About the children’s play space in the modern city: Lady Allen of Hurtwood versus Jakoba Mulder

Abstract

In the Europe of the mid-twentieth century, different ways of dealing with the links between
the public place in the modern city and the needs of homo ludens emerged. Among them, we must
highlight two complementary proposals: the one carried out by the English landscape artist Lady Allen
of Hurtwood in some neighborhoods of London during the postwar years, where she claimed - from the
field of social work and of ideas coming from the Danish skrammellegepladen- the space destined to the
play as support for the exercise of individual freedom; on the other hand, the initiative proposed by the
Dutch urban planner Jakoba Mulder -from the Departmente of Public Works of the Amsterdam City
Council- through its interventions in the urban interstices of the city to solve the need for playing spaces
in the overpopulated Dutch capital, as well as the incorporation of playful activities in the design of large
parks and new urban developments. Both initiatives had different drifts. The paper aims to discover those
values that can be reused for the urban spaces destined to the play of the current city. The aim of this
paper is to show two cases of study of European interventions that emerged from the feminine to solve
the problem of providing spaces for playing in the city from the dialectical relationship established
between them in the post-war European city.