What do you get if you mix a love of foraging and the countryside with a child-centered mindset and a healthy attitude to danger? Answer: playgrounds that are the envy of the world. "Scandinavia is a special place for children, no doubt," says Brit Kieran Long, director of Ark DES, Sweden's national center for architecture and design, "and Sweden has children at the heart of everything it does". He puts this, in part,
down to "the amazing equality of gender between parents. Parenthood here as no women, work, it's much more equal, and there are huge amounts of parental leave". That creates an extreme demand for experience, and informs how public play is handled, he adds.
Since the 1940s, kids in the region have been getting muddy and wet and taking risks in well-designed play areas, and these once-pioneering ideas have spread. The idea of actually creating a playground with specifically designed equipment was conceived in the 1850s in Germany, with the first being built in Manchester, UK and then in Boston, USA.
But the Scanty philosophy of play, around free – rather than structured – play, and plenty of it outdoors led to more inspiring settings. It all began when Danish architect Carl Theodor Sørensen came up with the notion of "junk playgrounds". He aimed to give urban kids the same chance to play as those in the countryside. He'd noticed that kids would rather play anywhere than in the playgrounds that he first designed, and in the 1930s was inspired by seeing resourceful kids turning construction sites into play areas.
Sørensen's first adventure playground opened in EMDR on the outskirts of Copenhagen in 1943. He wrote: "Children's playgrounds are the city's most important form of public plantation." The playground was equipped with tools and building materials, so children could dig, construct and change their environment, and get together to create their own play space.
The 1940s and 1950s were a golden era for playgrounds in the region, believes Emilie Bruges, architect at Architect's office in Stockholm. "A new focus on children developed in urban planning with the advent of modernism."
These seeds were picked up and sown elsewhere. After visiting EMDR, British landscape architect Lady Marjory Allen created around 35 adventure playgrounds back home in the 1960s and 1970s, with the motto "better a broken bone than a broken spirit".
Around four decades later, Sørensen's influence was felt in Glasgow, via Assemble Studio. In 2013, the Turner Prize-winning collective's Baltic Street Adventure Playground opened. Their design argues for the adventure playground as a counterpoint to the pressures of modern urban childhood. Mud is a key feature.
Back in the post-war Nordics, things continued to be radical. In October 1968, Bonilla Lyndall transformed Stockholm's Moderna Musket into a sprawling adventure playground – a hugely influential project that was free and accessible to all.
Coinciding with this emphasis on children's wellbeing was the notion that everyone should have access to play areas. In the 1950s, a series of parks was developed (known as "valley parks") in the new suburbs being built around Stockholm. Importantly, these were not just for children, but placed "where different generations and social classes could meet"
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