What do you get if you mix a love of foraging and the countryside with a child-centred mindset and a healthy attitude to danger? Answer: playgrounds that are the envy of the world. "Scandinavia is a special place for children, no doubt," says Brit Kieran Long, director of ArkDes, Sweden's national centre for architecture and design, "and Sweden has children at the heart of everything it does". He puts this, in part, down to "the amazing equality of gender between parents. Parenthood here is not women's work, it's much more equal, and there's huge amounts of parental leave". That creates an extreme demand for experience, and informs how public play is handled, he adds.
