Knowledge Live is proving to be a pandoras box. Ever since I started blogging about play and play environments, and with Charu introducing keywords such as “children” and “playgrounds” in the feed aggregator, a wealth of news, promotions, advertisements, perspectives, and even some personal accounts have started popping up. Most of these pieces are about playgrounds including one that visually documents a creepy children’s playground in Russia where pictures of surreal art objects in playgrounds are inserted in a page containing borderline pornographic material. I decided to explore the contents of this diverse range of materials to see what interesting themes are being thrown up and possibly explore them further through Play@Khirkee.
Playground as a social experience for mothers
This morning a mother of an autistic child blogged about her encounter with another mother in a nearly empty playground on a rainy day. Complete strangers to each other, these women chatted as they watched their young children play. Both discovered that each had a special needs child other than the ones accompanying them that day. One of them chose to give up her Downs syndrome child to be brought up by another family. Even as she opened up to a sympathetic stranger in a park, she cried behind her large sunglasses. As the two women walked away with their children and with a tacit agreement to meet again, our blogger/ listener realized that they had not even exchanged names. However she was moved enough by this experience to blog about it in the morning. What strikes me about this post is the socializing potential of the playground not just for children but also for mothers and caregivers, the potential to meet strangers with unknown histories, share stories and make connections which perhaps allow us to evaluate ourselves from a new perspective. I had no intention to look at playgrounds from this perspective before I read this blog. I now want to explore this important aspect of the nature of social experience of caregivers in playgrounds.
Playgrounds through collaborations between community, non-profits and business
Skimming through many news items related to playground equipments (some of which are quite unintelligible) I chanced upon an interesting news item:
“Children in New Brunswick received a brand new playground today thanks to the effort of more than 400 volunteers from ForestersTM, a life insurance provider committed to the well-being of families, Greater Brunswick Charter School and non-profit KaBOOM!. The new playground will serve 4,500 children and their families in the local community for years to come. Planning for the playground began at a Design Day event held in March when local children and community leaders met with organizers from KaBOOM! and Foresters to design their dream playground. The children’s drawings were then used to create the final playground design.” (http://insurance.gnom.es/news/foresters-kaboom-volunteers-encourage-quality-family-time-by-building-new-playground-for-new-brunswick-children)
The playground is seen as a vital community resource and promoted as such by a non-profit who facilitated the convergence of community and business interests to create a playground designed by children. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful example to follow in a place like Khirkee.
Children’s gardens and nature playgrounds within regional parks
Yesterday, a children’s garden and a natural playground opened inside the large Assiniboine regional park in Winnipeg. This 283 acre park is the first regional park in Winnipeg and was created in 1904.
The park website promotes the new children’s facility as:
“Exercise your imagination while you explore the sand and water play area, a sky-high crow’s nest, willow tree tunnels, basket swings, mazes, net bridges, and topiaries. These unique features are inspired by and incorporated into the area’s natural surroundings, which include two acres of trees, gently rolling hills, playful streams, and mountains to climb....In winter, snow and ice will transform the Children’s Garden and Nature Playground into a frosty wonderland with snow forts, toboggan runs, ice sculptures and outdoor fire pits.”
The practice of introducing children’s facilities in the form of gardens and nature themed playgrounds is common in the USA. I have visited two such children’s gardens, both inside existing botanical gardens, one in Atlanta and another in Chapel Hill. This illustration of introducing children’s gardens in regional parks maybe a good example for a city like Delhi, which at 19% green cover has the largest green cover of all large cities in India. Delhi has over 15000 parks and gardens of which about 14000 are maintained by MCD, 1100 by NDMC. DDA has 4 regional parks, 111 district parks and 225 neighborhood parks. 80% of Delhi’s schools have playgrounds. Yet Delhi has hardly any well designed environment for children and definitely no nature-based children’s facilities.
Children’s playground as a protective shield for dictator
The Telegraph reported on May 14, 2011:
"Even for an Arab dictator, it is an unusually cynical variant of the "human shield" gambit. On the roof of his Tripoli command bunker, Colonel Gaddafi has installed a children's fairground. Forty feet away from the crater made on Thursday by a NATO bomb, young boys and girls played happily on a roundabout shaped like a giant tea set."
Using a playground as a protective human shield is perhaps the most evil use of a children’s facility. However around the world open spaces, parks and playgrounds are used regularly as visual shields to cut off unsightly areas such as slums. And most often than not, the slum kids are prevented from playing in these parks especially if the city has invested in landscaping these facilities.
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