Rewilding Play Studio & Exhibition

Sharing and Caring

UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA) students, led by Professor Susan Herrington, explored a hypothetical exercise of co-locating child care facilities within or adjacent to existing, expanded and or/new parks and open spaces. The sites were identified by City and Park Board staff to guide this exploration. The Oakridge Transit Centre, which was approved-in-principle for rezoning in October 2020, is the only site currently under consideration for actual co-location of childcare.

Hypothetical child care buildings were placed within each exploration site and students developed designs for outdoor play spaces to support the child care centres. Outdoor play spaces were designed for the exclusive use of infants, toddlers, and their Early Childhood Educators (ECE), while those for children aged 3 to 5-years-old and their ECEs were imagined as spaces shared with park users outside of child care operational hours.

Balancing Parks and Child Care Use

To address the need for child care, the City has been seeking creative solutions in securing viable sites for child care creation. Student explorations were attentive to the fact that Vancouver’s significant increase in population and shift towards multi-family homes has put greater pressure on our parks’ system. With growth comes the necessity for new and upgraded physical and social infrastructure, but finding space for this is increasingly challenging and can result in encroachment on park uses. Students were mindful of managing and mitigating impacts to park uses in their explorations, attempting to retain as much fully accessible park space as possible.

In addition to designing limited-access child care outdoor play spaces, students also envisioned the design ‘spilling out’ into the broader park to offset the loss of park space caused by the explorations. Student explorations aimed to increase public access to the play space, manage the transition from child care play areas to the fully public park space, and protect existing fixed park uses, while also providing access to park features for the children and ECE.

The Child Care Challenge

Why Rewilding?

The term rewilding is borrowed from the field of ecological conservation. In an outdoor child care context rewilding aims to return nature play and risky play to children’s experiences with the outdoors, aspects of play often removed from contemporary childhood in Canada.

Rewilded play spaces offer the highest-quality play spaces. These spaces are scaled to the child, sensitive to climate, and include natural materials and elements that children can manipulate (e.g., water, mud, loose parts), and spaces for individual and group play. Students referred to the Vancouver Childcare Design Guidelines, the Seven Cs: an informational guide to young children’s outdoor play spaces, and the Child Care Outdoor Space Evaluation Tool. They also incorporated the following themes:

Nature Play environments contain natural elements (e.g., plants, sand, water, wood elements) and natural systems (e.g., hydrology, ecology, weather) as sources of play. Nature Play is more complex, diverse, and of longer duration than in equipment-based playgrounds. It has been shown to promote moderate to vigorous physical activity. Moreover, ongoing and repeated exposure to nature benefits physical activity, emotion regulation, social development, and readiness for learning. The adults working in child care centres, ECE, have also reported more positive feelings about outdoor play spaces that include plants.

Risky Play is thrilling play involving uncertainty and includes six categories: play at speed, at height, with dangerous tools (e.g., hammers, saws), near dangerous elements (e.g., fire, water), rough and tumble play, and play where there is a chance of getting lost [Ellen Sandseter]. Risky play is different from a hazard, and it reduces the risk of injury. Research has demonstrated that the overall positive health effects of increased risky outdoor play provide greater health benefits than avoiding outdoor risky play altogether. It has been shown that risky play increases children’s confidence, risk-management skills, physical activity, and the ability to plan ahead, meet goals, and focus attention.

Importantly, rewilded outdoor play spaces are expected not only to contribute to children’s play and development and to ECE satisfaction, but also to a park’s play value and ecological integrity.

Check out the student exhibition below:

Samara Child Care

Little Councilors Child Care

Enchanted Oaks Child Care

Little Long Coast Child Care

Big Blue Tree Child Care

SALA Participants:

Stuart Campbell, MArch
James Gray, MLA
Susan Herrington, Professor
Zahra Hirji, MLA
Sheena Jain, MLA
Shruti Misra, MLA
Chris Mulliken, MArch
Lana Radomsky, MLA
Jenn Richards, MLA
Matthew Scott, MLA
Madelaine Snelgrove, MLA
Caleb Spyksma, MARCLA
Cansu Undeyoglu, MLA
Kaity Windrem, MLA

Special thanks to:

Katy Amon, Senior Planner, Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation
Sharon Gregson, Coalition of Child Care Advocates of British Columbia
Yvonne Hii, Social Planner II, Vancouver Social Policy and Projects
Mark Pickersgill, Senior Social Planner, Vancouver Social Policy and Projects
Lori Snyder, Métis herbalist and educator
UBC Faculty of Applied Science
UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
Kasel Yamashita, Planner II, Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation