Redesigning Playscapes with Children aims to create community driven playscapes, created with children and customised according to the children’s needs. The RE:PLAY project is engaged in rethinking play as a distinctly human capacity which is currently underrated by urban design. It highlights the significance of designing spaces with children and pioneers a co-creative design process, involving children as its primary collaborators.
The project activities lead to active cooperation of experts, with chances to exchange experiences, approaches and concepts in working with various age groups, gender as well as socio-cultural backgrounds of children. The project allows a series of capacity building activities such as trainings, seminars and study trips, which will be tailored to suit the needs of organisations working in this field and will be available to other stakeholders throughout the project and beyond.
Five pilot projects will be implemented in each partner country, applying the findings and participatory designs hands on and later translating the work into various dissemination outputs, such as handbooks on co-creative design, videos, blogs and other publications. By increasing the skills of the CCI sector working in child friendly design, the project aims to transform the status quo of play design in the Western Balkans region, where social, political and cultural boundaries often translate to segregated and privatised playscapes, with boring, risk-free standard equipment.
In a context, in which designers are more concerned with meeting safety standards than the design itself, it is deeply necessary to reach both the CCI sector involved in urban design and the decision makers that crucially effect play conditions, to boost their awareness on the issue and raise the design standards.
In the long term, the project aims to provide significantly improved spatial conditions for enriching natural and unstructured play for all children living in urban environments.