City wraps ups Calgary mobile adventure playground pilot
Danielle Nerman | CBC News | Posted: September 20, 2016 4:36 PM | Last Updated: September 20, 2016
Unstructured outdoor play with tires and old bathtubs sparks imagination
Calgary kids have a few more days to play outside with cardboard boxes, tires and old bathtubs.
The city's mobile adventure playground has been visiting five city parks this summer: North Glenmore Park, Canyon Meadows, Canmore Park, Riley Park and Forest Lawn.
Unlike a traditional playground — which provides a soft, safe landing from the monkey bars and slide — an adventure playground promotes unstructured and risky play.
Julie Guimond with Calgary Parks describes the pilot project as a "backyard junkyard" — where kids have the ability to explore, work together and lead their own play.
"So they can have tools and they can build their own environment. So they have boards and PVC pipes, there's fabric, there's ropes and they can start to build their own structures," she told the Calgary Eyeopener on Tuesday.
"Playing in a play space that we've created for them doesn't give them that extra level of imagination sometimes."
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She said the entire experience can be a bit challenging for parents who sometimes have a hard time sitting back and letting their children run wild.
Not cheap play
Although most of the material for the mobile adventure playground was fairly inexpensive or donated — there is a cost to move it around the city. And because the project has tools on site, it has to be supervised by city staff.
So it's not necessarily a cheaper alternative to traditional playgrounds, which Guimond said have a "huge front-end investment" for permanent structures.
The city will be packing up its adventure playground on Oct. 1, but there's a good chance the project will pick up again in the near future.
"Our first weekend … we had 48 kids in the first half hour. Which to us says, there's a need and the desire for this," said Guimond.
"We're trying to figure out how we do it more than just in the summer."
The city pilot was made possible by a $160,000 donation from the Lawson Foundation, which also funded a second outdoor play project at Vivo for Healthier Generations — a charitable not-for-profit recreation facility in northeast Calgary.
The adventure playground makes its last stop for the season at North Glenmore Park on Sept. 23 and 24 and Canmore Park on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1.
The city is also asking families who have visited the project to take a short survey.
With files from the Calgary Eyeopener