Helen Woolley, CMLI, FRSA

The University of Sheffield
Department of Landscape Architecture

Dedicated to Professor Christopher Spencer (1943-2018).

Professor of Environmental Psychology at The University of Sheffield.

Chris was one of my first research colleagues and was ever encouraging.

He was also a friend. There was a period of years where we shared experiences about ageing relatives. I will be for ever thankful that he helped me understand something of what was happening during the earlier years of my Mother’s 12/13 year journey with dementia.

Abstract

The theme of children, youth and environment (CYE) have been woven through EDRA since it was first established in 1969. Many early members of the CYE network were influenced by the work of folklorists Peter and Iona Opie, who collected and documented children’s play in streets and playgrounds in the UK, and whose working papers and recordings have been archived. The paper explains how one archive, held at the Bodleian Libraries, is being made more accessible, through cataloguing some of the data and the developing of a web site. This work is being complemented by research exploring contemporary understandings of children’s play in playgrounds. Finally, this paper looks forward to some of the challenges for children, youth and environment research in the future.

Children, youth and environments is a thread that haswoven through the 50 years of EDRA’s existence. Kevin Lynch, Colin Ward, Roger Hart, Robin Moore and Louise Chawla have each made significant contributions to the field: especially in the their seminal works of Growing up in Cities,the Child in the City, Children’s Experience of Place, and Childhood’s Domain. The Child in the City (Ward, 1969) is full of rich black and white photographs showing children playing in streets in many cities of the world. One which particularly draws my attention is of skateboarders using the found space (Carr et. al., Woolley, 2015) on the South Bank of the River Thames in London, under the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Ward’s photograph was taken in the late 1970s and 50 years later the space is still used by skateboarders, as can be seen in Figure 1, indeed it is world known, probably for two reasons. First, the internet and more latterly social media allows skateboarders to communicate withone another where the good skate spots are and this is surely one, being a known as a national skateboarding landmarks spot. Second the site was under threat of redevelopment for retail and restaurants in 2016and an impressive, long, international campaign saved the space so that skateboarders can continue to enjoy it. In March 2019 an award was made by London City Hall for an extension to the skate park. Let’s hope that will continue for the next 50 years.

Figure 1: Contemporary skateboarders on the South Bank of the River Thames in London – the same skate spot that Colin Ward identified in the 1970s

The Experience of Place (Hart, 1979) introduces the concept of ‘home range’ and it is useful to remind ourselves that the home range was negotiated between a child and their parent. Home range as a term seems to have evolved into Children’s Independent Mobility and is often used in relation to children walking to and from school, or not. Childhood’s Domain (Moore, 1986) suggested a concept of territorial range including habitual range, frequented range and occasional range (p17). Growing Up in cities will be reflected on later in the text.

Colin, Roger and Robin were all English, Roger and Robin moving to America many years ago, and so it is fitting that as part of EDRA’s 50^thanniversary we reflect on the work of an English couple who were both an inspiration and had a significant influence on these people: Peter and Iona Opie.

Peter and Iona Opie and Playing the Archive

Peter and Iona Opie were a husband and wife team of English folklorists (Bishop 2013; 2014) who were best known for their work on children’s folklore; children’s play, games and songs but also children’s language, beliefs and traditions. In the 1950s theystarted on a journey of what we would now call ‘social research’or even ‘ethnographic research’ to understand children’s play and games in the outdoor environment. They collected vast amounts of data resulting in a series of landmark texts including The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) and Children’s Games in Streets and Playgrounds(1969). This paper will explain the depth of their work based upon a current research project which is funded by the Environment and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under a funding theme entitled ‘Content Creation and Consumption in the Digital Economy’. (EPSRC Project number: EP/P025730/1).

The research team is truly multi-disciplinary being based both at both The University of Sheffield (UoS) and University College London (UCL). The Principal Investigator at UCL is an expert in children’s culture, communication and media while the lead Co-Investigator at UoS is a Landscape Architect. The UCL team also includes additional expertise in education, culture, communication and media; and digital visualisation of the urban environment using technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. The UoS team also includes expertise in education, folklore and landscape architecture. There are additional consultants to support the cataloguing, web site development and community aspects of the project. Furthermore the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University; the Museum of Childhood in London; and The Site Gallery in Sheffield are partners for specific aspects of the project. Consequently the team brings together many years of experience of children, youth and outdoor environments, education and media and the modern technologies of VR, AR and Mixed Reality experiences. Sometimes these different sets of knowledge and experiences are seen as conflicting but during this project a greater understanding of these different aspects of children’s lives has been shared across the team: we have all learnt something from each other and from the different aspects of the project.

One of EDRA’s aims has always been to seek to make academic findings available to non-academics and Playing the Archive is following in this tradition: in this case by opening up an archive for easier access byuser groups including academics, independent researchers and the general public while seeking to explore its relevance for contemporary children. As the paper develops it also provides a framework for exploring children’s outdoor environments in the future.

Peter and Iona Opie’s independent research

Peter and Iona Opie’s independent research was initiated with a letter to the Sunday Times in 1951 asking ‘for assistance in the even more difficult task of collecting oral lore of schoolchildren’. From 151 initial responses (Bishop, 2013) they built up a network of contacts, mainly school teachers, gathering information from the schoolchildren through the 1950s until the 1970s: indeed Iona carried on with the workinto the 1980s after Peter’s death.They also carried out observations and made sound recordings with children, the latter being undertaken with very different technology than is currently available. A total of about 200 schools (Bishop, 2013)and teachers and an estimated, by Iona Opie, 20,000 children (Bishop, 2013)were involved with this work. This would be a massive achievement by modern standards, even with modern technology such as email, instead of traditional mail, and mobile phones and social media, instead of traditional landline telephones. So it is understandable why this work took place over decades, not months or even years.The responses from children, some communications with teachers and other adults are held in the Opie Archive in the Special Collections of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University.

A high level cataloguing ‘Finding Aid’ for the archive was to be developed in the first stage of Playing the Archive, but the Bodleian Libraries received funding from the Welcome Trust for this task to be undertaken before Playing the Archive commenced. In the early months of Playing the Archive all team members were privileged to visit the Bodleian and see the archive organised into its special archive boxes for themselves. The Opie Archive as deposited at the Bodleian Libraryoriginally consisted of 247 boxes of materials. The finding aid developed by the Bodleian Library indicates that there are 362 boxes.

Figure 2: Box 8 of the Opie Archive held at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University.

Figure 3: The author exploring Box 1 of the Opie Archive

One main element of Playing the Archive has been the digitisation, by the Bodleian Library, of boxes 1-37 and 44-46 in total about 31,000 of the sides of the archive content with data. This digitised data was, by contractual agreement supplied to the UoS where the data is being examined, explored and catalogued so that it can be made more easily available to anyone in the world, without the need to visit Oxford.The experience of cataloguing is exciting, revealing and sometimes frustrating. Limitations of funding and time mean that not all the archive can be digitised and not all of the digitised material will be catalogued: this will require further funding and time because of the size of the collection!

While the research team was aware that the Opies had worked with their network (Opie, 2014) of teachers to gather data from school children using questionnaires, the couple’s precise research methods were unclear at the start of the project. The Opies themselves never published these questionnaires in their books nor explained their methods in the way that might be familiar to contemporary researchers. Their network, however, was pivotal, developed through what is now termed ‘snowball sampling’, with teachers actively recruiting colleagues in different schools to participate. Personal communication between the Opies and individuals within the network are confirmed in Opie (2014) and discussed in more depth in a conference paper by Bishop, Bannister and Somerset-Ward (2018). Iona writes that ‘…our correspondents became our friends. We wrote chatty letters back and forth…’ (2014, p.200).

Delving into the digitised data has revealed that, over time, a series of four questionnaires were developed. This series evolved out of ongoing communication between the Opies and teachers in the form of letters, and data received from children, with the questionnaires repeatedly refined to elicit the information the Opies sought. One unexpected finding has been the extent to which members of this enthusiastic teacher network shared their own play memories with the Opies, shedding light on children’s lore and play prior to the 1950s. At the time of writing a web site is being developed by the Digital Humanities Research Institute of UoS and this will be the platform that hosts both the digital images held by the UoS together with the indexed catalogue to allow different people to access the digitised texts. This will go live in August 2019 with the web site address of: www.opiearchive.org.

Some spatial insights into children’s outdoor environments from the Opie Archive

Cataloguing the Opie Archive is in reality a multi-layered analysis of the content of the thousands of documents. Thus the cataloguing interface has been designed to accommodate the fine-grained detail of each intellectual item: a game, rhyme, saying, item of language or belief. The gender and age of each contributor, and the date and place where the lore was collected also form part of the meta-data, and each item is also being classified and indexed. That each document may contain a variable number of intellectual items from one upwards, means cataloguing progress is unpredictable, as one document alone can take from a few minutes to several hours or even days to enter into the interface.The detailed data has much to offer scholars from multiple disciplines but as a Landscape Architect I will briefly mention some of the issues around outdoor spaces that occur in the texts. Although the Opies’ primary interests were games, play and language they were also interested in other aspects such as the settings for play and this is exemplified in the text of one of the questionnaires: ‘It is also useful if they say when and where the game is played’ (Questionnaire 4: The Games and crazes od School children).

The breadth and range of the types of outdoor spaces that children reported playing in is wide and relates to both urban and rural locations, some being more constructed and others more ‘natural’ in character, or at least containing natural elements such as vegetation and water. The constructed locations include specific locations, connections between locations and elements within specific locations. Specific locations include parks, playgrounds, recreation grounds, waste ground, bomb-sites, school yards, yards, back yards and gardens. Within this category of constructed locations they also mentioned buildings such as school, home, garage, roofs, air raid shelter, garden sheds and tents. Within these specific locations, or types of spaces, children mentioned elements including the pavement, kerb, ground, floor, walls, fences doorway and doorsteps. Connections between the locations were also mentioned and include roads, streets, alleys, ‘the backs’ (of houses) passageways, stairs, gennels (narrow passages between terraced houses). More ‘natural’ destinations mentioned include fields, woods, shrub-land, marshes (Hackney in London), the countryside and ‘the country’. ‘Natural’ elements mentioned include hedges, grass, river, streams and water. A reservoir and quarries are also mentioned and these contain the natural elements of water and stone but are very specific constructions, for purposes other than play. Beyond individual locations, elements within those locations and connections between locations children reported use of larger areas such as their neighbourhood, town, shops as well as transport links such as the school bus and railway line.

One specific example from the archive is the game explained in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Hide and seek in the dark: extract from MS Opie 10 fol.215r.

This extract clearly expresses the analysis demonstrated by the Opies in one of their books: ‘Children’s games are ones which the players adapt to their surroundings and the time available’ (Opies, 1989). This text about ‘hide and seek in the dark’ provides insights into the intimate knowledge that children had and the use that they made of their neighbourhood including the boundaries exemplified in the use of street names; landscape features expressed in the use of grass and fences and navigational skills through the streets and passages. This also records the time of play: it is at night that this game is played and the play is supported by the use of torches.

The thick description provided by this child demonstrates the vast knowledge they and their play companions possessed of their neighbourhood environment and its play potential. Moreover, this is just one of the documents in the Opie Archive that discusses a wide range of locations and the elements within them, and connections between locations and larger geographical areas with which, it appears, children were familiar. This impressive awareness of their locality is in stark contrast to what we know from more recent research undertaken between 1990 and 2015 where reductions in both home range, now more commonly called children’s independent mobility, and the number and types of open spaces children go to have been identified in research in specific locations including New York in the USA (Gaster, 1991), Newcastle in Australia (Tandy 1999); Amsterdam in the Netherlands (Karsten 2005); Brumunddal in Norway (Skar and Krogh 2009), Tokyo in Japan (Kinoshita 2009) and Sheffield in the UK (Woolley and Griffin, 2015).

Contemporary explorations of the Opie Archive

Accompanying the exploration and cataloguing of the archive and development of the website has been an ethnographic field workapproach to provide an understanding of children’s contemporary play in school playgrounds in London and Sheffield. Methods for this have included walkabouts of playgrounds; 360 degree views using rooftop go-pros (in London) and video recording at ground level by team members using I-pads.The use of go-pro cameras enabled children to video record their own play experiences, which many of them enjoyed. Those who did not want to use go-pro cameras were invited to audio record their play experiences. Children also used research notebooks to record observations of play. Analysis of this contemporary work is underway but early indications are that there is an increasing influence of YouTube on children’s play in the school playground, while some longstanding play and games are still experienced. Contemporary discourses about children’s play often vilify technology because of the impact it is having or perceived to be having on children’s time and presumed desire to play outside. This may of course be the case for those of us from a Landscape Architectural background, rather than a media or children’s contemporary cultural background. There is a need to acknowledge two things in relation to this understanding. First although this may be the case for some children it is not for all. Second there has been evidence for some twenty years that technology and media can be a significant influence on children’s play and games in school playgrounds. Indeed mobile phones have been shown to facilitate negotiation about where children are in the outdoor environment and what time they should be home in contemporary society (Brockman et al., 2011).

The contemporary element of Playing the Archive confirms this. In particular children’s play in the playgrounds of London and Sheffield are influenced by the use of YouTube and games such as Fortnite and the ‘dance move’ the Floss which were performed in both cities. The research thus far demonstrates that, rather than technology limiting children’s play, it can be a source of inspiration incorporated into the temporal and physical constraints of the school day and setting. Previous research has also identified that small elements in the playground, such as manhole covers, fences/gates and little holes in walls provide affordances for children’s play, despite the playground being what a landscape architect would consider to be badly designed, if designed at all, with much tarmac and little else.Our contemporary research also identifies that specific elements in a school playground provide affordances for creative play. One example in Sheffield is a low level hexagonal wooden planter where the children walk round it and use each side as a ‘level’.

Contemporary representations of the Opie Archive

Playing the Archive also has a component for contemporary representations of the Opie Archive for both internal and external environments in conjunction with our partners The Museum of Childhood in London and The Site gallery in Sheffield. A time telephone, outdoor markers and packs of cards will be used at end of project events in summer 2019 in both locations. The time telephone is a replica of a traditional red British telephone box which were in the streets during the timing of the collection of the archive data. Many contemporary children do not know what a telephone box is or how to use a round dial telephone and so this will introduce those who visit the museum and gallery to the technology of these earlier years. On dialling a number derived from the year a piece of data was collected, the user hears a lively recording of a contemporary child, or group of children, performing an intellectual item from the archive. ’Scripts’ were developed using archived material, with the child performers encouraged to imagine themselves as the characters of their play predecessors. That these recordings were made in schools associated as far as possible with the Opies’ original survey gives these performances added meaning.Markers are being developed to be placed on elementswithin the external spaces associated with the museum and gallery and the QR code on these takes the user to a web site that hosts content developed in workshops with primary school children in Sheffield and other contributors in London. The Sheffield content is children’s creative responses to content from the archive and responses to place. In addition packs of cards are being produced with coloured AR codes that represent some of the coloured lines that can be found on school playgrounds and elsewhere to support games such as hopscotch and letter games. The AR code takes the person to a web site where animated characters designed to give a flavour of vintage comics and children’s illustrated books of the 1950s and 1960s. The audio content was generated by a small group of children with a specific brief to match voices to characters, Scripts were developed using material taken directly from the archive.

Both the museum and gallery are about to host weekend events where these mixed reality facilitators of play will be available to the public. There will also be a range of other supporting activities including props for play such as skipping ropes.

Reflecting on the future of children youth and environments research

Urbanisation has been a trigger for various pieces of research about children’s experiences of outdoor environments. The most notable being the Growing Up in Cities projects co-ordinated by Kevin Lynch in the1970which recorded something of children’s experiences in Salta in Argentina; Melbourne in Australia; Warsaw, Cracow and Bystra in Poland; together with Toluca and Ecatepec in Mexico. This was followed by the second GUIC project co-ordinated by Louise Chawla in the 1990s with research in cities in Argentina, Australia, United Kingdom, India, Norway, Poland, South Africa and the USA. The latter project helpfully identified positive and negative social and physical indicators of environmental quality from children’s perspectives (Chawla, 2002). Since the first GUIC project additional research from differing parts of the world have identified urbanisation as a major factor influencing changes to children’s experiences of outdoor environments over three or four generations (Gaster, 1991; Tandy 1999; Karsten 2005; Skar and Krogh 2009; Kinoshita 2009; Woolley and Griffin, 2015). Urbanisation is not going to go away and this together with climate change and migration are the three major challenges influencing children and youth’s outdoor environments in the future on which I will now briefly comment.

Some countries are experiencing not just urbanisation but rapid urbanisation. This is particularly the case in Asia, South East Asia and some other parts of the word where little of the research about children, youth and environments had been undertaken. One country which is notably for its rapid urbanisation is China where in sixty years or so the country has experienced what Europe did over a period of about 150 years. My three Chinese PhD students are studying Growing Up in China in Beijing, Wuhan and towns in a more rural areaand I will now draw upon some of their experiences. One of the students is using Moore’s (1986) constructs of habitual, frequented and occasional territories. It is very exciting to see a student enjoying using this framework that was developed from research in the UK in the 1980s in the very different context of a Chinese mega city over thirty years later. The occasional ranges she is identifying are both national and worldwide: a reflection of the increase in air travel during these years.Initial insights into this student’s findings reveal that not only is the rapid urbanisation influencing children’s experiences of outdoor environments but so is the extremely high academic pressure that children, even young children, continue to experience in China (Tang and Woolley, 2020).

One of the consequences of urbanisation is the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect (Lowry, 1967) which is now a commonly accepted term.The UHI theory acknowledges that the different materials between rural and urban areas; the more complex physical structures and buildings of cities; heating and cooking for people in cities; and the manner of disposal of water in cities all influence both micro-and macro climate of cities. This can result in changes to precipitation, temperature and wind flow in cities.At a cumulative scale these contribute to the changing global climate and climate change is the second issue, in addition to ongoing urbanisation, that will influence children and youths’ outdoor experiences.One specific example is that experienced by another of my Chinese PhD students in their home city of Wuhan which is located on the Yangtze River and used to be called the city of 100 lakes. Here, urbanisation has resulted in many of the lakes being built over with a possible, even probable, consequence of an increase in flooding events. One famous picture from the floods experienced in 2016 shows a group of students using chairs as a walkway so they could get through the water safely. Increased flooding has happened in other parts of the world and yet little research has considered what this means for children and their use of outdoor environments. For some children and families such flooding and other extreme weather events results in them needing to leave their homes and this leads us on to the third major topic of migration.

Both urbanisation and climate change can and will result in an increase inthe third major issue to influence children and youth’s outdoor environments: migration. This is and will continue to be of people within countries, between regions of countries and between countries. Again I refer to China as one example where political directives have encouraged migration from rural to urban areas. In addition there has been migration from city to city for some adults: but not always for the children, many of whom are ‘left-behind’ in rural areas or in towns, as opposed to cities and megacities. Some children remain in villages and towns while parents work in cities and mega-cities and one of my PhD students is seeking to understand something of what this means for such children’s use of outdoor environments. So much of China’s migration has been as a result of political directive but some has been as a result of natural disasters such as flooding and earthquakes.

In other parts of the world migration is the result of man-made disasters such as war or terrorism while in other parts of the world migration is the result of natural disasters such as tsunamis, hurricanes, cyclones and earthquakes.My own research explorations during the last eight years have allowed me some small insights into some of these situations, particularly in Japan and Jordan. The north-east of Japan, all be it a predominantly rural and not heavily populated urban areas experienced the triple disaster of massive earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear power plant failure in March 2011. Children and youth’s outdoor environments were dramatically affected by this unique triple disaster resulting in children’s outdoor spaces for play being lost, temporary, absent, found, reclaimed or new (Woolley and Kinoshita, 2014).

Photo 5: Massive areas of tarmac for car parking in temporary housing in the post disaster area of Japan.

Photo 6: Temporary, in time, spaces for play amidst the temporary housing in the post disaster area of Japan

Lost spaces included those which had been associated with a kindergarten, school, park and even a specific space of an elevated adventure playground on the Sendai coastal plain. Spaces might be temporary in both space or time and were usually associated with temporary housing. However the provision of designated spaces for children to play in safely in temporary housing was very, very limited, indeed often absent. In these locations there was a dominance of tarmac for designated car parking spaces and it is not clear why protected spaces for children’ splay had not been provided.

This is particularly concerning because of the children’s right to play, enshrined in the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child – I am not aware of any similar international right of adults to park cars. The more frequently observed temporality was in time, rather than space, when play workers, with a truck or car, would take loose parts to temporary housing on a pre-advertised schedule. Found spaces for play were where children just did what they do and played. Driving through one devastated area during a storm we observed a group of boys in the distance kicking a football around while in one of the temporary housing areas children were playing in the metre gap between the temporary housing units.

Photo 7: Found space for play between the temporary housing units

Photo 8: Reclaimed space for play in the disaster area

In one area where it was possible for reconstruction to start within a year, because the landform and level of devastation allowed for this, a space which had previously been a small adventure playground was reclaimed by the play workers and community for use by the children again as soon as possible after the disaster. Someone had a rice field next to this space and partly because of the salt contamination they donated their field as an addition to the adventure playground. The surfacing was changed and many loose parts were donated and the space again became a specific location for children to meet and play, supported by a programme of adult support provided by the play workers. The last type of provision we identified was that of new spaces for play: some outside but in Fukushima Prefecture where the nuclear power station was there was a move towards new indoor spaces for play because of concerns about ongoing radiation levels in the atmosphere. One new outdoor provision was an adventure playground called Asobeba. This used the landform to provide a slide and there was a big rope swing, a hut and experiences with natural elements. After some time, because of land ownership issues, part of the site was lost but another plot of land was added on and a more substantial hut was built. These were facilitated by a play worker who moved to work in this area from Tokyo.

Photo 9: New outdoor space – Asobeba adventure playground

Photo 10: New indoor space – PEP Kids, Koriyama, Fukushima

So the example from the unique triple disaster in Japan provides some insight into a situation of internal migration within a county and what that meant for the provision of outdoor environments for children and youth. Yet there are other types of migration with many people moving from one country to another country. This can be a result of natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and cyclones but very often such migration is the result of man-made disasters such as war. One current example of this is the migration of over 5.6 million people to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and other countries as a result of the Syrian emergency, while 6.6 million people are internally displaced in Syria (https://www.unhcr.org/uk/syria-emergency.html).Since January 2018, at the invitation of science colleagues within my university, I have visited Za’atari camp in Jordan which is home to about 80,000 refugees from Syria, more than half of whom are children. Many of these children have experienced the trauma of the war while others were born in the camp and have experienced no other living environment. Safety of children is an issue in this and other refugee camps and so protected, fenced in spaces in which children can play are an important part of the camp infrastructure as it evolves.

Photo 11: Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan

Photo 12: A designated play space associated with a Makani school inZa’atari camp

My observation of the play spaces within the camp is that they are very formulaic, whether they are stand-alone play spaces or play spaces associated with an educational provision. They truly have a Kit, Fence, Carpet (Woolley, 2007, 2008) approach thereby providing opportunities for somewhat limited types of play (Woolley and Lowe, 2014). However in these situations I have come to learn that the fencing really is important for children’s safety. Some of the playgrounds have exactly the same equipment as each other, even in their detailed layout, and this is probably because of the difficult social, political and physical context of providing play spaces and play equipment in these humanitarian aid situations.

Conclusion

So ongoing, and sometimes rapid, urbanisation, climate change and migration are, I suggest, the three biggest challenges to children and youth’s outdoor environments in the future. These three issues influence each other: urbanisation results in climate change and migration; climate change will increasingly result in migration, possible to more urbanised areas; which in turn is likely to lead to higher density and increased urbanisation is some parts of the world. Underlying these is the knowledge that these challenges are not predictable. Planners will continue to follow political directives about urbanisation. Some scientists model and map weather or natural disasters and others develop Disaster Risk Reduction Plans. Social scientists study migration, some in depth while others seek to understand the bigger picture of the patterns of and reasons for migration. But no-one can fully predict and prepare the outcomes of the increasingly complex relationships between urbanisation, climate change and migration. As these increase and become more complex in the future how will provision for and children and youth’s experiences of outdoor environments be supported and facilitated? I believe that in order to be prepared for these future changes there is a massive task for researchers of children and youth environments. This task is four fold. First to understand how provision for children and youth is currently provided for, usually by adults, and experienced by children and youth in these challenging context. Second to understand how the quality of the provision can be improved to provide increased opportunities for daily life experiences of play, independent mobility, safety. Third to understand who currently provides these opportunities, particularly in the context of rapidly urbanising cities, climate change and ongoing migration, and therefore who researchers should seek to influence. Fourth to influence the providers of outdoor environments in these complex situations whether those who need to be influenced are politicians, planners, humanitarian organisations. Can the right to play be explicitly included in policy, guidance and practice in these contexts?

This four-fold task, especially influencing humanitarian organisations, is likely to be very complex for three reasons. First the nature of humanitarian aid does notusually take academic research and impact from such research into account. Second the nature of humanitarian aid is built around the pillars of food and shelter, health and education, and play is not included. The evidence for this on the ground is the practical need forshelter and food to be in place as soon as possible after a crisis event.This is also complex because of the many platforms of provision at different levels: international, national, regional, local and community, across a range of sectors: inter-governmental, charity, civic society and voluntary (Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015).

So there is a massive and very important set of tasks for children, youth and environments researchers to undertake because of these significant, complex and inevitable changes that have started and will continue for the next 50 and more years. In order to retain the importance of the rights of the child to be involved in decisions about their environments, to influence the providers that appropriate environments should accommodate children’s right to play will require a well-structured, co-ordinated international approach to such research and dissemination. The task is greater and more complex than that of the last 50 years because of the complexities of the challenges and the multitude of organisations and people who need to be influenced. This means that the CYE network of EDRA needs to expand to additional countries, cultures, contexts in order to continue to meet one of EDRA’s founding aims of undertaking research that is used by practitioners: an approach which is increasingly welcomed if not required by universities in some parts of the world under the name of ‘impact’. Despite this our work with the Opie archive has reinforced our understanding of the ingenuity of children and young people to locate spaces for play and their ability to blend communal knowledge, broader popular culture, an intimate understanding of the possibilities of outdoor space and materials which gives a hopeful indicator that despite challenges children and young people will always find spaces for play.

Web site: https://www.unhcr.org/uk/syria-emergency.html [Accessed 14.6.10]

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