Four entities in the city of Boulder, Colorado worked together to create a nature play area in the schoolyard and to enhance an adjoining park for children's environmental learning. Partners for this project included the city, the school district, a charter elementary school, and a university design program. A joint-use agreement between the school and the city provides neighborhood residents with increased access to the schoolyard. The agreement also allows teachers to bring their classes into the park for lessons during class times. During recess and lunch, however, the students were required to stay in a designated play space beside the school building.
Goals of this project included providing access to an improved playground to the students during school time and to the community outside of school hours. Goals of the project also included giving students the opportunity to participate in all stages of the design and construction process. This case study describes opportunities and constraints identified by the team during successive phases of the project. The account draws on interviews with key facilitators involved with the project, a 90-minute focus group discussion with 10 children participants, and additional visual and written documentation of student and facilitator activities.
The children's involvement with the project included dreaming and imagining with the city's landscape architects about what the playspace could become. While the children realized that not all their ideas could be realized, they valued the chance to be involved with something real. Their teachers, too, valued the participatory process of this project separate from the outcome. Adults involved with the project observed significant development in the children's thinking about play and how what they did could impact the larger social and ecological communities. Listening to the children's ideas helped the architectural team learn about play from a child's perspective. However, by the end of the project, the children's involvement was greatly curtailed. In fact, professionals took over the final plans and construction of the playspace without ongoing communication with the children, facilitators, or the wider community.
Many of the children's ideas were never implemented; yet, even two years after the project, some of the children recalled their participation in the design process as an enriching experience. Some of the children were disappointed that some of their favorite playspaces were eliminated during the renovation process. This concern might have been avoided if the facilitators had asked the children to document what they valued in their previous play area and would like to see reproduced in the new play area. Other disappointments might have been avoided or diminished if students had been told in advance that their vision for the playspace would unfold in stages. Many of the children expressed frustration that what they saw after their summer break was just “a skeleton version of what was visible in the master plan.”
The way this project unfolded indicates that sustained community involvement with active children participation in playspace design can be challenging. Attention to the opportunities and constraints identified in this case study may be helpful in achieving the desired outcomes of both the process and product.
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