Designed for Play: Children’s Playgrounds and the Politics of Urban Space, 1840–2010

Children’s playgrounds are commonly understood as the obvious place for children to play: safe, natural and out of the way. But these expectations hide a convoluted and overlooked history of children’s place in public space – one shaped by implicit social, political and environmental values, and by government intervention in spaces and lives across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is the first empirically grounded historical account of the modern playground, drawing on the archi