The project site in Helsingborg is located on a pier in a harbour area in Öresund, in Sweden’s southernmost province of Skåne. Helsingborg is Sweden’s eighth largest city. It is a densely built urban city, with a large former port area under redevelopment. The project site covers an old warehouse building - Magasin 405, and its surrounding plot. The goal is to re-use and repurpose the warehouse into a attractive meeting place in the city, while adding building volumes and public space to accommodate public activities and housing units within the project site. The new proposal is aiming to revatalize the waterfront area of Oceanhamnen (the Ocean Harbour) and help connect the segregated neighbourhoods ’North’ and ’South’ (”Norr” and ”Söder”) of the city centre. The renovation of Magasin 405 will make the waterfront district, and the city as a whole,more dynamic.

Playing is the dominant activity in children's daily life, but is the playground still the place where children have their first encounter with societal roles, norms and values of today’s society, through the act of playing? The playground functions as the place where children are forced to educate themselves, in learning to develop, to make decisions, to solve problems, and to regulate emotions. They look for risks in order to test and explore their physical limits. In this research, I will be focusing on the existing playground in the street of my childhood home aiming to gain understanding as to whether or not the playground still fits the needs of children. Is there still space to discover the basic guidelines of social behaviour and finding out one's personal limits? Looking at today’s playground, I see an over-designed, completely protected, safe-in-the-grid play area which leaves no space for one’s own interpretation and imagination and is not at all a suitable space for testing out your own limits. The play objects are already placed in a concrete form and can only be used in one specific way, eliminating any space for personal initiative. I am curious about how these playground designs arose, and whether there is any kind of communication with children about their needs and desires in the context of play. Which parties decide where and how playgrounds are built in the urban landscape, and why playgrounds are not connected with their urban surroundings, but instead form separated and isolated entities. This detached space often does not meet the demands of the children, resulting in them abandoning the designated playing area, and finding play areas of their own, including streets and abandoned buildings or wastelands, sometimes close to traffic, where they chose to play instead. Making the playground as safe as possible by placing the different kind of play equipment behind a fence is actually resulting in its opposite safety in that the children are looking for a different kind of place to play freely. Aiming to answer these questions, I studied the work of Aldo van Eyck and Bruno Munari, both architects who worked on playgrounds and used primary shapes in urban architecture. I am also focussing on the work of Mariana Brussoni, who writes about the importance of the element of risk in playing, and how this affects a child’s development and social behaviour. For this research, I am working closely together with the municipality and NIJHA Playground Equipment Factory to get a better understanding of the origins of playgrounds. Adding to this research, I conducted many conversations with children from different cities and neighbourhoods, with the aim to find out what the perfect play area is for children and how that fits in the urban landscape, or more specifically, in my own street.

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