Sustainability of playgrounds
Playing for Keeps is an interdisciplinary project supported by Western University’s pilot program Thinking Globally, Acting Locally. The project investigates sustainability potential of outdoor play spaces. While much has been written (primarily from developmental perspective) about the vital role play and playgrounds play in children’s lives, little has been said about playgrounds’ broader effects for sustainability.
The project asks:
What are we sustaining on playgrounds? Is what we have worth sustaining? How might we rework sustainability by wrestling it away from the capitalist mainstream? How might we consider sustainability in interdisciplinary ways? Furthermore, while the word “interdisciplinary” promises a generative outcome, we hope to pay attention to the tensions and labours that come when different disciplines bring their ideas to the shared space, wondering: How might thinking with/in a particular space (this playground, at this time, with these inhabitants) make us see sustainability differently? And, what does sustainability look (feel /taste/ practice) like to you in your life?
Playing for Keeps brings together undergraduate and graduate students, academics, environmental professionals, artists, and early childhood educators working with our community partner, London Bridge Childcare Services, a network of 15 Early Childhood Learning Centres and after-school programs based in London, Ontario. Together, more than 40 co-researchers engaged in “intensives” – field sessions held in the centres and on playgrounds – to consider how might playgrounds contribute to well-being of people and more-than-humans, function as sustainable, resilient, and inclusive environments, and contribute to local-level climate solutions? Through the intensives, the four multidisciplinary teams collaborated in generating an array of ideas (scientific, pedagogical and artistic) about sustainability potential of everyday outdoor places and our relationship with them. During these interventions, the project teams considered how playgrounds can function not only as spaces for young children’s play and learning, but also as vital sites of animal and plant habitat, placemaking for local communities, and connection points to pedagogical conversations around climate change, environment, and relationships with place.
The resulting Catalogue, which brings together individual and group contributions offered by co-researchers, attests to the richness and complexity of the way sustainability is understood by different persons, in different disciplines, and across different places.
visit the catalogue
The Catalogue will also be printed as a hard copy and will ‘live’ in early learning classrooms of London Bridge as an ongoing testament to the difficult and vibrant work of taking up environmental precarity and place relationships within a project of education.
This project has been supported by Western University’s pilot program Thinking Globally, Acting Locally
