Poorly designed playgrounds & the disappearing childhood

I have been paying attention to the design of playgrounds recently. My goodness, they are so poorly designed! Chia-lat, man! (Whichever agency is in charge of playgrounds, please don't sue me!)

In the past, the playgrounds are sites of great fun and adventure! Two of the key artefacts that contribute to such great fun and adventure are the see-saw and the swing. A third important thing to include in any decent playground would be sand. So, in short, what we need are the three S's - see-saw, swing, and sand. But what has happened to the three S's??

We can speculate on the reasons for this disappearance - policymakers' desire to have complete cleanliness (after all, sand can mess up the surrounding areas), the need to conserve land and hence the need for smaller playgrounds, and the wish to please those paranoid parents who cannot bear seeing their child fall down on the sand and scratch him/herself. It is possible that over time, parents have become more and more protective of their children, and this may have contributed to the disapperance of the third S - the sand (and possibly the first and second S's too, although one would have to adopt a very loose definition of 'danger' in order to consider the see-saw and the swing as 'dangerous').

I suppose those who made decisions about playgrounds did not consider the views of two groups of stakeholders - parents who are not so paranoid, and the children themselves. If they did, and if they had bothered to do some field research (e.g. an anthropological study of how the children are enjoying themselves on the playground), they will realize that the children of today, in Singapore, are a bit bored with the tiny, adventure-less, and abstract-looking playgrounds! In fact, there's a fourth S that we can criticize - the pathetic slides ('hua-ti') which take just one second to slide down! How can this possibly be fun?? Even if it is mildly fun, how can it be exhilarating?!) For me, thankfully, I had the pleasure of enjoying a majestic, exciting, and awesome Dragon Head playground when I was a kid - hence I am happy now! Hahaha! :)

In conclusion, I am nostalgic and I yearn for the day when awesome playgrounds can return. The tiny, artificial-looking playgrounds are boring and uninspiring, for on top of the lack of the three or four S's, they lack themes. So they are not awesome, but awful. How can Singapore become a world-class city if we do not have world-class playgrounds?! I am going to find out which agency is responsible for playgrounds and 'grumble' or 'complain' to them, despite what ST journalist Chua Mui Hoong said. And following PM Lee's advice, I'm going to come out and change things if all my feedback fall on deaf ears. I'll buy an axe (to chop down some trees for the wood), a shovel, and other essential tools (a drill, maybe?) and build my own preferred playground downstairs if necessary. After all, as the official rhetoric says, 'Change it, do something, don't just whine!!!!'