed "with" children. At a
minimum, the design process must be made transparent,
revealing how children's ideas were used. When there is
feedback and the children are involved in negotiation
over the design, it can then be claimed to be
participatory design.
6. Adult designed: shared decisions with children
This is what we should be doing almost all of the time
in our projects. Adults may initiate a project but should
set up a frame for collaborative decision-making. We have
found that it is particularly effective to use
three-dimensional models because it maximises involvement
with all ages of participants and increases the degree of
negotiation well beyond that possible with drawing (Iltus
& Hart, 1995).
7. Child-initiated and directed
Children's "free play" is child-initiated
and directed. When the stage is set and there is a rich
play environment, free play offers an opportunity for
children to collaborate with one another and to design
their own activities with a flow of play that works for
them. A few years ago a member of our research group
studied the play of emotionally disturbed and
intellectually disabled children (Schwartzman, 1988) He
found that the teachers of these children, even when they
were really trying, invariably interrupted the children's
play just when they were about to complete an episode. It
is very hard to be a playworker and intervene in
children's play without interrupting the flow of that
play. The reason I respect the playwork profession so
much is the way it tries to often set the scene for
child-directed play, responding to children rather than
directing them.
8. Child-initiated: shared decisions with adults
The International Journal of Children's Rights
reviewed my essay on children's participation and
criticised this part of it. The reviewer asks how could I
possibly have "shared decisions with adults" at
the top of the ladder. My answer is that I do not want
children as a separate society. We are trying to prepare
children to be participating members of society. There is
a naÔve wing to the children's rights movement that
talks about children's power, and the child's world as
separate. This is nonsense. The movement should be about
children's rights to have a voice with adults. So often
in newspapers one sees pictures of children carrying out
some project in the community with a headline like
"New Park Built By Children" and the adults
pretend that they had nothing to do with it. It is, of
course, often patently obvious that it was an
adult-controlled project, thereby making a mockery out of
the idea of children' participation. We need to make
adults, including journalists, more honest about the
different and important roles of both adults and
children.
All too often, the most crucial phase of problem
identification does not involve children. One very
effective way for children to identify problems which
they can act on is through acting out scenes from
everyday life. I have seen Filipino street and working
children use skits with one another as a way of
articulating problems in their lives in meetings at the
local level and then taking these to regional congresses
of street and working children, and finally at the
national meeting, to agree upon extremely important
issues to present to the Philippine National
Congress.Enabling children to take the lead in
transforming the physical environment is a particularly
effective way of introducing them to the idea of their
taking more initiatives in their lives; for example
creating murals on a community building as a way of
making it their own is a very simple but concrete, and
hence powerful, way to give children more control over
their lives. Yet, in the dozens of programs I have seen
with street children around the world I only remember one
where children had been allowed to take control over a
facility in this way, even though
"streetworkers" are next to playworkers in
their recognition of children's capacities.
In the Bronx where we have worked for the last five
years we have some neighbourhoods so dangerous that play
has disappeared. This is true of many urban areas in the
USA. Many playgrounds are used as drug locations. In many
parts of New York, it has to do with the movements of
drug dealers and crime. In the West Farms neighbourhood
where we have been working for many years the situation
became so bad that there were no spaces left for play at
all. Only teenage boys, who rigged up milk crates on
traffic lights to serve a basketball hoops, had any play
space at all. In this area we are helping some fine
people take back spaces for their children. We engage
with the community to both plan and design these
playgrounds. It has become easier to convince the city
government of New York to support this approach, not
because of a deep ideological shift in their belief in
public participation, but because they have concluded
that community participation is necessary to create
workable community open spaces. In the planning phase
templates of many kinds are moved about on large
neighbourhood maps by parents, teenagers and children in
community meetings. These templates express dangers,
valued places, possible safe locations and so on. This
flexible medium enables a rich discourse between all age
groups (Iltus & Hart, 1995).
In the design phase,
models are built, again by all age groups, and these are
shared at the community meetings or on the street or at
the site itself in order to maximise the involvement of
all age groups in the community. Through debate between
the different age groups we gradually arrive at a
consensus.Community gardens are valuable as safe places
to build areas for children because adult males are there
all day long. The best way to design for children within
these community gardens is in model form, in the garden. Children enjoy designing inside the space
itself, using natural elements from the space.
In some parts of the world, the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child is being used as a
very effective tool to increase children's involvement in
society. In the new democracy of South America for
example there are some impressive examples. One of the
biggest programs is El Programa Muchacho Trabajador (The
Program of Street and Working Children). This is a
national movement involving 55,000 children. These
children meet in "Alternative Spaces" because
the school system is too formal to carry out the program
and because many children do not go to school. There they
design mini-projects which they then carry out and
evaluate. It is a very effective action research
program.
Unlike most "environmental" programs
with children this is not limited to the same set of
"ecological" problems defined by the
environmental movement. Children are concerned with many
other aspects of their environment and this program
empowers them to identify and act upon problems which
concern them. For example, I visited children living in
San Vicente, a very poor area outside Quito. Because many
of the children had to walk an hour and a half to get to
their recreation centre, they designed a bridge that
would shorten the journey. They then worked with adult
members of the community to build the bridge.In calling
for the increased participation of children in community
projects be ready for those who will argue that children
are losing their childhoods and that we need to protect
this by guaranteeing the right to a play world separate
from adults and the adult world of planning and
decision-making.
I am sympathetic to this perspective but
I do not see the protection of childhood as antithetical
to an improved recognition of the developing competencies
of children. I believe that it is in all of our interests
to enable children to gradually increase their
participation in the communities in which they live.
Playwork is more important than just creating
opportunities for children's individual development. It
is also about enabling children to play a role as
competent and responsible participants in the community
and larger society. The profession needs more discussion
on these big questions. What, for example, are the
relative merits of adventure playgrounds versus theme
parks, not only in terms of their impact on children but
also for the society we are creating? How we answer such
questions is, I believe, of great significance for
democracy and community in the twenty-first century.
References
Benjamin, J. (1976). Grounds for Play. London: Bedford Square Press. The National Council for Social Service.
Children's Environments. (1992). Special Issue on "Children's Changing Access to Public Places". New York: Children's Environments Research Group, City University of New York. Vol. 9, No. 2.
Hart, R. (forthcoming). The Children's Community Participation Handbook: Methods for Involving Citizens Aged Four to Fourteen in Sustainable Development of the Environment. New York: UNICEF.
Hart, R. (1983). Wildlands for Children: A consideration of the values of natural environments in landscape planning. London: Town and Country Planning Association, Bulletin of Environmental Education. No. 14, Feb. 1983.
Hart, R. (1976). Place and play: Transforming Environments. Milton Keynes: BBC/Open University. Film and programme notes of the same title.
Hart, R. (1987). Children's Participation in Planning and Design: Theory, Research and Practice. In C. Weinstein & T. David (Eds.), Spaces for Children. New York: Plenum.
Hart, R. (1992). Children's Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship. Florence: UNICEF/ International Child Development Centre.
Iltus, S. and Hart, R. (1995). Participatory Planning
and Design of Recreational Spaces With Children.
Architecture & Behaviour, 10:4. pp 361-370.
Katz, C., Hart, R. & Iltus, S. (1990). The
Participatory Design of Two Elementary Schoolyards in
Harlem, PS 185 and PS 208. New York: Children's
Environments Research Group.
Hart, R., Iltus, S. & Mora, R. (1991) Safe Play
for West Farms: Play and Recreation Proposals for the
West Farms Area of the Bronx Based Upon the Residents'
Perceptions and Preferences. New York: Children's
Environments Research Group.
Schwartzman, J. (1988). A comparison of teacher-child
play interactions in mentally retarded and non-disabled
groups. New York: Children's Environments Research Group
Monograph.
Contact Roger Hart:
c/o Children's Environments Research Group
Graduate School and University Center
City University of New York
33 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
USA
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