Designing ‘junk’ playgrounds for playful democratic participation, sustainable mindset and cure for creativity

The goal of the project is to enhance playful democratic participation, promote mental and physical health and develop sustainable mindset of the youth. This can be done by enabling them unstructured play with loose parts on outdoor ’junk’ playgrounds.

The so called ‘junk(yard) playground’, known already for decades in countries like the USA, UK, Denmark (‘byggelegeplads’), Germany, Switzerland (‘Kinderbaustelle’) etc is a concept a living and changing outdoor playscape, where the kids/youth take initiative to autonomously create their own worlds out of ‘junk’- pieces of different materials - wood, bricks, tires, rope, paint, hammers, nails, saws, fabric, netting, plastic pipes etc.

So far, the existing youth work is focused on indoor activities and the setup of public playscapes largely ignore the kids’ need for autonomous self directed play and physical and mental challenges.

The objective of the project is to develop an outdoor ’junk’ playground model as an innovative approach to youth work and public room planning in the Baltic States so that it would meet the youth's developmental needs.

The junkyard playground can be seen as a powerful learning environment that helps with challenges in several spheres:
- democratic participation (growing alienation and apathy of the youth)
- public health (abuse of the screen time, childhood obesity)
- ecological and economic sustainability (extensive wasting, missing skills to repair things, little creativity to upcycle, ignorance, understanding circular economy)
- key future skills (creative, critical and design thinking, self management, leadership skills, teamwork, problem solving, technological skills, social intelligence).

During a training course and networking the experienced junk yard playground practitioners are expected to share experience with the youth workers from the Baltics and education innovators will introduce science behind junkyard playgrounds.