An Ode to Playgrounds: play, unruliness and care in the art of playgroundology

This chapter explores the spatial study of playground and play practices to ask what would happen if playgrounds were designed through a process of care and attention to the players. Building a contextual framework of the historical suppression of the young body through the changing trends in playground designs in the 20th century, the writing centres on Danish artist and playground activist Palle Nielsen whose protests culminated in 1968 with The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society which, for a few weeks, succeeded in transforming Stockholm’s established Modern Museum into an explosive site for anarchic play. It was loud, messy, jarringly disruptive; yet documentation of the event does not include the voices of the players at its centre. I argue that this apparent gap in The Model’s story, rather than just hindering its account, actually brings attention to play as a potentially radical practice if players were to be taken seriously. Building on theories of play, this chapter demonstrates what can happen when a politics and an aesthetics of care play off each other – when activist rhetoric on the one hand, and the practice of enacting meaningful change on the other, inevitably contradict each other.