Susan Herrington

What is the Relationship between Risky Outdoor Play and Health in Children? A Systematic Review

Risky outdoor play has been associated with promoting children’s health and development, but also with injury and death. Risky outdoor play has diminished over time, concurrent with increasing concerns regarding child safety and emphasis on injury prevention. We sought to conduct a systematic review to examine the relationship between risky outdoor play and health in children, in order to inform the debate regarding its benefits and harms. We identified and evaluated 21 relevant papers for quality using the GRADE framework. Included articles addressed the effect on health indicators and behaviours from three types of risky play, as well as risky play supportive environments. The systematic review revealed overall positive effects of risky outdoor play on a variety of health indicators and behaviours, most commonly physical activity, but also social health and behaviours, injuries, and aggression. The review indicated the need for additional “good quality” studies; however, we note that even in the face of the generally exclusionary systematic review process, our findings support the promotion of risky outdoor play for healthy child development. These positive results with the marked reduction in risky outdoor play opportunities in recent generations indicate the need to encourage action to support children’s risky outdoor play opportunities. Policy and practice precedents and recommendations for action are discussed.

Position Statement on Active Outdoor Play

A diverse, cross-sectorial group of partners, stakeholders and researchers, collaborated to develop an evidence-informed Position Statement on active outdoor play for children aged 3–12 years. The Position Statement was created in response to practitioner, academic, legal, insurance and public debate, dialogue and disagreement on the relative benefits and harms of active (including risky) outdoor play. The Position Statement development process was informed by two systematic reviews, a critical appraisal of the current literature and existing position statements, engagement of research experts (N = 9) and cross-sectorial individuals/organizations (N = 17), and an extensive stakeholder consultation process (N = 1908). More than 95% of the stakeholders consulted strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the Position Statement; 14/17 participating individuals/organizations endorsed it; and over 1000 additional individuals and organizations requested their name be listed as a supporter. The final Position Statement on Active Outdoor Play states: “Access to active play in nature and outdoors—with its risks— is essential for healthy child development. We recommend increasing children’s opportunities for self-directed play outdoors in all settings—at home, at school, in child care, the community and nature.” The full Position Statement provides context for the statement, evidence supporting it, and a series of recommendations to increase active outdoor play opportunities to promote healthy child development.

The design of landscapes at child-care centres: Seven Cs

Abstract Key criteria, called Seven Cs, identified from phase one of a five-year multidisciplinary study, are described. This study asked, what are the precise outdoor physical factors that contribute to early childhood development and quality play at child-care centres, and to what degree do these factors currently exist at the centres under study? The child-care setting provides an instrumental context for understanding children and landscape interactions. The Seven Cs criteria were derived from a comparison of 12 sample outdoor play spaces at child-care centres in Vancouver, Canada, with findings from a review of the literature concerning landscapes designed for children. Landscapes designed for childrens use should consider developmental and play needs, and the unique contributions that landscapes can offer on a daily basis. Seven Cs earmark important physical dimensions of designed landscapes for children that can potentially enrich future designs at child-care centres. The goal is to provide a set of criteria that will allow the city of Vancouver Community Service and Social Planning Department to evaluate landscape design proposals for new child-care centres and to inform the existing set of Design Guidelines which the city is revising.

Can child injury prevention include healthy risk promotion

To reflect on the role of risk-taking and risky play in child development and consider recommendations for the injury prevention field, a symposium was held prior to the November 2013 Canadian Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion Conference. Delegates heard from Canadian and international researchers, practitioners and play safety experts on child development, play space design and playground safety, provision of recreation, and legal and societal perceptions of risk and hazard. The presenters provided multidisciplinary evidence and perspectives indicating the potential negative effect on childrens development of approaches to injury prevention that prioritise safety and limit childrens opportunities for risky play. Delegates considered the state of the field of injury prevention and whether alternative approaches were warranted. Each presenter prepared a discussion paper to provide the opportunity for dialogue beyond attendees at the symposium. The resulting discussion papers provide a unique opportunity to consider and learn from multiple perspectives in order to develop a path forward.

Beyond Physical Activity: The Importance of Play and Nature-Based Play Spaces for Children’s Health and Development

The reduction of child obesity continues to be a challenge worldwide. Research indicates that playing outdoors, particularly in natural play spaces, boosts children’s physical activity, potentially decreasing childhood obesity. We present evidence that natural play spaces also provide for more diverse forms of play for children of varying ages and competencies. This is crucial because play spaces designed expressly for physical activity may not increase physical activity among less active children. Moreover, when researchers only examine physical activity in play, they overlook the valuable contributions that play makes to other aspects of children’s health and development. To enhance research on children and their play environments, we introduce the theory of play affordances. To assist in the creation of more natural play spaces, we describe the Seven Cs, an evidence-based approach for designing children’s play spaces that promotes diverse play. We end with some preliminary insights from our current research using the Seven Cs to illustrate the connections between play, nature, and children’s healthy development.

Beauty: past and future

Abstract Beauty was banished from much art critical writing and aesthetics for a large part of the second half of the twentieth century. The category of the beautiful was critiqued by feminists for objectifying women, by sociologists for maintaining class divisions and conceptual artists who had little concern for formalist conceptions of beauty based on characteristics like grace or harmony. While beauty wasn’t completely ignored in Landscape Research, it’s highly unlikely to find scholars writing about the formal characteristics of a landscape’s grace. Nevertheless, during the past decade, there has been renewed interest in beauty headed by philosophers and theorists. The following surveys the historical status of beauty and describes contextual beauty, beauty and social justice, and beauty and meaning. These theories expand beauty beyond a concern with only formal features to be appreciated with disinterestedness, informing a new approach for analysing designed landscapes while raising challenges for practice.

The garden in Fröbel's kindergarten: beyond the metaphor

Abstract The kindergarten is an educational experience that has been shared by a range of cultures since the nineteenth century. Created in 1839 by Friedrich Frobel, a controversial German educator, the word kindergarten described the educational philosophy he developed for children of 3–6 years of age. Frobel is known primarily for the gifts he invented as part of his kindergarten pedagogy. The gifts (figures 1 and 2), a sequential series of play objects, were predecessors of the play blocks and other toys used by children today. A less known aspect of the kindergarten, implied in the word itself, is the garden (figure 3).

Meiji-mura, Japan: Negotiating Time, Politics, and Location

Abstract While there have been critical debates concerning urban landscapes renovated ‘in situ’, the open-air museum represents a less examined strategy in the negotiation of time, space, and politics of a city—what Henri Lefebvre calls the ‘spatial practices of society’. Meiji-mura is an open-air museum containing infrastructure projects and buildings relocated from Japanese cities and towns since 1965. The purpose of this paper is to reveal how Meiji-muras museum landscape: 1) naturalises its artefacts in their new context, and at the same time provides a village-like environment that is neater, more sanitised, and planned than the real cities where the artefacts derived; 2) incorporates theme park-like elements which contribute to a vagueness about the social histories that the artefacts elaborate; and 3) appropriates the idea of the museum as a means to devolve the political and religious powers imparted by artefacts so they can be appreciated as Art.

Designing with water above the Arctic Circle: East Three School

Abstract Water is a protean substance in the Arctic Circle, the portion of the earth above latitude 66° 33′44′′. The transformation from a frozen to a liquid state is captured dramatically in map analyses of diminishing ice caps. Videos of towering ice shelves collapsing into a sea of floes also attest to extreme transformations occurring in the ArcticCircle. Melting permafrost, a thick subsurface layer of soil normally frozen throughout the year, along with changes in snowdrift heights and patterns have forced designers to explore new approaches to practice. This article examines landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlanders and architect Gino Pins East Three School design in Inuvik, a town 200 km north of the Arctic Circle, N.W.T., Canada (Fig. 1). It is hoped that an examination of their approach to extreme conditions of changing polar hydrology will encourage designers in other countries that occupy the Arctic Circle to share the multitude of ways designers can adapt their practice to fluctuating conditions and the sea of change to come. [1]Figure 1 The Arctic Circle

Introduction: Methods and Content in Landscape Histories

This special issue of Landscape Research contains papers presented at the first daylong symposium held by the Society of Architectural Historian’s Landscape Chapter. The gathering took place on 21 April 2010 as a pre-conference event for the Society’s Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The symposium sought to explore how changes in historical methods and content have shaped contemporary landscape history scholarship. The first series of scholars examined and compared historical approaches with methods from parallel fields including geography, environmental history, theory, and architecture. Might there be hybrid approaches? Are various methods competing with each other? To what extent do we enrich or dilute the formation of our own perspective of landscape history when we use other methods? The second group of scholars investigated diverse landscapes as well as a broad range of issues including gender, race, and class. In what ways should these histories influence and be incorporated into scholarship? Does this content call for other types of historical methods? How might survey courses integrate marginalised sites, cultures, and/or designers? How do historical texts treat these changes as part of their content? At the conclusion of the paper presentations Elizabeth Meyer from the University of Virginia, Ann Komara from the University of Colorado, and D. Fairchild Ruggles from the University of Illinois reflected on the talks and the challenges presented. They considered how landscape historians might not only build a richer body of knowledge within the discipline, but also how they might contribute to the larger humanities scholarship. ‘Methods and Content in Landscape Histories’ draws on five of the papers presented at the symposium. The papers not included here remain works in progress that we hope to see published in the near future. All of the papers challenged the boundaries and groundwork of contemporary scholarship in history and we hope that this issue will suggest the richness of the questions and discussion. This special issue does not follow the same categorisation of method versus content, although that remains a powerful framework. Instead, this issue is arranged in a more or less chronological fashion to allow other threads to become evident. Nonetheless, three of the essays focus more on alternative methods that reveal new content, while two essays focus on alternative content that leads to new methods. Landscape Research, Vol. 36, No. 6, 621–624, December 2011