成人快手

After the Second World War, a vast experiment took place in which adventure playgrounds transformed bombsites and waste ground in the UK, creating opportunities for children, beyond the sanitised swing and see saw. Laurie Taylor talks to Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex about the activists, charities and designers whose celebration of children's imaginative capacities re-invented the notion of play, from Northern Europe to North America. They're joined by Gabriela Burkhalter, an urban designer and political scientist in Basel, whose classic study of open air playgrounds saw them as a social laboratory for the city, as well as children. She recounts the forgotten history of playgrounds in the former German Democratic Republic and the culture of memory surrounding the Shek Lei Playground in Hong Kong.

What remains of those post war playgrounds, in the here and now, and what can the astonishing ambition of those spaces tell us about the power of play?

Producer: Jayne Egerton