Place, Pedagogy and Play: Participation, Design and Research with Children
ISBN: 9780429023477
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited



Place, Pedagogy and Play connects landscape architecture with education, psychology, public health and planning. Over the course of thirteen chapters it examines how design and research of places can be approached through multiple lenses - of pedagogy and play and how children, as competent social agents, are engaged in the process of designing their own spaces - and brings a global perspective to the debate around child-friendly environments.

Despite growing evidence of the benefits of nature for health, wellbeing, play and learning, children are increasingly spending more time indoors. Indeed, new policy ideas and public campaigns suggest how children can become better connected with nature, yet linking outdoor space to pedagogy is largely overlooked in research. By focusing on three themes within these debates, place and play; place and pedagogy; and place and participation, this book explores a variety of angles to show that best practice requires dialogue between research disciplines, designers, educationists and psychologists, and a move beyond seeing the spaces children inhabit as the domain only of childhood professionals.

Through illustrated case studies this book presents a wider picture of the state of childhood today, and offers practical solutions and further research avenues that promote a more holistic and internationally focused perspective on place, pedagogy and play for built-environment professionals.

Chapter 12 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.


Matluba Khan PhD is a Lecturer in Urban Design at Cardiff University. She is an architect and landscape architect from Bangladesh and her doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh focused on co-design, development and evaluation of outdoor learning environments in elementary schools in Bangladesh. She co-founded the charity A Place in Childhood (APiC) with Dr Jenny Wood in 2018.

Simon Bell PhD, CMLA studied forestry at the University of Bangor, landscape architecture at the University of Edinburgh and took his PhD at the Estonian University of Life Sciences. He is co-director of the OPENspace Research Centre at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Edinburgh and Chair Professor of landscape architecture at the Estonian University of Life Sciences. He was president of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS) between 2012 and 2018.

Jenny Wood PhD is a Research Associate in the Institute for Social Policy, Housing and Equalities Research (I-SPHERE) at Heriot-Watt University. She gained her PhD in children's rights and the Scottish town planning system in 2016, and currently contributes to research on homelessness and poverty. She co-founded A Place in Childhood (APiC) with Dr Matluba Khan in 2018.

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