Play,Sports and Environment

Abstract

This article is about an evaluation study of a sports playground. It describes the sports playground and the planners' intentions, and presents the evaluation results and their implications for sports playgrounds. The article analyses the gap between the planners' intentions and the "behavior seeting" that actually emerged at the sports playground. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from ecological psychology, the gap between intentions and realities is put down to the lack of sufficient research results about the "behavior setting" period of convergence, and to the power of the already existing mental map of the physical environment. The values and preferences of the children who use the playground are discussed as well.

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