Permaculture Playgrounds as a New Design Approach for Sustainable Society

Abstract

Playing is an important surviving activity for children like feeding, housing and sleeping. Children often perform even their
basic needs as if playing games. Landscape architects are in attempts to seek useful play-spaces for children. In today’s cities, due
to the rapid and distorted construction, playgrounds for children are consumed up and outdoor play-spaces are converted to the
structural land uses; therefore, because of the lacking of these areas, children have to play on the streets and roads.
Studies on designing play areas that improve physical, social and mental development of children in urban and rural areas
have been continuing with new approaches. One of these approaches is “permaculture playground design” approach. Permaculture
playground design gets its origin from the application of permaculture designing philosophy to playgrounds. In this approach, the
aim is to provide children with play spaces, constructing natural play areas using vegetation, animals, topography, water and other
natural landscape elements. In this paper, brief information on the design of permaculture playgrounds is presented for explaining
permaculture philosophy and proposals about their design in urban and rural areas are given.