Hart, R., 1979, Children’s experience of place, Irvington, New York
- Author : Hart, R.
- Year : 1979
- Publisher : Irvington
- Publisher's Location : New York
- ISBN : 0-470-99190-9
- Pages : 518
- Comments : KEYWORDS: children, play, preference, children’s development, planning, landscape design.
- Outline : This book offers an exhaustive insight of how children experience the place where they are living. The summary and reflection (chapter 10; p329-350) offers a very good overview of the book’s content: Spatial activity, place knowledge, Place values and feelings, places use, place fears, Some points are: * Brooks and small “frog ponds” are highly valued places, used for dabbling in as well as for watching and catching wildlife. * The woods are extremely high on most children set of preferred places even though they are often feared by the same children. *In addition to trees, such dangerous and forbidden places as sand piles and quarries are highly valued for their suitability of climbing and jumping. * Hiding places and lookout places are two environmental qualities valued by children, which are not readily revealed by the kinds of observational survey reports which concerned environmental planners use as guides in their attempts to plan with children in mind. * Children spend a large amount of time building place for themselves. * Many of the self-built “houses” of children under eight years of age are simply found places with scarcely and physical modification. They nevertheless serve as “houses” and “forts” to the children and the interiors are highly differentiated and modified by the imagination. * One particularly important quality of environments for children is its suitability for modification by them. Adopting a theory of adaptation, it may be argued that on way people can make themselves comfortable in an environment is through the complimentary processes of giving order and meaning to an environment and of physically modifying it. In these complimentary ways it is possible to make oneself at home” in an environment. The children of this research for example demonstrated how much they value paths which they have “found” or made by themselves, compared to the path network given to them by planners and engineers. They also showed how important the freedom to make other environmental modification is, particularly the opportunity to make places for themselves. It is hoped that this information will not only support the arguments of “adventure playground” proponents but will also go a little way toward convincing planners of the need to think more generally of how to create environments in which children may “find: or create their own settings for play.