Opening school gates for play & stay

Today’s newsletter shares examples from New York to New South Wales as well as the Danes and Scots that show how much more we could be doing to create accessible movement-friendly, sociable public space at schools in the heart of our communities.

If you'd like to discuss how the Active Urbanist can help you achieve this then get in touch with me at [email protected]

Schools must be community facilities, inside and out, at all times. Anything else is a waste of a valuable community asset. But what part of a school holds the greatest potential in our mission to tackle inactivity? Is it the opening up of sports halls and artificial turf pitches or the tearing down of fences that surround their playgrounds??

In many communities, the school is it most significant physical asset and the fence that surrounds it represents a physical barrier to a valuable public space.?

Providing play close to home in the U.S.

Over 28 million children in the United States don’t have a park within a 10-minute walk of their home, it was this statistic that drove the Trust for Public Land to establish their Community Schoolyards Initiative.?

“Carving out the space, the actual acreage to create a new park can sometimes be cost prohibitive,” says Danielle Denk, the Initiative’s director. “But if there’s a schoolyard, that’s land that is often not used to the greatest advantage, and when it can be transformed . . . it becomes a really smart strategy for park creation.

One of those schools was PS 184M Shuang Wen, in Manhattan, New York’s Chinatown. In addition to the more commonly seen play equipment, basketball and tennis courts, the space features a yoga circle, a stage, and social seating areas.

“When they’re open to the community after hours, they can serve so many needs”, says Denk.

The site’s porous turf field, provides additional community benefit through its ability to capture an estimated 1.3 million gallons of stormwater runoff.

Balancing risk & broadening appeal in Denmark

Last summer, as part of my Churchill Fellowship , I witnessed how the Danes open up so many of their schools as public space. In England, the status quo is to keep school grounds closed and the most common argument you’ll hear against is opening them up is ‘risk’.?

Take a close look at this picture open to the public International School in Bilund, thats a fire pit!

Closing schools removes risk, but also the benefit. Genuine risk management represents a balance of risk and benefit. It is this approach you see here and advocated north of the border by Scotland’s Play Strategy ‘Play Out of Hours’ guidelines.

When it comes to risk management, Play Out of Hours suggests schools need not open up their whole grounds. When Amager F?lled Skole in Copenhagen created an accessible "forest" in the middle of the city, some areas remained fenced off. But by including picnic places and grills to accompany play and sport facilities in their urban forest they created a space with invitations to stay and to play — inviting legitimate peripheral participation, a comfortable gateway to play and movement.?

“The entire school area is decorated with many small niches with activity opportunities, both in the forest area and along the edge. It was a wish – especially from the school's girls – to have more places where you could be yourself,” says a description of the project from the Lokale og Anl?gsfonden

Even if your school has a small footprint, that need not stop you, as Copenhagen’s European School proved when they opened up their rooftops to activity and the community.?

Activation in Australia

Of course, such a regeneration of a school’s environment takes time and money, but as suggested by the Active Urbanist model, the best place to start is with activation that adapts to the current environment and provides the community-led insight to what you should build.

In New South Wales, in addition to Shared Use & Community Use Arrangements that open up the more traditional sports facilities at schools, they have introduced ‘Share Our Space’.

Share Our Space sees schools open up their grounds during the holidays, with the addition of an activation programme that offers free activities for children on site.?

In addition to sports, these activities include cultural events and celebrations. These — just like the seating, shade and fire pits of Amager F?lled Skole — broaden the appeal and accessibility of these facilities.?

“Our schools are designed to be welcoming and inclusive and the Share Our Space program helps us go even further by ensuring that everyone can benefit from these facilities.” says the council website.

Opening School Facilities

In England, March saw ￡57 million announced to open up school sports facilities in England for community use. The ‘Use our School’ pages of Sport England’s website says “historically, opening school estates for community use has been viewed through the lens of income generation however the [Opening School Facilities pilot] project in 2019-20 highlighted that this was often a secondary driver for schools.

“The primary driver for both primary and secondary schools was to establish themselves as the hub of the local community by offering a safe, trusted and accessible space for people of all ages to be active during evenings, weekends and holiday periods.”

Yet despite this, the useful resources provided are a school lettings brochure and a ‘measuring success’ document that focuses implicitly on pricing policy and formal sports facilities.?

Much of this new money will likely be spent on increasing the supply of formal sports facilities — sports halls and artificial turf pitches — to existing clubs and programmes. Anyone who has gone through a ‘Built Facility Strategy’ or ‘Playing Pitch Strategy’ in the U.K. will know that they invariably recommend increasing access to formal sports facilities on school sites to address shortfall in capacity — and that is important. But are those facilities attractive to the truly 'inactive'?

As campaigns like the U.K’s Make Space for Girls or this report from Danish urban sports organisation GAME make clear traditional sports facilities are not designed in a way that are attractive to [inactive] girls.?

How might some of that ￡57 million be used to open up school playgrounds? Might community activation and tactical urbanism help these spaces to remove barriers to movement and participation for the currently inactive — particularly for girls and create accessible, active and sociable spaces in-and-out of school hours?

If you’d like to further explore ways you can develop an approach to maximise the use of these spaces at the centre of your communities get in touch with me at [email protected]