Adventure playgrounds emerged in the mid-twentieth century in Copenhagen. Post WWII, a number of architects and landscape designers noticed that children preferred playing in vacant lots and rubble sites rather than formally constructed playgrounds. This led to the creation of the first ‘skrammellegepladser’, or junkyard playgrounds. British landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood introduced the practice to the UK in the 1950s (Norman, 2003). The concept has since expanded internationally. The adult supervision and facilitation of these spaces formalised into the profession ‘playwork’, a distinct approach to working with young people that foregrounds their right to self-directed, free play (Walton, 2023).
A core part of the provision of free play within the adventure playground is an adoption of a positive approach to risk (Kilvington & Wood, 2017). It is an approach at odds with many prevailing attitudes beyond the adventure playground fences, where risk-averse attitudes to children’s play dominate (Gill, 2007). Within adventure playgrounds, playworkers create conditions that allow for ‘risky play’, viewing it as both a life-affirming activity, an individually negotiated capacity, and a vital part of young people’s agency and connection within the world (Wilson, 2009).
The attitude towards risk is perhaps best encapsulated in Lady Allen of Hurtwood’s oft-cited quote: Better a broken bone than a broken spirit.
These playgrounds feature materials perceived elsewhere as ‘junk’: tyres, broken toys, rope, crates, battered sports equipment. When assembled, these become what Simon Nicholson termed ‘loose parts’ – materials multiplying creative possibilities (Nicholson, 1971). Many playgrounds allow children to build structures using tools like saws, nails and hammers (Schiffman, 2019). The first time an uninitiated adult sees an adventure playground, the sight may cause shock: young people wandering around with hammers amongst rickety-looking structures populated by dirty broken objects? Isn’t this a little too risky? My first encounter – a chance visit to The Yard on Governors Island in New York – sparked deep curiosity.
What were the conditions allowing this sort of chaos, freedom and risk-taking to emerge? How might the energy of what I could see occurring within the fence trickle out into the world beyond?
These questions led me to a one-month period of field research at The Yard, engaging in playwork training and observational research. One particular experience, and a resulting artwork, provides a useful metaphor for considering how the approach to risk in adventure playgrounds might apply in other settings, such as creative arts research in a university.
Each morning, before The Yard opens to children, playworkers conduct a thorough site check to identify potential hazards, which are distinct from ‘risks’ as something that may not be readily perceived by children but may cause injury (Play Wales, 2021, p. 30). Tasks include checking structure stability, clearing loose parts off paths, and looking for nails sticking out of wood. This latter one is caused by many excited children who, inexperienced with hammers, half-whack the nails into the wood before moving on. Playworkers dutifully pry these loose.
These nails are taken to a central workbench (the nail counter). A regular task for an otherwise idle playworker is to hammer bent nails back into shape. As a non-profit, this recycling has a functional, economic purpose. However, it also provides busy-work that puts the playworker visibly at service of the young people and their risky play. From this central vantage point, playworkers can observe most areas of The Yard, allowing them to identify moments they may need to intervene when play strays into the realm of ‘too risky’.
This spatial arrangement creates both the ‘physical’ and ‘psychical’ conditions that enable risky play (Norman, 2003, p.18). Physically, the nail counter provides strategic oversight while keeping playworkers engaged in supportive labour. Psychically, by being visibly occupied in a task that enables risk to continue (straightening the nails), they adopt a supplicant position that fosters autonomy for young people. Playworkers are trained in dynamic risk assessment and engage in reflective practice to avoid projecting their own fears into the play situation, seeking to redirect rather than halt play (Wilson, 2009).
During my research, I became interested in this continual cycling of materials through playworker and child hands.
At times, The Yard is so crowded that as fast as playworkers straighten nails, children take them again and chaotically hammer them around the site. This material flow encapsulates the principles toward positive, affirming risk management underpinning the site.
As a creative response, I spent time with two playworkers straightening nails. When they chose a bent nail, I traced it on an index card, then traced it again after they had straightened it. Through this, I developed a record of this material processing. In a later printmaking residency, I created screen prints showing these bent and straightened nails, registering them in bright primary and tertiary colours – an oblique reference to Friedrich Froebel’s pedagogical objects that underpin early childhood education, forming a humorous nod to these unconventional objects of play.
In today’s academy, where risk often becomes something managed rather than embraced, the Adventure Playground model suggests an alternative. The playwork approach to risk, as something to be dynamically assessed rather than eliminated, demonstrates a continual balancing of care, reflection, and responsibility. The bent nails are a material trace of the way risk creates space for transformative creativity.
References
Gill, T. (2007). No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=oRauAAAACAAJ
Kilvington, J., & Wood, A. (2017). Reflective Playwork: For All Who Work with Children (Second edition. ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474254090
Nicholson, S. (1971). How not to cheat children: the theory of loose parts. Landscape Architecture, 62(1), 30 – 34.
Norman, N. (2003). An architecture of play: a survey of London’s adventure playgrounds. Four Corners Books.
Schiffman, R. (2019). Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous. The New York Times. Retrieved 7 April from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/well/family/adventure-playgrounds-junk-playgrounds.html
Walton, C. (2023). Risking It: Transformational Art Practice in Primary Education University of Melbourne].
Wilson, P. (2009). Playwork Primer. Alliance for Childhood.
Nadia Odlum is a Sydney-based artist whose practice explores the material language and lived experience of urban space. Their abstract works transform everyday city elements to investigate how bodies and environments interact, focusing on both individual and collective responses to space. Nadia Odlum is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. Their research focuses on intersections of contemporary art and play, and the potential for public art to create opportunities for intergenerational play in urban space.
Main image: Tracing nails at The Yard, Governors Island, New York