By the end of the nineteenth century, children were beginning to acquire places of their own within the city. Playgrounds were among them, providing an alternative to streets increasingly considered dangerous for play. But they soon became something more complex: carefully bounded spaces where freedom was promised but only granted on adult terms. Across a century of design experiments—from picturesque parks to radical landscapes—a question persists: can a space protect children without prescribing how they should play? This essay traces how landscape thinking has offered alternatives to the standardized playground, and what that history reveals about childhood, public space, and design.

The playground developed in close relation to the rise of public parks in the industrial cities of nineteenth-century Europe and North America. These parks were celebrated as the “lungs” of the metropolis, as they offered relief from crowded streets and polluted urban districts, and brought nature into a designed setting. Paths directed movement, planting defined spaces, and activities were assigned particular places. The park regulated behavior and the limits of acceptable leisure as much as it offered nature.

Initially, access to this new urban nature was largely reserved for children from affluent families, who encountered it through lawns, paths, and designated areas. In Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten, literally a “children's garden,” children were understood, like plants, to need the right conditions in which to grow. They were also expected to work in the garden, tending the same plants and plots that formed part of their own education. Thus, the garden[1] promised growth, which was understood to depend on carefully defined boundaries and on the children’s disciplined labor to maintain them.

By the late nineteenth century, the playground began to separate itself from the park and emerge as a distinct urban type. In the United States, the first initiatives that helped establish this model came from a group of women philanthropists, who promoted a sand garden for working-class children in Boston’s North End in 1885, offering them an alternative to playing in the increasingly dangerous streets. Sand was an unusually simple provision. It had no fixed use and could be worked over again each day. Similar projects soon spread to settlement houses and immigrant neighborhoods across the industrial Northeast and Midwest.

This apparently modest shift had major consequences. The playground identified children as a distinct group of urban users and assigned them a territory of their own. It also defined the street as somewhere they should not be. The historical timing matters. As the first playgrounds appeared, elevators, streetcars, and mass communication were reorganizing metropolitan life, with automobiles later accelerating this transformation. Streets became devoted to circulation, commerce, and production. Children’s spontaneous occupation of them now appeared inefficient, unsafe, and morally suspect. Play was pulled away from the city’s productive machinery and placed inside a bounded alternative. The playground was thus born as both refuge and instrument: a protected garden and a civic enclosure. This spatial separation opened new possibilities for organizing childhood—but also new forms of control.

Protection and Control

Modern childhood itself was constructed through separation. As children came to be regarded as fundamentally different from adults—more vulnerable, impressionable, and in need of formation—the city was divided accordingly. Adult public life and children’s play were assigned different places, schedules, and expectations.

Playgrounds offered genuine benefits: safety from traffic, disease, violence, and exploitation. Although access was unevenly distributed by class and geography, supervised outdoor recreation could be a significant social gain for working-class and immigrant families where it existed. This protection, however, also served political ends. Reformers expected playgrounds to shape children's conduct, and controlled play became part of their education in hygiene, physical exercise, social roles, and civic behavior.

The spatial design of early playgrounds made this ambition visible: fences established a perimeter; equipment prescribed movements; supervisors regulated conduct; and separate areas divided boys from girls or younger children from older ones. The playground transformed play from an unpredictable occupation of the city into an activity with a designated location and an approved form.

This logic reached an extraordinary scale in New York under Robert Moses, Parks Commissioner from 1934 to 1960, who oversaw the construction of hundreds of playgrounds through a vast public works program launched during the New Deal and continued throughout his tenure. They provided much-needed recreation and became popular neighborhood amenities. Yet they also reproduced a model centered on efficiency, athletics, surveillance, and civic order. High fences, organized sports, military symbolism, and tightly managed behavior often left little room for invention. The playground operated less as an open landscape than as a machine for producing healthy and orderly citizens.

This was the central paradox of modern discourse on play: spaces intended for children’s freedom were designed according to adult political objectives. The safer and more specialized they became, the more clearly they separated childhood from the rest of urban life. The playground can be understood as a small territory of exception: part of the city but held apart from it; public yet reserved for a limited category of users; playful yet surrounded by rules.

This pattern persists today. Children move through a series of specialized places—home, school, organized activities, sports facilities, playgrounds—often transported between them along routes planned by adults. The contemporary playground remains one island in that larger geography of childhood. The fence may protect children from immediate danger, but it can also contribute to their disappearance from shared civic space.

Landscape Against the Apparatus

Since the early twentieth century, landscape design has offered ways to loosen this enclosure. Unlike fixed play equipment, landscape remains open to interpretation. A slope does not prescribe a single movement. Sand offers a surface that children can continually alter. Water changes course. Vegetation conceals and reveals. Earth and mud can be moved and transformed through play. Such elements invite action without determining it, and offer greater scope for children’s invention. For this reason, playgrounds were long understood less as a problem of architecture than as a form of gardening.

Carl Theodor Sørensen developed this idea from his observations of children at play, particularly the freedom he associated with play in the countryside. At Emdrup, outside Copenhagen, his 1943 junk playground offered earth, timber, tools, and discarded materials rather than finished equipment. Children worked with these materials, altering the playground as they played. Lady Allen of Hurtwood carried the idea into postwar Britain, where bomb sites and leftover land provided the setting for adventure playgrounds. These playgrounds, too, were never entirely finished.

Later designers took the principle in different directions. Alison and Peter Smithson transformed excavated earth at Robin Hood Gardens in London into a central grassy mound, which served both as a shared landscape for children's play and as an aesthetic experience for residents looking onto it. Aldo van Eyck, working in Amsterdam, similarly understood topography as more than a substitute for a fence. A change of level could alter how the city was seen and felt. His playgrounds combined spatial cues with sandpits and abstract elements distributed through streets and leftover sites, making the boundary between playground and city less absolute. Isamu Noguchi had already explored the topographic approach furthest in his unrealized playscapes for New York, from Play Mountain (1933) to the proposal for Riverside Park developed with Louis Kahn (1961–1966). Excavation and sculpted ground replaced equipment with continuous landscapes open to bodily interpretation. M. Paul Friedberg later brought comparable ideas into dense urban neighborhoods, using walls, platforms, tunnels, and level changes to make the ground itself playable.

As postwar utopian visions receded, material itself became a political tool for opposing standardization. In 1970, shortly before the demolition of the historic Baltard pavilions, Group Ludic covered the floor of Pavilion 8 at Les Halles with sand collected through a public appeal. Play structures and found materials were scattered across it, temporarily turning the floor of the pavilion into a terrain for play. Like Van Eyck’s image of snow temporarily erasing the rules of Amsterdam, the sand transformed an ordered urban surface into a field of possibility. None of these experiments returned children to untouched nature. Earth, sand, waste, slopes, and plants were deliberately arranged. Their power lay in resisting predetermined use, and landscape became a way to design for uncertainty.

Yet uncertainty did not dissolve the playground’s enclosure. Landscape could not only make its boundaries less visible, soften their effects, and expand what happened within them, but it could also turn separation into a carefully designed habitat. The Canadian landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander gave this ambivalence built form in her playground for the Children’s Creative Centre at Expo 67 in Montreal. Here, landscape became the apparatus itself.

Oberlander’s method was distinctive. She started from observation rather than from equipment or preconceived ideas about play. Photographs, notes, sketches, plans, and sections recorded what children did. She then translated these observations into a landscape strategy in which sand, water, topography, and vegetation were arranged to open space for children’s agency while simultaneously regulating it. The Children’s Creative Centre was deliberately set below the surrounding circulation routes. Adults could watch from elevated paths or through reflective glass without interrupting play. Children inhabited a world of their own: visible, bounded, fully constructed by adults, yet genuinely open to their invention.

In Montreal, the landscape enclosure became a sophisticated device in which the garden and the cage were indistinguishable. Its limits were topographic and visual rather than defined by fences. The sunken ground both protected and contained, the reflective glass made adult supervision almost invisible, and the loose materials invited action within a clearly defined territory. Where other landscape architects had resisted the standardized playground through an opening to landscape, Oberlander designed freedom and enclosure as a single spatial system. Although the playground was organized and supervised, the freedom children found there was not illusory; it was real, and it was produced through carefully crafted spatial separation. Children remained surrounded by architecture, yet experienced it as a multisensory landscape offering multiple possibilities for play.

By materializing the garden-and-cage paradox, Expo 67 thus brings into focus a tension running through the history of the modern playground. Oberlander’s design offered a spatial negotiation where freedom was genuine but designed, expansive but territorially controlled. The garden loosened the cage without removing it, and the cage persisted in the topography, the sightlines, and the material edges.

Taken together, all these landscape experiments did not resolve the conflict between freedom and enclosure. Instead, they made it a permanent subject of spatial design.

Beyond Exception: Reclaiming the City for Childhood

Since gardens also organize behavior and cages can protect, the history of the modern playground cannot be read simply as an opposition between liberating gardens and oppressive cages. The more difficult questions are how boundaries are designed, what kinds of freedom they permit, and whether they reconnect children to public life or remove them from it.

Today, playgrounds in different cities often look remarkably alike. Much of their design is now shaped by safety requirements, maintenance, procurement, and the availability of catalog-based equipment. Their surfaces are colorful and their equipment recognizable, but their uses are frequently narrow.

The legacy of twentieth-century play landscapes suggests another path. It implies that a playground can protect without prescribing every action or becoming an isolated island. It can include risk without becoming reckless. It can accommodate different bodies, ages, abilities, and cultural forms of play while remaining connected to the city around it.

These experimental landscapes did not remove the separation between children and the adult city. Even the most open among them remained places set aside for play, with boundaries established by adults. What changed was what could happen inside those boundaries. Sand could be moved, ground reshaped, routes invented, and materials used in ways their designers could not entirely anticipate. Landscape made the playground less prescriptive without making it any less designed.

Read together, these projects allow us to move beyond understanding the playground simply as a heterotopia, a territory of exception separated from the adult world. They expose the spatial mechanisms through which that separation is continually produced, negotiated, and occasionally unsettled. Most importantly, they open possibilities for children to act not as passive recipients of adult care but as participants in the production of urban life.

Perhaps the most enduring lesson of these landscapes lies not in the forms they produced, but in the city they invite us to imagine. A city in which childhood is not confined to specialized enclaves—now increasingly private and commercialized—carefully protected yet spatially segregated from everyday public life. A city in which children are not merely accommodated but recognized as legitimate urban subjects, capable of occupying, transforming, and giving meaning to shared space. Yet this leaves a problem that the playground cannot resolve on its own.

From this perspective, the challenge is not to approach the playground as an exceptional environment, but to rethink the urban conditions that make such exceptions necessary in the first place. The question is not simply how to design better places for play, but how to build cities capable of embracing the presence, autonomy, and unpredictability of childhood as a constitutive dimension of public life. The most radical promise of the playground may therefore lie beyond its boundaries: in imagining an urban future where childhood no longer needs territories of exception to inhabit the city more freely.

Notes

1. Tellingly, the etymology of the word “garden” points to the very essence of the playground as a bounded domain. The German Garten, the English garden, the French jardin, and the Spanish jardín all ultimately derive from the Indo-European root gher-, meaning “to enclose” or “to fence in.” From its very origin, therefore, the idea of the garden is inseparable from that of enclosure and boundary.

Author Note

This essay grows out of Nicolás Stutzin Donoso’s doctoral research on playground politics and the role of design, representation, and landscape in constructing childhood in the modern city, as well as the three authors’ broader collaborative work on the subject. It also draws on previously published research in various international journals and contributes to the Spanish research project Children’s Playgrounds as an Urban (Eco)system (PID2024-157037OB-I00), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the State Research Agency and co-funded by the European Union (2025–2028). Together, this work treats modern recreation not as a closed historiographical field, but as a way of reading contemporary debates on standardized play, public-space regulation, environmental care, and children’s agency.

The authors have employed the use of AI to assist with translation from Spanish.

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Authors

Nicolás Stutzin Donoso is an architect, Associate Professor, and Director of the School of Architecture at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. He holds an MS in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University and is a PhD candidate in Architecture at the University of Alicante. His doctoral research examines the politics of playgrounds and the role of design, representation, and landscape in the construction of childhood in the modern and contemporary city.

José Parra-Martínez is an architect and Associate Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Alicante. His research addresses modern architecture, historiography, gender studies, landscape, and public space. He is Principal Investigator of the Spanish national research project Children’s Playgrounds as an Urban (Eco)system (2025–2028) and was a member of the Iberian DOCOMOMO Register Committee (2007–2011).

María-Elia Gutiérrez-Mozo is an architect and Full Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Alicante. Her research connects architectural history, gender perspectives in architecture, participation, sustainability, and social space. She has led and participated in several funded research projects on women in architecture and situated histories of modern design, including the Lilly Reich Research Grant awarded by the Mies van der Rohe Foundation (2022) for the project Anna Bofill Levi: Architecture as Counterpoint.