The Science of Play: How to Build Playgrounds That Enhance Children's Development by Susan G. Solomon

Abstract

Book Reviews 301 at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. Her research focuses on Australian Indigenous childhood experiences, Child-Friendly Environments, and Architectural Anthropology. The Science of Play: How to Build Playgrounds That Enhance Children’s Development Susan G. Solomon (2014). Hanover, NH and London, UK: University Press of New England, 208 pages. $40.00 (hardcover); ISBN 978-1611686104 The Science of Play: How to Build Playgrounds That Enhance Children’s Development explores how to create outdoor play places that support child development. Moreover, the author presents a challenge to those responsible for playgrounds to be bolder in their conceptualization of what these spaces could look like. She does this by presenting examples of outdoor play spaces which the author believes enhance children’s play opportunities and may contribute positively to certain developmental values. The book is primarily intended for designers (architects and landscape designers), artists, urban policy makers, educators, parents, and community members interested in preserving or developing interesting and inspiring places for children to play. While the examples of play places the author believes to be successful are international (mainly in Western Europe and Japan), the primary audience seems to be those who are responsible for developing playgrounds and play spaces in the United States. This is the second book on this topic by the author and it is intended to be a companion to her first book, American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space (2005). Solomon, an architectural historian (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1997), heads Curatorial Resources and Research in Princeton, New Jersey. The consulting firm provides assistance to architects, playground patrons and synagogue building committees. This book picks up from her earlier one, which was a history of American playgrounds since World War II. The Science of Play attempts to marry scientific data on child development and play with design. The book begins with a discussion of the current state of American playgrounds. Solomon uses the British nickname for uninspired US playgrounds: “KPC,” for “kit, fence, carpet.” Kit refers to standard playground equipment ordered from a catalog; fence refers to the way playgrounds, and hence children, are removed from community life; and carpet refers to rubber ground cover found on most American playgrounds. Solomon adds a “P” to the British nickname, parents. She states that “hovering” parents on playgrounds rob children of the opportunity to explore their own capabilities and interests. Solomon critiques each of these features, stating that the result is playgrounds that are boring and unable to meet the developmental needs of the growing child. Book Reviews 302 In the late 1960s architect Richard Dattner and landscape architect Paul Friedberg having been influenced by an earlier Kahn-Noguchi collaboration, independently created playgrounds in New York City that the author states encouraged physically challenging and complex play. All of this changed beginning in the early 1980s when the underlying driving force for playgrounds in the US became the elimination of risk. Solomon makes the argument that while no child should be subject to lifethreating or serious injury, the complete elimination of risk is not healthy for child development. In place of KPC + P, Solomon offers the following as guiding principles for playground design: risk and independence, failing and succeeding, executive function, friendship, and nature and exploration. These principles, or values as Solomon states, are chosen based on current child development literature and are appropriate for potential design solutions. There is a chapter on each of these principles in which Solomon gives some background discussion about why the principle is critical for healthy development and examples of how to incorporate the principle in playground design. The examples are for the most part from Western Europe and Japan with a few from the United States and represent a range of budgets. Nearly all of the examples are accompanied by black and white photographs or drawings of the playgrounds, some of which include children. In the final chapters, “Paths” and “Paradigms,” Solomon provides specific directives for future designs. She highlights four playgrounds that incorporate most if not all of the principles presented in the previous chapters, each of which represent an intervention on a different scale, including city park, street level, town square, and larger urban scale. The examples...