Design for children refers to the intentional shaping of environments to support children’s presence, safety, development, and agency. It extends beyond playgrounds to encompass public spaces, landscapes, and urban fabric that acknowledge children as users and participants. Too often, children are reduced to a demographic to be managed, with spaces designed as closed zones of entertainment or control. This risks turning childhood into a spectacle for adults, bound to a fenced terrain, rather than a topography for an unfolding subjectivity. When excluded from broader public space, children are denied their role as full citizens, reinforcing hierarchies of who public space is “for.” In landscape architecture, design for children can be understood as creating platforms that stimulate imagination, facilitate emancipation and learning through encounter.
The jury recognized the imaginative adaptive reuse of a former wastewater infrastructure, from a discarded concrete object into a lively playscape that engages children in an unusual setting and encourages them to discover new means of play. It is precisely the abstract dimension of the playground, these unique specifics, that separate the playscape from strictly catalogue-based playgrounds and contribute to children’s emancipation and development. In doing so, it affirms play as a creative, cognitive, and social practice—contributing to children’s emancipation from rigid, predefined systems of interaction. The result is an outstanding playscape, both ecological due to adaptive reuse and socially fulfilling.
Almost every park needs a playground area and children’s playgrounds are one of the toughest typologies to design. The equipment available is either ugly or beyond budget, especially in the public realm. Then the programme is repetitive — poles, slides, swings, climbing walls, sandpits. For the designer to cover the developmental needs of all ages […]
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