Playgrounds

The Watford Borough Council has voted that parents cannot play with their own children in local playgrounds because they haven't had a criminal background check.

Unstructured play is a mainstay of childhood. But dense urban areas offer fewer opportunities for free-form playtime, writes Alex Marshall. Kids have to take what they can get, and often it's not much more than an empty parking lot.

Advocacy group KaBOOM have launched a campaign to map play places across the U.S. called 100,000 Playspaces in 100 Days. The goal is to create a useful tool for planners for evaluating networks of parks and recreation.

Korean photographer Hosang Park's recent series exposes tiny, unknown 'parks' that are attached to housing developments around the world.

Want to get kids off the street? Build playgrounds on top of skyscrapers, like in this retro-future design from 1957's Mechanix Illustrated.

Architect David Rockwell has some new ideas about what makes a good public playground. With movable, buildable foam blocks, his experimental playground in Brooklyn gets kids actively and creatively involved in their play.