The Importance of a Safe Playground for Children

As the population grows, the safety and health problems of urban communities also increase, because population density, mechanized living, and various environmental pollutants are among the consequences of the uncontrolled growth of city populations, which has come to threaten human health and the biosphere. Undoubtedly these problems threaten all age groups to varying degrees; as a result, more vulnerable groups will require greater attention, and this is of even greater importance for children as a special group in society. This is because under conditions such as unplanned urban growth and increasing population density, the possibility of accidents and harm increases in environments where children are most in contact, such as parks. The points mentioned emphasize the need for more active involvement of environmental planners and urban designers and for creating suitable infrastructure to properly address citizens' problems. Undoubtedly, raising the level of children's safety and achieving higher levels of sustainability and safety for urban areas plays an important role in creating safe cities. On the other hand, children's safety is an important factor in the healthy-city approach, and therefore a healthy city requires safe playgrounds for children, because a major part of children's leisure time is spent in these environments, and during play a child acquires various kinds of information from the environment. Play in this period is considered a strong resource for the growth and development of perceptual-cognitive, psycho-social, and also sensory-motor skills. Therefore, providing a safe environment for children's play is inevitable, and the physical safety of children's playgrounds is strongly emphasized. To analyze safety in playgrounds, major accidents as well as near-accidents are taken into account. Near-accidents can be considered important and common sources of minor injuries that can turn into very serious harm, so it can be said that safety alone is not sufficient; rather, the perception of safety is also of clinical importance, because the feeling of being unsafe plays a very important role in accident-proneness. Therefore, planning for children's play environments in urban parks can be proposed in the following three frameworks: 1_ Equipment: All components, tools, devices, and play items fall under the equipment group. Safety auditing and risk assessment must be carried out for all playground equipment. It should be noted that some play items such as swings, slides, and items the child climbs are high-risk equipment that require a more precise safety audit. 2_ Environment: Environmental characteristics fall into 2 groups: hazardous environmental factors, and also the physical structure of the environment. Hazardous environmental factors include air pollution and noise pollution, while the physical structure of the play environment includes matters such as warning signs, the graphic composition of the environment, and aesthetic aspects. Therefore environmental conditions also require a precise safety audit. 3_ Child: In the matter of children's playground safety, the child's characteristics must be examined both physically and from the standpoint of behavioral and psychological criteria. In general, play-related behaviors carry a degree of risk-taking, and since children love pastimes with high excitement as well as adventure, studying children's behavior with the aim of controlling it and providing safer conditions is very necessary. Finally, it can be concluded that children's safety is of undeniable importance, and the necessity of examining children's safety as thoroughly as possible is evident. Therefore, special attention to the need to integrate the concepts of sustainability and social safety should be regarded as one of the requirements of urban planning and management. In the diagram below, the process of examining the environmental conditions of children's playgrounds is briefly described: