Knowledge Live brings world playground news to my screen

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 Foresters^TM, 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.

Week 1: Parks and Open Spaces

We have found, much to our surprise, a number of parks and open spaces within the tight built fabric of Khirkee village. There’s Nandan Park which is close to the pink temple on the main spine of the village leading to Malviya Nagar. MCD has only recently reclaimed this park for public use from the custody of some of the original settling families who virtually used this park as their private space. There’s the long and narrow Prithviraj Chauhan Park and a smaller rectangular park across from it on the southern side. There are two other parks abutting the Khirkee DDA flats to the north side of Prithviraj Chauhan Park. Each of these spaces has their own politics and dynamics as well as strong environmental and perceptual cues for children.

Prithviraj Chauhan Park: layout and observed uses and behaviors

On our many trips to Prithviraj Chauhan Park, I noticed different age groups, boys and girls, mothers, other adults using the place at the same time. This park is clearly demarcated in three zones that to my mind serve as multiple activity nodes for different user groups.

Zone 1 comprises a dusty barren space with a few trees in the periphery. A street-facing temple carves out some space from the north east corner of this zone which at its eastern narrow end is about 25 meters wide. The first zone is where the older boys play cricket and football, with occasional cycling activities by younger children.

Zone 2 comprises a well-kept middle area with a grass lawn, a dry fenced off fountain lined with tiles. Trees and flowering bushes and hedges make this one of the prettiest places inside the village. At its widest Zone 2 is about 40 meters wide. The middle zone is the zone for women, girls of all ages and sizes and younger boys. Children engage in a variety of games under the watchful eyes of mothers, aunts, neighbours and other adults.

The space in between the first and second zones serves as a waiting area with several benches facing zone 1. This is also the space where people enter the park and has the option of going left to zone 1 or right to zone 2. Women, younger children and elderly were seen using the benches when we visited. One time we saw adolescent girls playing badminton in this linear space. There are several markers that help to define these zones: a massive tree with a raised fenced off base housing a sacred space holds eastern end of zone 1 before the transition zone, the entry into zone 2 from the transition zone are further articulated through framing the entries into the two walkways along the long sides of the park by trees and hedges.

Zone 3 is separated from zone 2 by a hedge, a walkway that merges with the dirt of this zone though walkers still complete their rounds ignoring the lack of the physical walkway. Even though a row of houses squeeze down this end of the park, the houses are separated by a pedestrian street from the park’s boundary wall. A raised cemented portion in front of the pump house has a bench where assorted people including men and adolescents boys hang out. Sometimes we saw smaller girls playing in this cemented area. Khoj once did a toy-making workshop here where children baked clay toys. Next to this cemented area is a unkempt overgrown patch where we saw older boys playing cricket.

DDA Parks

The park across from the popular Prithviraj Chauhan Park on the north is a L-shaped dusty ground which was used by two groups of boys for sports on both days we visited. The park had not been marked on the Khirkee map drawn up by DDA and posted on major intersections inside the village. The rectangular dusty ground in front of the DDA buildings (which also hasn’t been marked on the map) was another interesting space to observe. The groups of children playing here were very different from the ones in the grassy park. The entrance of the park seems to be under construction and was piled high with logs, sand and gravel. About two-thirds of the park was used by older adolescent boys. The other part was used by a group of children mainly from the Panchsheel Vihar area behind the DDA flats. Most of them lived in the rag pickers’ colony. Some of them had attended KHOJ workshops earlier and were keen that we do a theatre or dance workshop with them. In one corner of the park under a tree, we saw that they (girls) had made an ingenious temporary see-saw by balancing two logs of wood (from the pile of construction material) on the back edge of a movable bench placed between two trees. It was quite a sight to see 4-5 children enjoying themselves with this simple yet creative invention.

The park where no children played

There is a smaller rectangular park across the road on the south from Prithviraj Chauhan Park. This park is cosily tucked in from the road and surrounded by residential buildings that overlook it. There is only a narrow pedestrian street between the park and the buildings. This park has two entrances: one from the middle of the inner long side near the buildings and another from an outer corner facing the main street. Both entrances appeared as if they were made as an afterthought by breaking the thick masonry wall. The boundary wall is quite high, about four and a half feet and on top that there is an additional iron grille about one and a half feet tall. Inside were two large trees located in the two halves of the rectangle. In addition there were another 9 trees of different kinds along the southern and western and to some extent the north western edge. The western quadrant of the park has a grass lawn with four benches around it. The eastern quadrant is a dirt top with a heap of mulch, leaves and debris at the foot of the majestic tree that shades this zone. We never saw any children playing here. And I wonder why. This little park, cosily nested within the residential fabric of the neighborhood, to my mind presents an opportunity to meet neighbors, friends, while younger children played in the lawn. For girls also this space physically affords a protected yet central space for hanging outdoors with friends and playing without fear of a cricket ball hitting them or boys shooing them away. We want to probe this to find out why this little park lies unused while all the other parks around it bustle with people and activities.

Week 1: Exploring the Khirkee Masjid

The research team which included myself, Padma and sometimes Yukti visited Khirkee several times during the first week. These visits were always in the evening to coincide with the evening playtimes of children in the area.

On our first day we went for a walk through the village with Andy from KHOJ, who gave a running commentary about past projects, the local politics, the issues and the general dynamics of this village and even pointed out the various hot spots of play and initiated conversations with children some of whom had participated in various workshops and other activities organized by Khoj over the years. This was a very interesting and immensely helpful introduction to this complex urban space that will be our focus for the next two months.

Khirkee Mosque/Qila

We first headed to the Khirkee Mosque which is a “protected” monument. We walked through lanes so narrow that it felt as if we were encroaching onto a corridor space within people’s homes. The Khirkee Mosque suddenly appeared right in front of us, larger than life. It turned out to be WAY larger and more majestic than we first time visitors had expected it to be. Since I had checked out Khirkee on Google Earth before coming, I knew that the mosque was indeed very close to the Press Enclave Road. There was however no way of knowing as one sped past Khirkee on so many occasions that such a grand structure lay hidden inside this village with its closely packed houses.

Several arched latticed windows in stone adorn the walls of the mosque and give it the name “Khirkee Masjid” (literally meaning mosque with windows). The Archaeological Survey of India is supposedly responsible for the maintenance of the mosque. ASI has created a no-build zone around the mosque which surrounds it like a moat and elbows out the surrounding houses from encroaching into this zone of history.

The Mosque and the moat surrounding it, we observed, was an important playground for many young boys who had devised a number of interesting games one could play with just a bat and a bottle! Playing was serious business for these children and we observed them for a while engrossed in their rules and fights and team making process. The roof of the mosque had numerous domes and was a fascinating area, regularly visited by the children who knew every nook and cranny of it.

The children we met during the entire walk all seemed very eager to talk and play and were curious about who we are and why we are here. We also observed shadowy figures of adolescent boys and young men smoking and hanging out in the far end of the arched corridors of the mosque.

The children of Khirkee claim the mosque as their “qila” or fort. When you have a readymade structure where very few adults venture into, with ample loose parts and mystery, claiming territory through play is easy especially for boys. No girls were visible in the qila on our first walk.

Some of the girls we chatted up in the large park in the village told us that they were not allowed to go to the mosque by their parents. They even offered eerie details about how a boy once died while playing there.

Play@Khirkee seeks to explore the patterns and affordances of play for children and young people in Khirkee village located in south Delhi. Play comes naturally to children. However adults often think of play as unwanted behavior. Play and the many different interactions with everyday places allow children to make sense of the world in their own terms.

Ordinarily children can and do provide for their own play. However in the context of a mega city such as Delhi this right is not so obviously exercised by children anymore. Parental licenses for playing outdoors are hard to come based on fears of traffic and stranger danger. Children still manage to negotiate licenses against all odds as one young Muslim girl in Nizamuddin Basti once told me, “I like playing too much!”

Khirkee represents a unique urban location being on the margins of shiny new mega malls and corporate hospitals. These developments have enhanced the real estate potential of Khirkee and its extensions even though Khirkee continues to survive on informal systems.

What do the children of Khirkee play? When do they play? Where do they play? How do they play? What are some of the constraints to playing outdoors for boys and girls? How do children negotiate with parents, other adults and different interest groups that simultaneously lay claim over urban space to play outdoors? Growing up in the shadows of globalized real estate of the Saket Malls, do children still engage in traditional games? How do they use the affordances of the physical environment of Khirkee and its surroundings through play? Do children have access to internet and computer games in this community? How do adults perceive children and children’s play in this community? What are the intergenerational opportunities for play and recreation in this community? These are some of the questions among others that this ethnographic field study will seek to answer.