Education through nature. Ecological playgrounds – the genesis

Justyna Kleszcz

doi:10.5277/arc160210

Abstract

Ecological playgrounds for children were being erected as another stage of development of organized form of children recreation, playground, playfields or city gardens accessible to common society. Its genesis is bound with creating and evolving the term of sustainable development, ecology and all the other ideas, considering education and basing on the original term. However the statement that ecological playgrounds take their origin from no more than the “eco” design concept, social-conscious design would be indisputably shallowing the problem to its basic conditions. There were a few more elements which influenced the process of creating a new form of sustainable, the so called – ecological playgrounds, older than the WHO agenda from Rio de Janeiro conference itself. Among them, there was the experience of World War II and the so called “architecture of war time”, but also development of cognitive psychology and consciousness of human development as a psychological process.     The article presents an analysis of the current state of research on the evolution of formal and essential formation of playgrounds for children in the global and Polish scale, which has resulted in developing nowadays a form of ecological playgrounds. It also shows a series of events that contributed to the creation of some global trends in the formal formation of space for children associated with the pro-ecological design.

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