Gardens of Exception. Landscapes of Play and the Construction of Childhood as a Heterotopia

Abstract

The origin of children’s playgrounds coincides with the evolution of the picturesque movement towards the operational imaginaries of mid-19th-century metropolitan culture and its unprecedented creation of public parks in major European and North American cities. Moreover, it is inseparable from a complete reformulation of the very notion of childhood. Soon after the early inclusion of attractions for children in such exclusive urban gardens, playgrounds inherited the playful impulse of the ludic elements installed in green areas yet served more specific uses and political visions, which contributed to definitively articulating the spatial control of a different form of sociability—‘minor’ and subsidiary to adulthood. The first outdoor spaces specifically designed to contain children’s play outside of a park appeared between 1880 and 1890, almost coinciding with the invention of the automobile and the emergence of new information and communication technologies, such as cinema and radio. In other words, the relationship between childhood and the city as we understand it today, mediated by its play landscapes, is essentially modern. Conceived by adults, these spaces have produced territories of exception, heterotopias whose deterministic configuration has separated them from other environments. A few social reformers and landscape designers, their accidental creators, aimed to rethink these isolated spaces and hand them over to children’s exploration under their own rules. This paper addresses how, after the invention of playgrounds, through different assumptions and ideologies, as well as material paradigms, landscape design, and its conceptual and methodological tools have provided architecture with the most successful attempts to negotiate the otherness of childhood and reintegrate it into urban life. Their experiences constitute a valuable disciplinary legacy, raising instrumental questions to face contemporary challenges.