The Field

Educational presentations at the Children’s Outdoor Environments PPN meeting.
image: Chad Kennedy

If you missed the Children’s Outdoor Environments PPN meeting at the ASLA Annual Meeting in Chicago, you missed a fantastic meeting that rivaled many of the education sessions in value and content. As has been the trend in recent years, meeting attendance exceeded that of past years and presentations have never been better. This year’s meeting began with a surprise mini-birthday celebration for Nilda Cosco, PhD, Affiliate ASLA. She and Robin Moore, Hon. ASLA, were kind enough to make the trip to join us over her birthday weekend, so we took that opportunity to show our appreciation by singing happy birthday and presenting her with a cupcake and birthday crown.

Short Presentations: 

After this brief introduction, the meeting began with presentations by four fantastic speakers on a variety of children’s open space topics ranging from public engagement of youth, to research projects, and even to controversial topics like risk in the play environment. Below is a list of the speakers and the specific topics each of them addressed. The presentations used by each of the speakers can be found on our PPN Resources page for those interested in learning more about what was shared.

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Haverford Bright Futures School in Philadelphia
image: Community Design Collaborative

The Community Design Collaborative and the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children (DVAEYC) have chosen three real-life public sites in Philadelphia—a library, recreation center, and school—for their Play Space Design Competition. They’re challenging you to transform them into play spaces that will support healthy childhoods, strong communities, and family friendly cities.

The Collaborative and DVAEYC are seeking innovative ideas from interdisciplinary team of designers, educators, and more. Sign up now! The deadline to register is November 30. To register, you just need to pick your site and identify at least one licensed professional on your team. The design competition ends with a public event in Philadelphia in March 2016 with juried awards and cash prizes ($10,000 to three teams!).

The design competition is part of Infill Philadelphia: Play Space, a partnership of the Collaborative and the DVAEYC with support from the William Penn Foundation. It’s a design initiative to explore the unexpected ways that innovative play space helps both children and communities grow. Together, we can design a more playful Philadelphia!

Competition details and registration information can be found at cdesignc.org/playspace/competition.

Alexa Bosse, Associate ASLA, is a Program Associate at the Community Design Collaborative and presented at the Children’s Outdoor Environments PPN Meeting at the 2015 ASLA Annual Meeting in Chicago. The Community Design Collaborative provides pro bono design services to nonprofit organizations in greater Philadelphia, creates engaging volunteer opportunities for design professionals, and raises awareness about the importance of design in revitalizing communities.

image: Andrea Weber

Nature play has been in the news a lot in the past few years, but what does it really mean and how can you successfully introduce it into a public park setting if it is new to your organization?

Just about every type of media, from popular to professional, has covered nature play in the last few years. The benefits of nature play are well researched and the field is still growing. Those of us working on promoting nature play can thank Richard Louv and his brilliant marketing of the concept of “Nature Deficit Disorder” which, if you have read his best-selling book (Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder), you will know is a made up term cleverly designed to get the attention of the public and of professionals, about how little time our children spend in nature and what developmental costs that is having on them. It worked.

So if we know that nature play is good, and we also know that children’s exposure to nature is plummeting, how do we get kids outside, exploring nature? How does a public park agency start opening up to and implementing new ideas on play areas to support this need? The following is a case study on a project which opened in 2012 in Minneapolis, the first project built by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (Park Board) to re-shape the typical play area to integrate more nature play and how it has re-shaped play area design moving forward.

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ASLA 2009 Professional General Design Honor Award. Water Play. Within an interior circulation of play circuits, Teardrop Park creates the conditions for children’s play that feels far removed from traffic and ordinary street life. Children are able to turn the water on and off.
image: Elizabeth Felicella

Children’s Outdoor Environments Professional Practice Network (PPN) Meeting
Sunday, November 8, 9:15 – 10:45 AM in PPN Room 3 on the EXPO floor

Join us for our annual PPN meeting during the ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO in Chicago, which will provide learning opportunities with short, lively, and inspiring presentations by speakers from throughout the country who are passionate about play environments. A keynote presentation will be given by Robin Moore, Hon. ASLA, from The Natural Learning Initiative. Topics and presenters for our PPN Meeting include:

Where Design Comes into Play: Designing Innovative Play Spaces
Alexa Bosse, Associate ASLA, Program Associate of Community Design Collaborative

Building Mounds. Building Play Diversity.
David Watts, ASLA, Associate Professor of Department of Landscape Architecture at California Polytechnic State University

Risky Play Elements in Play Design
Shannon Mikus, Associate ASLA, Family-scape Designer with Master of Landscape Architecture 2014

Engaging Youth in Creative Place Making
Ilisa Goldman, ASLA, Principal of Rooted In Place Landscape Architecture and Consulting

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gARTen Hilltop, 2014
image: Alex Calegari

San Diego Children and Nature Schoolyard Habitat Workshops

There are many facets to the Children and Nature Movement, from natural playgrounds to family nature clubs, each having the goal of connecting children to the natural world. As many landscape architects have recognized, design is a key component to bringing nature into the everyday lives of children. What better place to do this than in the place our children spend most of their waking hours…the schoolyard!

Since its inception in 2009, San Diego Children and Nature (SDCaN) has offered professional learning opportunities to teachers, parents, administrators, and designers on the why’s and how-to’s for integrating nature into schoolyards. Thanks to a grant from San Diego Gas & Electric (SDGE), SDCaN, San Diego Master Gardeners, and Rooted In Place Landscape Architecture and Consulting partnered to host four training workshops in 2015 on Creating Schoolyard Habitats for Play and Learning. The 100+ attendees learned how to design and utilize schoolyard wildlife habitats.

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Exploration in nature encourages socialization, creativity, and inquisition.
image: Amy Wagenfeld

Play

Play is a primary occupation of childhood and an important contributor to healthy development. The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights acknowledges play as being the right of every child. [1] The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children play or exercise outside for 30-60 minutes a day. [2] Despite this recommendation, a study of nearly 9,000 preschool children found that almost half of them don’t go outside even once per day. [3]

Outdoor play encourages physical movement and social and emotional interactions. It fosters thinking and creativity. The quality of outdoor play activities depend upon children being able to experience and to be in an environment that is safe, inclusive, engaging, fun, spontaneous, and arouses curiosity and creativity. When children play outside they can learn to enjoy their own company, take turns and listen to the perspective of others, create and follow and break rules, understand the consequences of their actions, take risks, learn, role play, challenge themselves, problem solve, move, and have fun. Arguably, what happens in outdoor play and exploration is equally as important as classroom learning. To deprive any child of opportunities to be outside and in nature is simply wrong.

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The Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden at the Dallas Arboretum
image: Lisa Horne

We are looking forward to the ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO in Chicago this November. Join us for a high energy PPN meeting to spark creativity and create new connections! We are honored to have Robin Moore, Honorary ASLA, and Nilda Cosco, PhD, Affiliate ASLA, as our meeting keynotes.

Our presentations last year were a hit with record meeting attendance. We are continuing the dialogue of new ideas with another round of presentations, and we invite you to take part. Participants can look at broad issues like universal design, safety, emerging health issues for children, etc. or focus on a specific project. A presentation can be about process, innovations, trends—whatever you want to share.

Interested in presenting? Submit a title, short summary paragraph, and brief outline for your slides (one to two words per slide) to Lisa Horne at lhorne