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A Brief History of
Adventure Playgrounds
189o—192o
Progressive public health reformers
across North America in the late
19th and early 20th century believed
supervised recreation and sports—
including dance and arts & crafts, in
newly built public playgrounds—would
help address disease, “idleness” and
“delinquency” among inner city children.
The City of Toronto invested $1.4-million
in new playgrounds and schoolyards,
which were equipped with swings,
teeter-totters, monkey bars and baseball
diamonds. Supervised parks programs and
“vacation schools” offered children a daily
destination during summer months and on
weekends for sports, play and socialization.
The Playground
Movement
The idea that public recreation
would shape the country’s future
citizens by promoting health and
citizenship was popularized by
the “Playground Movement.”
Playgrounds were invented as an
alternative to the chaotic streets
and vacant lots where working class
and immigrant children played.
Across Canada, the efforts of organizations
such as the National Council of Women
of Canada, the Toronto Playground
Association, YMCA, Boy Scouts and Girl
Guides brought supervised play and
playgrounds into cities and made the fouracre schoolyard a minimum standard.
Between 1910 and 1914, the City of
Toronto began employing seasonal
supervisors in playgrounds (the city’s
existing wading pool program is
an enduring legacy of this effort).
Meanwhile, Hamilton, Ont.’s “Supie”
(short for “supervisor”) program has
run continuously since 1909, bringing
free outdoor recreational programming
to 87 parks across the city.
Experiments in
Play Provision
The 1960’s and 70’s saw the development
of new ideas about playgrounds
inspired by child psychology and
progressive education. Experimental
playgrounds offered children new spatial
experiences and creative challenges
beyond the teeter-totters and swings
of the Playground Movement.
playgrounds he designed, attracted to the
freedom to do what they wanted and the
indeterminate nature of the materials.
Adventure
playgrounds in
Europe
Sørensen enclosed an area slightly larger
than one acre in size, where children
had access to fragments of wood,
tools, and other discarded materials in
a seemingly risky open-ended space
that was actually under the watchful but
restrained supervision of a playworker.
The adventure playground concept was
first developed during World War Two by
Danish landscape architect Carl Sørensen,
who noticed that kids were more interested
in bombed-out vacant lots than in the
This model—originally branded a “junk
playground”—has since been adopted
throughout the UK, Northern Europe
and Germany, where it thrives today,
“Like education and libraries, municipal parks and recreation is one of the great public goods and a defining characteristic of public opportunity in Canada.”
—Bruce Kidd, Vice President, University of Toronto
A Brief History of
Adventure Playgrounds
offering children a place of their own
to control, where creativity, communitybuilding and nature connection can
flourish in highly urban settings.
Like the “Supie” programs of the
Playground Movement, adventure
playgrounds addressed the needs of urban
and immigrant children (who did not always
have access to the roaming expanses of the
suburbs) by giving them a place to convene.
In contrast to recreational supervisors
with set programs, adventure playground
supervisors, called “playworkers”, allowed
the children to lead their own play.
Adventure
playgrounds in
Canada
Adventure playgrounds were introduced
to Canada in the late 1960s through
progressive educators, social workers
and landscape architects, who felt
children here needed more “wild”
spaces and freedom to explore.
Bathurst Quay
Adventure
Playground
Toronto’s first adventure playground, the
Bathurst Quay Adventure Playground,
was established and operated by a
non-profit called Adventure Education
Concept from 1974 to 1984, when it
eventually succumbed to development
pressure on the waterfront. During
this decade, it served as a regular
destination for thousands of children
from all backgrounds. It drew attention
from National Geographic in August,
1980, as a “model playground.”
The AEC sponsored successful satellite
projects in North York and Kitchener,
Ontario. Unfortunately, the depth of
learning and expertise acquired through a
decade of playwork at this location was lost
as the trend toward programmed activities
for children took hold in the 1980s.
parks with recreation staff. Heightened
safety standards resulted in the destruction
of many older playgrounds and new
equipment was reduced to a standard
kit of platforms, posts, steps and slides—
safe to the point of being uninteresting
to most children over the age of six.
Meanwhile, modern society has seen the
rise of “helicopter parenting,” where children
are kept under tight surveillance at all times.
The technological revolution has put children
in front of screens in school and at home.
198o—2o1o
The 1980s saw greater fiscal conservatism
and privatization, which reduced support
for publicly funded outdoor recreation.
Recreation departments began charging
user fees for programming, which was
often indoors. Municipalities began to
favour standardized playground equipment
that eliminated all but the smallest risk in
order to save on the costs of supplying
“Play is a biological, psychological and social necessity, and is fundamental to the wellbeing of individuals and communities.” —Playwork Principles, Play Wales 2005
A Brief History of
Adventure Playgrounds
Now and the
st
Future: A 21
century Play
Agenda
The crisis of “nature deficit disorder” as
described by Richard Louv has added
another layer of urgency to the calls for
enriched play programming, education
reform, park and playground renewal.
and natural elements — in short, places
where kids can engage with their
environment and their local community.
An outdoor play movement is once again
taking shape at the turn of the 21st century.
Advocates of the new play agenda are
addressing rising obesity rates, inactivity
levels, fear of the outdoors, learning
and behaviour disorders, anxiety and
depression among children and teens.
Like the charities who campaigned for
the establishment of publicly funded
programs at the turn of the 20th century,
play champions today must step up to
meet the same challenge. We aren’t
simply advocating for bringing back the
“junk playgrounds” of post-war Europe;
we want to create spaces where children
can connect to their nature through
play with a myriad of both manmade
The missing
“wild side” of
childhood
Child health advocates agree we need a
balance of structure and freedom in our
childhood in order to thrive in adulthood;
the wild side of youth has been disappearing
steadily, and we must work to bring it
back in order to achieve this equilibrium.
Show your support—
Pledge4PLAY
Earth Day Canada is working to bring
permanent adventure playgrounds to
Canada. If you want to support our efforts
to promote riskier, muddier and more active
outdoor play—and ensure we build adventure
playgrounds that are here to stay—
donate now to our #Pledge4PLAY
campaign at earthday.ca.
“The impulse to play is innate. Through play, children become active agents in their own development.” —Bateson and Martin, 1991