"I was completely swept off my feet by my first visit to the Emdrup playground. In a flash of understanding I realized that I was looking at something quite new and full of possibilities," writes the Englishwoman Lady Allen Hurtwood, devoted to social welfare, in her "Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady". She became the ambassador of a new type of play space - raw, informal and uneducated as she would say - which were first built by C.Th. S0rensen in the 1940s in the Danish city of Emdrup. His iconoclastic approach to play - against the then current educational theories, social codes and design -spread around Denmark and the world, and came to be known as adventure playgrounds in the following decennia. S0rensen himself also entitled these spaces junk playgrounds, quite conscious of the fact that his "loosely formulated concept" had a revolutionary potential for the design of city spaces. Today once again, spaces for play can deliver ideas about public space in general: they are "full of possibilities". This is the reason why we devote the three reviews in this issue of'scape to play.
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